Tyranny of the routine...

[whisperstorm]

I wonder how many other indie game making folks go through this:

You get up in the morning, thinking about your game. You head to work - planning to find some time - perhaps lunch time - to write a few lines of code. Instead you end up chatting with coworkers about politics or some other inane subject and the time zips by. By the time you finish work it's already time to leave. Besides, your brain hurts now from all the junk at work and you dont feel like switching over to your game.

You get home and stare at the television and gulp down some dinner. After some bickering with your wife and kids you slip away to the computer - thoughts of writing something - anything on your game. Alas, not for you! Youtube, email, everyone else's great games beckon to you. "play me!" "read me!"

You look up and it's 2am. Time to go to sleep with another day of frustration....

How to break out of this?

[Sharpfish]

How to break out of this?

Quit your day job and work nights on your games (avoiding family and distractions) :D

[Ratboy]

Get a cheap laptop for the farting around part at home (Youtube, other games, etc.) and keep it in the living room. Set up your work machine somewhere away from the TV, and don't hook it up to the net. Also, try waking up a couple of hours earlier and using that time to work on your game.

[Genimo]

Been There, Done That... Only solution I could find was to take a brave pill and quit the day job and go full time indie...

[Dan MacDonald]

... But if you have a wife 2 kids, couple cars, and mortgage... you just find a way to man up and get some work done. :cool:

[cliffski]

music.

Buy some seriously good headphones. Bose make some nosie cancelling ones that totally envelop you. Then pick a piece of music thats maybe 20-30 mins long (prog rock is my friend!).
Commit yourself to not stopping coding or even leaving the IDE for the duration of the music.

Works for me :D

[voodooshaman]

I have this problem too. After programming all day at my dayjob, sometimes I'm too tired or head-mashed to do any programming at home too. I agree with the music idea ... I use this at work when I just absolutely cannot be arsed to do anything and it usually has fantastic results.

Another technique I've found that works is committing myself to getting one task done and attempting to get that task done as quickly as possible. This sends my brain into a higher gear with some intense concentration. Usually once this task is done, I'm well into a flow and can continue with another one. Getting started is the hardest. Once you start and have some momentum, the sluggishness feeling goes.

[Grey Alien]

use to have same problem, quit job, everything's fine now.

[mot]

use to have same problem, quit job, everything's fine now.

Same here, quit my job and it's much easier to focus.

[Polycount Productions]

Try:
1-hour solution (http://www.gameproducer.net/2005/11/29/1-hour-solution-to-any-problem/) and use rewards (http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/07/14/dogs-do-anything-for-treats/). For motivation, ask yourself: "“what will happen if I keep doing this for 5 years” (http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/10/10/game-production-and-the-art-of-making-sit-ups/)

Steve's article "Overcoming Procrastination" (http://www.dexterity.com/articles/overcoming-procrastination.htm) might turn out to be helpful as well.

[Davaris]

Don't do any work on a computer that is connected to the net, get a laptop and work in another room. Oh and stop fighting with the wife, it gets you no where. ;)

[Karja]

Dump the wife and sell the kids. :D After a breakup I have about a month or two where I can't get anything at all done. But after that I usually find myself extremely productive, since I have so much spare time.

Okay, I really don't have any suggestions - just this mildly tragic observation.

[Emmanuel]

Sell your wife on your dream in all honesty -- find out what's in it for her and ask for her help. If all that's in it for your family is that they'll never see you come out of your office again, after you spent all day away, this is not very enticing to them (even if you provide for the whole family and feel entitled to your dream). My wife was really interested in our revenue being independent from our place of residence, and me working from home, so that was the big sellers to start Funpause. Considering I've always been the only provider for our family of four, I have to give her big props for saying "okay, let's do it!", letting me drop a pretty comfortable (although mentally unrewarding) situation and helping out a lot, back when it wasn't a no-brainer at all. Today we've far exceeded our previous situation but she had to have some imagination. (and ok so we got really lucky)

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Ricardo C]

Try:
1-hour solution (http://www.gameproducer.net/2005/11/29/1-hour-solution-to-any-problem/) and use rewards (http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/07/14/dogs-do-anything-for-treats/). For motivation, ask yourself: "“what will happen if I keep doing this for 5 years” (http://www.gameproducer.net/2006/10/10/game-production-and-the-art-of-making-sit-ups/)

Steve's article "Overcoming Procrastination" (http://www.dexterity.com/articles/overcoming-procrastination.htm) might turn out to be helpful as well.

