Throughout the past few years of working on side projects outside of a full time career, I’ve often come across a somewhat annoying problem: there never seems to be enough time in each day to get the things I need to do done.

I eventually got so fed up with my “to-do list” growing faster than I could cross things off that I decided to investigate the problem and see if I could be doing anything differently. My first step was to take an in-depth look at how I budgeted and spent the time I had on any given day.

I came to the conclusion that there are a lot of small, repetitive tasks I frequently do that all really add up and eat away at my budget. For example, taking 15-30 minutes per day to check on the status of some of my apps might seem like just a drop in the bucket on a given day, but that’s up to 16.6% of my ~3 hours of available time per day. If I can get that process down to about 5 minutes per day instead, and I do this with as many tasks like this in my life as I can, then I can put all of that time I saved towards my main side projects instead and thus get more accomplished every day.

The question then becomes- “how in the world can I make all of these unimportant tasks take less time out of my day?” To answer it, I’ve simply kept my eyes open for anything I frequently do that is repetitive, monotonous, or otherwise unengaging. I figured that whatever that task is, there’s a good chance that I can write a software utility for myself to automate it and do it faster.

That is the basic origin story for my side project time hacks. These are all small personal software utilities and tools that I hack together in order to solve a problem or automate a task in my daily life. The end goal of each of them is to free up more of my time per day so that I can keep up with my ever-growing side project list and become as productive and efficient as I can be.

In this blog post series, I’d like to share some examples of these personal utilities that I’ve written and what problems they solve for me. Each post will be about a new utility or an extension of an existing utility and will go into detail about how it works and how it solves a problem that’s preventing me from making the most of my 24 hours per day.

I hope that some of these examples will inspire you to go build some of your own “time hack” utilities that enable you to get more out of your day as well. I also hope to demonstrate that it doesn’t take much to solve a problem in your life through programming. Even if all you may have is a beginner level knowledge (or less), you can still build some extremely useful tools that make your life easier.

Most of the projects I share here will be posted to my Github account so that you can follow along with them and use the code for yourself or modify it to your own use case. These projects will include everything from short scripts to larger apps or utilities depending on the scale of the problem I need to solve.

While I will try to keep the code I post as clean and readable as possible while adhering to standard practices, the goal of these projects is not to be “engineered to perfection” because that would defeat their purpose. What’s the point of spending loads of time on a utility that only saves a couple of minutes total?

That being said if you see anything that you think should be improved or done differently, the projects are open-sourced for a reason so feel free to make your own changes. You can also send me an email with your feedback and I’d be happy to take a look!

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