I don't know what will work for you but here are a couple of things that helped me find the time/energy to work on side projects. The first was taking more bre

I don't know what will work for you but here are a couple of things that helped me find the time/energy to work on side projects. The first was taking more breaks at work so I don't get to that fried point. I think if you're fried it's almost impossible to enjoy coding outside of work. The second was writing down the next step at a granular enough level for each of my side projects I could accomplish the next task in 15-30 minutes. Third breaking up working on the side projects with a hobby. For me it's starcraft, but could be chess, watching a show or listening to music. I've noticed I can do 15 minutes of coding without winding back up into work mode. Also purposefully having very low expectations of how much I'll accomplish each night. Tonight was literally submitting an empty csv to kaggle, and getting some data (any data) saved in my mobile app. Have a bunch of side projects. I noticed that if I have 5-6 side projects the probability I want to work on at least one of them is higher. Hit a sticking point on the machine vision projects maybe make some progress on that mobile app, not in the mood for that then I'll test out that new web framework I've been meaning to try out.