Optimizing my time for side projects

On October 1, I became a father again. Now I have two daughters under two years of age, and I can just say that it's a big increase from having only one child.

Both of them need attention on their own, but together, our older daughter wants to play with and help take care of the younger one. She's quite rough, though, and sometimes puts her fingers in the younger one's eyes, so we need to be a bit protective.

It feels like it's more than double the amount of work, but it's also very rewarding. Somehow, it feels much more complete having two children compared to one. Even though we, of course, love our first daughter very much, having two is even better. Big recommendation: have children if you don't already!

But having two children instead of only one, I definitely already feel that I have much less free time than before. This has made me think about how I can still be able to work on side projects, even though I don't have that much spare time.

I already have a full-time job, and since I'm self-employed, I also need to do some accounting and other activities outside of work from time to time. With two small children, there's not much time left for everything else.

Lately, I've been getting more interested in vibe coding as a way to still be able to develop things, even though I don't have that much time to actually sit down, learn, and write all the code myself. I'm still able to do some coding, but on a more meta level. That's something I want to continue doing: coming up with services or apps that would be fun to have, thinking about what features they should have and what language they should be built in, but then offloading the actual implementation to an AI.

For instance, recently I did some work on my company website, Kalyna.se, which I hadn't updated in over a year. I wanted to translate it into English, update the content slightly, improve SEO and page speed according to Google's recommendations, and optimize some blurry images for high-DPI screens. I also wanted to improve the existing dark and light theme toggle by adding support for automatically detecting the system preference.

Before, I would have sat down and taken my time to do all of this myself. Now I let an AI do these things, and it didn't take much time at all. The result was very satisfying.

These are things I probably wouldn't have gotten around to doing otherwise. It's not that I don't enjoy doing them myself, but there are so many other things competing for my time. With AI, even the small, minor improvements become much easier to do since they require so little effort. The barrier to actually doing something is so much lower now.

Another thing I'm trying out is an app called Wispr Flow. I first heard it mentioned in an interview with Mitchell Hashimoto, who created Ghostty. He talked about how, now that he has children, his time is more limited, so he deliberately limits the number of hours he spends sitting at the computer.

When he's away from the computer, he can instead ramble on for hours into Wispr Flow. It's an AI transcription service that records what you say and converts it into text, and it does a very good job of it.

He's an iPhone user, so he puts the transcriptions into Apple Notes on his phone. When he's back at his computer, he takes all the text he's rambled on about and gives it to another AI, which structures it and organizes it into separate files.

In that way, when he's away from the computer, he can still capture his thoughts and organize them later. Then, when he's back at the computer, he can actually work on them. That's a workflow I find inspiring and something I want to try out myself.

For instance, if I'm out on a walk to put one of my daughters to sleep in the stroller, I could talk into my phone and record different thoughts that I have. If writing them down is too annoying, it probably won't happen. But simply talking into my phone sounds like a quite easy workflow to get started with.

Having a wife and two children has made me much more time-constrained, and it's making me reevaluate what I want to spend my free time on. But I think that's a good thing, too. When free time is limited, I have to be more careful about what I choose to do as a hobby or side project.

There are so many things I want to do, but I simply don't have the time for all of them. That means the things I actually choose to spend time on become more conscious decisions. And perhaps that's not such a bad thing.