How Daily Coding Boosted My Productivity and Work‑Life Balance

John Resig, the founder of jQuery, shared on his personal blog how coding every day changed his life.

Last autumn my coding projects peaked, yet I made insufficient progress and couldn’t find a way to do more without sacrificing my effective work at Khan Academy.

I also faced major issues with my side projects, often working on weekends and occasional evenings, which proved unsustainable. The pressure to cram high‑quality work into weekends felt like failure when I couldn’t meet it.

Weekends aren’t always free, and committing to two full days of coding eliminates relaxation and other enjoyable activities. Moreover, long gaps between coding sessions cause me to forget what I was doing, even with notes, and missing a weekend creates a two‑week blank period that hampers momentum.

Inspired by Jennifer Dewalt’s achievement of building 180 websites in 180 days, I decided to try a similar daily side‑project habit.

Minimum Viable Code

I forced myself to write code at least 30 minutes each day. On some weekdays I wrote a bit more (usually under an hour), and on weekends I could code an entire day.

Coding Is a Habit

I don’t care about the external appearance of the GitHub chart. The most important insight from this experiment is that the change is for myself, not to satisfy others’ expectations. Like any diet or exercise, if you’re not focused on self‑improvement you’ll never truly succeed.

Fighting Anxiety

Before the experiment I often felt intense anxiety for not doing “enough” work or making “enough” progress, even though my side projects lacked concrete deadlines. I realized that the feeling of progress is as important as actual progress. Once I started making daily, steady advances, the anxiety faded and I felt comfortable with my output.

Weekends

Previously, weekends were crucial for progress because they were the only time I could work on important side‑project code. Now the situation has changed; I no longer rely on weekends, which is a positive shift. I still set weekly expectations for weekend work, but I’m less disappointed when they aren’t met.

Because I can’t finish everything I want, I sometimes sacrifice other weekend activities (snacks, museum visits, park outings, time with my partner) to get more work done.

While side projects are important, they shouldn’t dominate my life.

Background Processing

Writing code daily has an interesting side effect: the current task often runs in my mind during unrelated activities like walking, showering, or any low‑cognitive‑load task, prompting me to think of better solutions.

When I code only weekly or bi‑weekly, this mental processing doesn’t happen; instead, I think about other tasks or feel anxiety about not advancing my side projects.

Context Switching

Resuming side‑project work after a week of other tasks requires context switching, which is hard. Daily work shortens the interval between tasks, making it easier to remember what I’m doing.

Work Balance

This change taught me to better balance work, life, and side projects. Knowing I’ll code each day forces me to schedule my time more wisely, such as doing side‑project work earlier in the day if I plan a late night out.

I’ve noticed I spend less time on hobbies like woodblock printing, but it’s a reasonable trade‑off I accept.

External Perception

The habit also signals to others, especially my partner, that I need daily coding time. Being able to say “yes, we can go out, but I need to code later” and have that understood is comforting.

In the past few months I’ve written a large amount of code—new websites, rewritten frameworks, many new Node modules—so much that I sometimes forget what I’ve done, yet I’m very satisfied with the output.

I consider this habit change a huge success and aim to maintain it as long as possible, while recommending the strategy to anyone wanting to accomplish substantial side‑project work.