One of the best things I did for myself was moving all of that free time to the morning. Now I wake up at 5, have coffee, exercise, play or work on whatever hobby has my attention at the moment, then work all day. I have loads of focus and attention and energy for my fun things.

Evening is pretty much make dinner, eat, relax for a bit and be in bed reading by 8.

Well, unless your job requires you to be present for 8 hours, in which case it's harder to use those 2 new hours.

except in practice this never works. you cant automate all tasks, even as a programmer a lot of time is spent architecting or debugging, even requirements gathering in some cases. Those details aside, if you automated hours of your job away youd then be asked to do more work (or if you own the place youd probably want to improve your product more anyway) instead of just sitting around working on your own projects during business hours, which some businesses would fire you for or at least theyd claim your work as their intellectual property.

So you can do 2 more hours of work, you mean?

> you can reduce 8 hours of work to like 6 hours of work.

even if you assume this is possible, why would your boss pay you for the 8 hours when it clearly is possible to only pay 6? You end up back where you're started.

The issue here is that the income you generate from your job is not enough. I dont know what the solution is - but under a capitalist world-view, the only solution is to own more capital, get that capital to produce your income stream (dividends or capital gains or whatever), and thus, give yourself back time.

AKA, this is called retiring, and if you can do it early, you end up with a better life, able to spend your energies on activities you care about (such as making this game).

Don't usually have much extra time on the weekends. Weekends are for making up for a week of the house getting dirty, relatives and friends wanting to meet, extra long walks for the dogs that only got short walks during the week, errands that got put off, some catchup sleep, actually relaxing a bit since there wasn't much during the week, etc.

I might have 2-3 hours each day (of energy and motivation) to work on projects but not 8. Of course I never have 4 hours during the week either, I'm lucky to get 1 in usually.

Weekends aren't necessarily free time.

Saturdays and Sundays are chore days, or family days, or simply resting, or ...

About 4h remaining for yourself is still fairly realistic.

I assume that for most people the "not for yourself" time is bigger on the weekends, it is for me and the people around me.

I worked in an open office for years and never understood how people did things besides work. I tried 100% remote but that got lonely.

Now that I have an office, it's like I'm living a completely different life where there's energy for meaningful activities after work. I get so much more done. The socialization is down from 2019 but there's a feeling to being in a building full of people that's different from being stuck in your house all day.

I can't imagine accepting an open plan office job again, the money would have to be life changing. I suspect cubicles would be fine.