An important change that I made, compared with these techniques, is that I require myself to write meaningful code. It's certainly much harder to do that but as a result I find myself developing good time management skills. Knowing that I have to be mentally "present" for my work forces myself to schedule and plan my days better, resulting in higher quality work all around!
How do you define meaningful code? I feel like I'd quickly run out of approachable ideas without reinventing some wheel. I'm also not to the point that I can write Node/Python/other packages and have them be useful or unique.
When did you find yourself getting most of your coding done? Mornings? I'd love to try something like this, but it will probably mean writing code at like 6 am..
Personally I like to do my side coding project in the evenings. I find that if I do it in the morning it's too "all consuming" (I'll end up working on it to the exclusion of my main work.) For me morning/early afternoon is my prime coding time so it feels right to devote those hours to my job. I concede that the weekday side project code won't be the most amazing ever, but it's something and it's moving me forward.