Nice :) I particularly enjoyed the "1-hour solution". I recently started a new job, and the schedule can be ridiculous at times (I'm a teacher, and sometimes I get last-minute calls to sub for a colleague, at the weirdest times). But it's all a matter of setting aside that seemingly small chunk of uninterrupted development time. And I do mean "uninterrupted". No chat/email allowed ;)

After a breakup I have about a month or two where I can't get anything at all done. But after that I usually find myself extremely productive, since I have so much spare time.

Hehe, that's exactly how my last breakup went. Two months of unproductive depression, followed by elation at my new-found freedom.

[Jack Norton]

I think that starting an indie business if you have wife and kids to mantain is the worst situation possible ever. I made 4 games in 1 year when was single living with parents... and 1 game / year after I was living with girlfriend (no kids luckily otherwise I would have given up) :o

[Emmanuel]

Jack, as you know (but indeed a good point, worth mentioning!), I had some self-renewing, passive income (rents coming in, etc.) to live on, thanks to my previous business, otherwise I wouldn't have risked my family's well-being. I knew we could scrape by forever, if needed. Luckily we didn't have to.

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[electronicStar]

I know where you're coming from:)
I wonder how many other indie game making folks go through this:

You get up in the morning, thinking about your game. You head to work - planning to find some time - perhaps lunch time - to write a few lines of code. Instead you end up chatting with coworkers about politics or some other inane subject and the time zips by. By the time you finish work it's already time to leave. Besides, your brain hurts now from all the junk at work and you dont feel like switching over to your game.

If your day job doesn't leave you opportunities to work comfortably on your game project, then there's not much you can do. Some jobs do leave some free time, but if it's not the case it's better not to add a supplementary layer of stress by trying to cram some indie game devellopment in between real work. Better concentrate on the job that pays the bills and mortgage.
Best thing you could do for your game devellopment is to use a notepad to write down ideas, manage them or work on the design doc/class hierarchy/Todo list/whatever when you have micro breaks.
If you have more time and if your boss is ok with that then you could invest in a laptop.

If you manage both jobs efficiently and realistically you'll feel energized in both activities because you'll be on the winning side, if you manage this poorly, you'll peform poorly on both jobs and you'll only accumulate fatigue and stress.


You get home and stare at the television and gulp down some dinner. After some bickering with your wife and kids you slip away to the computer - thoughts of writing something - anything on your game. Alas, not for you! Youtube, email, everyone else's great games beckon to you. "play me!" "read me!"

You look up and it's 2am. Time to go to sleep with another day of frustration....

How to break out of this?
Now this is where you have to find some free time.
WTF do you need to go to youtube for every night?!! Leave youtube and the useless things for the Week end or suppress them entirely or else you won't finish your project ever.
Tell your family about your project and explain them that you'll have less time to be with them, this way you'll be able to set up a work schedule without being guilty. Find a room for yourself and if your family members want to be with you they can come in your room (an not the other way around).
If possible eat on the computer (good meals, not junk food).
One good idea can be to put a tv in this room (somewhere in your line of sight, behind the monitor) because AFAIC most of the time the programs don't really bother my concentration and in the contrary it can help concentrate by entertaining one part of the brain (there was already an old thread about TV and concentration).
Don't try to take on your sleep time, IMHO it's not efficient to go to sleep at 2 am every day, because you are not regenerating your nervous energy this way.Sleep is important, go to sleep with your wife :)
TRy to insert a physical activity in your schedule, either weekly or daily.
Heck, if you think you need to take a 30 minutes walk to cool down after you come back from work then by all means, take it. This time won't be wasted.

This is my way of working, other people will surely disagree, I've seen people saying they worked 80 hours a week on their indie project( and I used to do that), but not everybody can afford that with a job. Don't sacrifice the rest of your life on a side project , or else, if you are sure, just do as everybody said and quit the day job.
The indie game business being a business, it would be better if you could quit the day job, but maybe this is not an option for you.
And my personal experience taught me that I was progressing much more steadily and fast when I didn't abuse the machine. But as I said everybody is different , s this might not be the ideal method for you.

[Yield]

*The following is unethical and possibly not legal. It can also get you fired, use this advice at your own risk*

You can't support yourself as an indie because your job prevents it. You can't leave your job because you need the money. Perhaps your only recourse is to break the rules. Find a desk at work where nobody can see your screen, and finish your game.

[whisperstorm]

Thanks for all the replies! Note I dont really spend every day bickering with wife and kids, I simplified a very complex and interactive part of the day for brevity's sake. We get along pretty well :)

I think for me finding extra time at work as well as getting up earlier in the mornings will help quite a bit. I'm also going to focus each day on "one thing" to try to accomplish that day instead of the generic "work on the project". I tried that yesterday and it worked really well.

