I have about two free hours a day.
Here’s how the math works. I wake up and have an hour to get ready. Eight hours of work. I pick up my daughter at five and we’re together until eight — fully present, no phone, no laptop. Then from nine to midnight it’s time with my wife, except I need an hour for the basics: shower, reading, winding down.
That leaves two hours. On a good night.
In those two hours, over the past year or so, I’ve learned to play the drums, set up a home lab server with automated backups and media streaming, and shipped Brown Note — a full-stack web app with a REST API, a mobile app for iOS and Android, push notifications, social auth, and a sticker economy. I also wrote a case study about it.
In my 20s, I had entire weekends free. I got almost nothing done.
The Paradox of Too Much Time
There’s a concept called Parkinson’s Law: “Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.” It was coined in 1955 as satire, but it turns out to be uncomfortably accurate.
When I was 25, I had all the time in the world. I also had a long list of things I wanted to do — learn guitar, learn Spanish, build an app, start a side business. I had notebooks full of ideas. I had bookmarked courses. I had GitHub repos with nothing but a README.
What I didn’t have was urgency. And without urgency, I had a ritual that felt like productivity but produced nothing: I’d research a new idea, spend hours reading about the best way to approach it, compare frameworks, watch tutorials, outline a plan, and then… not start. Or I’d start, hit the first real obstacle, and retreat back into planning mode. The gap between the idea and the finished thing felt enormous, and I’d convince myself I needed to “think about it more” before committing.
I wasn’t lazy. I was overthinking. And overthinking with unlimited time is a trap, because there’s always more to think about. There’s always another blog post comparing React to Vue, another video on which drum kit to buy first, another Duolingo review to read before downloading the app. Planning becomes a substitute for doing, and you don’t even notice because it feels productive.
Looking back, the problem wasn’t that I lacked time. It was that I had too much of it to treat any of it as precious.
The Constraint That Fixed Everything
Having a toddler fixes the “too much time” problem permanently. There is no ambiguity about my schedule. There is no “I’ll get to it this weekend.” The time is defined, it’s limited, and it’s non-negotiable.
And something unexpected happened when I accepted that: I started getting things done.
Not because I suddenly became more disciplined or found some productivity hack. But because when you only have two hours, you can’t afford to spend one of them deciding what to do. You sit down, you pick the next thing, and you do it. There’s no time for the overthinking loop. There’s no time to compare frameworks for three evenings before writing a line of code. There’s barely time to hesitate.
Constraints killed the paralysis. The limited time made every session feel valuable in a way that a wide-open Saturday never did.
The Long Game
The other mental shift — the bigger one, honestly — was changing my relationship with time horizons.
In my 20s, I thought about learning in terms of “how long until I’m good.” The answer for guitar was “years.” The answer for Spanish was “years.” The answer for building a real app was “months, at least.” And somehow that estimate always felt like a reason to delay. Not a reason to start.
There’s a quote often attributed to Earl Nightingale: “Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway.”
I must have read that quote a dozen times in my 20s. It never landed. Now, at 43, it’s the operating principle of my entire life.
Here’s the reframe: if I practice drums for fifteen minutes a day, every day, for ten years — I will not suck at the drums. I don’t need to be great. I don’t need to play in a band. I just need to be meaningfully better than I am today, compounded over a decade. When I’m 53, I’ll have been playing for ten years. That’s true whether I start now or don’t. The only variable is whether 53-year-old me can play.
James Clear writes about this in Atomic Habits — the idea that tiny, consistent actions compound into remarkable results. Getting 1% better each day doesn’t feel like anything in the moment. But it’s 37x improvement over a year. The math is unintuitive, which is why most people don’t trust it. They want to feel the progress in real time, and when they don’t, they quit.
The secret is that the bar for “today’s session” is laughably low. Fifteen minutes of drums. One hour of code. Read ten pages. The bar for “the next decade” is ambitious. But you don’t have to hold both in your head at the same time. You just have to show up tonight.
AI as a Force Multiplier
I’d be lying if I said this was only a mindset story. The tools matter too.
AI — specifically Claude — has fundamentally changed what’s possible in a two-hour coding session. I wrote about my workflow in detail, but the short version is: I can describe a feature in plain English and have working, tested code in an hour. That’s not an exaggeration. The My Replies feature I shipped last night — views, templates, URL patterns, navigation updates, 15 tests, all passing — took one session.
Two years ago, that same feature would have taken me a week of evenings. Not because it’s hard, but because I’d spend the first evening setting up the view, the second evening on the template, the third evening debugging why the pagination wasn’t working, and the fourth evening writing tests I’d been putting off. By the fifth evening I’d have lost momentum.
AI compressed the execution time, and that compression matters disproportionately when you only have two hours. It’s the difference between shipping something tonight and shipping something “eventually.” And “eventually” is where my 20s went to die.
The combination of constrained time, a long time horizon, and AI tools is genuinely new. I can make fifteen minutes of progress on something every night, and each fifteen minutes goes further than it would have five years ago. It’s not a productivity hack. It’s a structural change in what a person with limited time can accomplish.
The Tradeoffs Are Real
I want to be honest about something: two hours a day isn’t free. It comes from somewhere.
I don’t spend enough one-on-one time with my wife. We get the 9-to-midnight window together, but if I’m coding until 11, that’s two hours where I’m next to her on the couch but not really with her. She’s understanding about it, but I know the balance isn’t right. It’s the tradeoff I’m least comfortable with.
I stopped going to the gym. I used to go four or five times a week. Now that time doesn’t exist. I try to stay active in other ways, but I’d be lying if I said I haven’t traded physical health for project time.
I watch zero movies or TV shows. I can’t remember the last series I watched. When people at work talk about whatever everyone’s streaming, I have nothing to contribute. That one I genuinely don’t miss — but it’s worth naming, because it’s a real thing that left my life.
This isn’t a brag. It’s a budget. Two hours a day means something else doesn’t get two hours. And some of those things — the gym, time with my wife — matter more than shipping an app. I haven’t fully figured out the right allocation yet. I’m not sure anyone does.
What I Am Saying
I’m not saying busy is better. I’m not romanticizing the grind. I would love more free time. I would love to practice drums for an hour instead of fifteen minutes. I would love a Saturday afternoon with nothing to do.
But I’ve stopped waiting for conditions to be perfect before starting things. That was the real lesson. My 20s weren’t unproductive because I was young or lazy or lacked talent. They were unproductive because I believed I needed a critical mass of time and energy to begin, and that belief meant I never began.
Now I know the truth: you don’t need a critical mass. You need fifteen minutes and the willingness to be bad at something for a while. The time will pass anyway.