Daily beats weekend marathons: Why I work on my side project every day

Saturday morning. I used to tell myself: "Today I'll work on Edicek for 8 hours straight."

Then I'd wake up tired. The kid wants attention. Errands pile up. Life happens.

By evening, zero progress. I'd push it to next weekend, feeling like I wasted another Saturday.

Next weekend would come and the project felt distant. Like something I thought about a month ago. I'd sit down to work and spend the first hour just trying to remember where I left off. What was I building? Why did I structure it this way? What was I supposed to do next?

The real cost of weekend marathons isn't the time between sessions. It's the mental context you lose. When you work on something once a week, your brain treats it as an occasional activity. You have to rebuild the entire mental model every time. You forget details. You lose momentum. You question decisions you made last week because you don't remember why you made them.

I changed my approach. I work on Edicek almost every day now. Some days it's just 10 minutes. Some days it's two hours straight.

Here's what changed: my brain never logs out. I go to bed thinking about the problem. I wake up with solutions already forming. In the shower, I'm mentally debugging yesterday's code. Walking the dog, I'm planning tomorrow's feature.

When I sit down to work, I don't need to remember where I left off. I already know what to do next. Because I was just there yesterday.

That's why I've made 1,184 improvements in eight months. Not because I work harder, but because I work daily. The project stays mentally active. The context never goes cold.

Weekend marathons feel productive. Daily work actually is.