It'd be awesome if someone ran an "indie gamer developer conference" who's sole purpose was to give part-timers like me a chance to have 3 full days of dev time. Imagine what you could do with 3 days of nothing but development on your game! (Speaking to the part-timers here... )

Quitting the job is a non-starter. I really love my job and working on a game is just for keeping sanity / having something fun to look forward to.

[Dan MacDonald]

You already stopped watching TV right? Indie game develoers can't have "shows" that they watch. Just not enough time for that :)

[GBGames]

You already stopped watching TV right? Indie game develoers can't have "shows" that they watch. Just not enough time for that :)

I hear that! My girlfriend has a bunch of shows that she has tried to get me into, and unfortunately I like some of them. Unscheduled time spent in front of the TV is time that could be put to better use. I'm fine with watching TV, but I'd prefer if I decide when I do it rather than simply get caught up in it because it was on while I was eating dinner.

And yet, somehow Youtube is different. B-) I need to also avoid it and other pages like it unless I purposefully want to go there.

Recently I've renewed my commitment to my indie business. I've worked long hours at the day job, and I've used it as an excuse not to work when I get home, but somehow I find the time to check email for upwards of a couple of hours?!? No, now I know that if I don't start working on my own things in 15 minutes, I better find something better to do. And what could be better than working on my own projects which are possibly going to bring me passive income?

I've found that if I can get myself to just start working on something, even if I don't think I'll feel like doing it for more than a few minutes, I almost always end up working for much longer. And if you start something enough times, eventually you'll start the final part that results in a finished task.

[whisperstorm]

I've stopped watching TV except for Stargate Atlantis and Heroes. (Hiro is my Hero!)

[zppz]

Whenever you finish up your development for the day, think of a couple of really simple things that you could do next and note them down, things that would only take a few minutes. Next time when you sit down at your PC, it will be easy to do those things, and that will get you in the right frame of mind.

[Rod Hyde]

I think I could have written what you wrote, almost word for word.

I think for me finding extra time at work as well as getting up earlier in the mornings will help quite a bit.A word of advice from someone who originally started getting up early to work on his game: getting up early may bring different benefits than those you'd expect. After a few months of early starts and making reasonable progress with my game, I ended up volunteering for the early shift at work when we had a new project going live. The project is over, but I still go into work that bit earlier, because I like avoiding the traffic and enjoy the thinking time that I have when I get there. I now leave work at 4pm which is great for quality of life, but not what I had intended when I started.

It'd be awesome if someone ran an "indie gamer developer conference" whose sole purpose was to give part-timers like me a chance to have 3 full days of dev time. Imagine what you could do with 3 days of nothing but development on your game! (Speaking to the part-timers here... )With you on that one. Imagine what you could do with 3 days of nothing but development on your game surrounded by people who are also working on theirs. Participating in the last pyweek (http://www.pyweek.org/) worked for me. It was short, but it did bring focus. I think I made more progress in that week than I have since, but it did kick-start me down the path of my current project.

Quitting the job is a non-starter. I really love my job and working on a game is just for keeping sanity / having something fun to look forward to.I love my job too. Sometimes I think that the whole reason that I'm good at my job is the time spent during my evenings trying to figure out how to do things. The key differences between working the day-job and the indie thing is that I have to be at work and I get a lot more continuity of thought when I'm there, whereas at home there are many more important things, like my wife and daughter, demanding my attention.

--- Rod

[ninesquirrels]

I keep a yellow legal pad next to the computer with a list of the next 30 minute to 1 hour tasks I have to do, and I force myself to do ONE TASK before I do anything else. I don't answer email, use MSN, take a leak, or *anything* until I finish that task - not even skip songs on Winamp. I keep my MSN set to BUSY when I do this, and so I don't feel guilty for ignoring the chat windows while working. Then, when that task is done, I do all of the little things that could have interrupted that task. If I need a break, I take one, but next time I start a task, I do the same.

Usually I do 3-4 such tasks before lunch and 3-4 tasks after lunch. On days when I have to leave the house for meetings or such, I just do as many tasks as I can work through in the time I have.

It's not sexy, nor is it magic, but I do get a lot done.

Oh, and I don't have cable - we only watch DVDs, and I only do that when I have completed enough tasks to call it a day.

Cn

[Grey Alien]

I got rid of TV and SKy, besides the kids were going nuts when they watched TV, or more specifically, when I asked them to stop.

My partner, Helen, is already location independent because she is a freelance science writer and does quite well. Now I make games, I'm also location independent so we plan to rent this house out and go and rent in other countries for a bit like Portugal, Finland, U.S. (I'm thinking warm, like California...)