Most of my best work happens on Saturdays. Not because I have more time - I have less. Far less. There's a son to get to activities, errands to run, a family that quite reasonably expects me to be present and engaged. The window is small. Some Saturdays it is four hours. Some Saturdays it is two. Some Saturdays it doesn't exist at all.
But the constraint is the point. When you have four hours instead of forty, you make different decisions. You skip the research rabbit hole. You don't spend an hour debating font choices. You don't write a specification document. You open Claude Code, you know what you want to build, and you build it. The compression forces clarity. The deadline - self-imposed, invisible, but real - forces action.
And the work is better for it. Not despite the constraints. Because of them.
Constraints breed creativity
I spent fifteen years in advertising agencies. If there's one thing agency life teaches you, it's that unlimited time produces unlimited deliberation. Give a creative team three months and they'll spend two months and three weeks exploring, debating, second-guessing, and refining before producing work in the final week that's roughly the same quality as what they would have produced if you had given them the week to begin with.
I'm not being cynical. I did this myself, constantly. The brief arrives, you think about it, you explore, you go wide, you go deep, you go sideways, you present fifteen routes, the client picks one, you refine it, you present again, they change their mind, you start over. The process expands to fill the time available. Parkinson's Law is the unofficial motto of every agency I've ever worked in.
The best work, without exception, happened under the tightest deadlines. The pitch that landed on Friday for a Monday presentation. The campaign that had to go live in two weeks instead of two months. The crisis response that needed to be in market by end of day. When the time was short, the thinking was sharp. No room for deliberation. No room for politics. Just: what's the answer, and how do we make it?
The Saturday ritual
Kid to football practice or swimming or whatever the Saturday activity happens to be. Walk to the coffee shop - or rather, the hot chocolate shop, because coffee doesn't agree with me and I've long since stopped pretending otherwise. Find a table. Open the laptop. Open Claude Code. Start.
There is no Slack. No email. No meetings. No standups or check-ins or status updates. No one asking for my opinion on something unrelated. No context-switching between three different projects because someone tagged me in a comment. Just me, the tool, and a clear idea of what I want to build.
Four hours of pure building. Uninterrupted, focused, intentional building. And here's the thing that still surprises me: that Saturday rhythm has produced more tangible output than any full-time role I've ever had. Not because I worked harder or longer. Because I worked without friction.
Friction is the real enemy of productivity. Not lack of time. Not lack of resources. Not lack of talent. Friction. The meetings, the approvals, the debates, the politics, the process. Remove all of that and what remains is astonishing. A person with a clear idea and a good tool can build in hours what a team with process takes weeks to produce.
Why side projects win
No stakeholders. No approval process. No compromise.
Those three sentences explain everything about why side projects so often produce better work than professional environments. In a job, every decision passes through layers. The typography choice gets debated. The colour palette gets questioned. The copy gets rewritten by someone who wasn't in the original brief. The user experience gets compromised because someone senior has a different opinion about how navigation should work. The final product is a committee's version of the original vision - smoother, safer, less interesting.
On a Saturday, the only stakeholder is me. If I want the typography to be DM Serif Display because I think it looks beautiful and authoritative, that's what it is. If I want the colour scheme to be dark and minimal because that matches the aesthetic I'm going for, nobody argues. If I want to ship it today instead of spending another week refining, I ship it today.
The purity of building exactly what you want, exactly how you want it, is intoxicating once you've experienced it. Side projects are R&D without the bureaucracy. They're creative freedom in its purest form. And that freedom produces work with a coherence and a point of view that committee-designed products almost never achieve.
The compound effect
One Saturday equals one feature. Or one new page. Or one new project. Or sometimes just a fix, an improvement, a small refinement that makes something slightly better than it was before. On its own, each Saturday feels small. A few hours of work. A single deployment. A minor addition to something that already exists.
But over months, that compounds into something significant. Fourteen live projects didn't happen in a burst of manic productivity. They happened one Saturday at a time. One decision at a time. One deployment at a time. The pub guide got better on a Saturday. The culture aggregator got a new feature on a Saturday. The Japanese restaurant directory launched on a Saturday. Each one, individually, was just a few hours of focused work. Together, they're a portfolio.
This is the part that most people get wrong about side projects. They think they need to clear a week. Block out a month. Take a sabbatical. Find the time. The time doesn't exist in large blocks. It exists in small ones. And small blocks, used consistently, produce extraordinary results.
I didn't need a year off to build fourteen products. I needed fifty-two Saturdays.
The energy question
I'm not a routine builder. I want to be honest about that because the productivity advice industrial complex makes it sound like you need a rigid schedule, a morning routine, a consistent cadence. Some days I build for eight hours straight and lose track of time entirely. Other days I sit down, stare at the screen, and nothing comes. The energy isn't there. The idea isn't clear. The motivation has evaporated for reasons I can't explain.
I've learned not to fight it. When the energy is there, ride it. Build until you can't build anymore. Ship it. Deploy it. Cross it off the list and feel the satisfaction of something going live. When the energy isn't there, don't force it. Go for a walk. Watch football. Read something. Wait for the spark to return, because it always does.
The mistake is thinking that consistency means daily output. It doesn't. Consistency means weekly presence. It means showing up on Saturday even if last Saturday was unproductive. It means keeping the rhythm going even when individual sessions vary wildly in output. The compound effect doesn't require perfection. It requires persistence.
Stop waiting
Stop waiting for the perfect conditions. They don't exist. Stop waiting for the perfect amount of time. You'll never have enough. Stop waiting for the perfect co-founder, the perfect tech stack, the perfect moment when everything aligns and the universe gives you permission to start.
What exists is Saturday. What exists is four hours and a hot chocolate and a tool that turns your ideas into deployed products. What exists is the gap between dropping my son off and picking them up, the quiet morning before the house wakes up, the late evening after everyone else has gone to bed.
That is enough. It's more than enough. It's all you need.
Ship it.
