I agree with being out of debt... it's been very critical in maintaining relative sanity when pushing through the tough times of a startup. Use credit cards to

I agree with being out of debt... it's been very critical in maintaining relative sanity when pushing through the tough times of a startup. Use credit cards to float a month's worth of expense, but always pay in full. Here's what I've been doing recently, but I'm at a slight advantage since I'm self employed. When possible, I try and use the time I spend working on client web projects to advance my own projects. For example, I'm researching CMSes for a client and myself. What I learn building their site, I can apply to my site during the evening and visa versa. Makes me much more efficient on both fronts, especially being able to work on both in tandem. And, knowledge retention is generally higher. I spent about 3 days doing pretty extensive research and testing on TXP, WP, SilverStream, and EE. Selected SilverStream CMS and now a lot farther along in BOTH projects than I had imagined being just a few days ago.