For a long time I fell into the trap of thinking that I needed to find a block of a few hours so that I could sit down, get into the zone, and get some side-pro

For a long time I fell into the trap of thinking that I needed to find a block of a few hours so that I could sit down, get into the zone, and get some side-project work done. The result of that was that I never found a 4 or 5 hour block unless I took a day off work and so I made slow or no progress. More recently I've made the concious effort to do small pieces of work wherever I can fit it in: lunch break, get up an hour earlier, an hour in the evening, etc. If your tools are set up for a quick start then it's pretty easy to get some good work done in a spare 30 minutes and all those small pieces of work soon add up to a finished product.