I work pretty reasonable, 45-50 hour weeks as a programmer. I'm a social guy, large friend circle, graduated college from a great computer science school about 2.5 yrs ago, live in a big city (DC), pay a ton in rent. Single, active in sports, gym, with plenty of very satisfying hobbies. I don't come off as your typical "programmer".
Yet there's nothing I like doing in my free time more than coding. Nothing. Not TV (I watch none), not partying (I still do occasionally, FOMO is tough), not socializing. There's nothing that I want to do, more than write code. Now that might sound kind of ridiculous, especially for people that meet me in social situations, but every time I try to understand myself and wonder why I like coding so much, it is so incredibly obvious.

Coding allows me to sit down, block everything else out, and create. It is a beautiful form of release for an artistic mind, using a medium that so few people understand and yet so many people respect. Armed with nothing but my fingers and my thoughts I can create something that has the capacity to accomplish more than 100 humans could do in their lifetime. Loops, conditions, contracts between the computer and the user. Seamless, beautiful interaction. Many of the reasons people are averted to coding are why I like it. Because they make it valuable.
It's "difficult"
It's foreign
It's stigmatized as nerdy
It takes a long time

What I have found is that my addiction, like most, is a cycle. You see, I didn't like coding at the beginning. I hated it. I wasn't very good. Not a straight 'A' student by any means. I've always been good at writing, writing was natural, easy 'A's. But coding... Coding was terrible.
As time went by I started getting better. It wasn't "fun" yet, but I stuck with it, I had to, I needed that degree! Gradually I started learning new concepts on my own to increase my value in the job market. I wanted money, we all want money. Web development became very interesting to me, because I could see what I was creating. There were actual use-case scenarios that were very obvious, and I could make a globally accessible "thing" that would represent my skills, and my dedication. People could see me.

Rapidly, I began to get better and better. I got a job which gave me an incredible opportunity and responsibility with a tech startup. My focus led me to want to learn more and more, in order to increase my responsibility, and ultimately, my salary.

Somewhere in the confusion and headaches from trying to learn so much, I had an idea. Just a little web app I'd really like to create on my free time. And then another. And then another. These ideas involved applying the concepts I learned and creating something no one had done before. For once, I had a legitimate opportunity to be the first. It's like I had a responsibility... An opportunity of a lifetime that was only worthwhile if I took advantage of it in the lifetime of the opportunity. So I coded. I coded and I coded. Every day after work, I coded. It became like a game of learning and creating and seeing something come to life. Some kind of Frankenstein-like production out of the kaleidoscope of my naturally disjoint thoughts, and I ran with it.

My schedule was:
8am - Wake up
9am - Leave for work
9:45am - Arrive at work, code all day
7:30pm - Leave work
8:15pm - Arrive at gym
9:15pm - Leave gym
9:30pm - Arrive home
9:30-10pm - Eat dinner
10-2am - Code

There wasn't much room there for a girlfriend. But she was busy too, a graduate student, and we made time when mutually available. Ultimately, she left me. I was devastated, and in that I again found coding, as an emotional release, was what saved me. She never really understood my passion for what I'd come to love, and how different it made me since college. She'd get mad that I wasn't partying and that I'd frequently enjoy coding rather than just "hanging out". It's a difficult thing to come to terms with the idea that someone you love just doesn't understand you, and I wrestled with that for a long time. I still do.

"With great power, comes great responsibility". That is the reason my addiction is cyclic. Coding has given me such ability, that I now recognize the amount I could get done in merely one night of coding. This makes little things like a Friday on the town cause me extreme anxiety. It makes spending time "chilling" with friends seem like a sin.

I want to code, so I make the time for it. The same way people who want to watch their favorite TV show undoubtedly find an hour to kill. It's caused me to become an efficiency machine. Every possible time sink has been removed from my life. Dating seems like a losing battle. Not because I don't believe I'll find someone, but because it just seems like right now, with this mindset, not many people would understand. And yet I remain like this, because I love what I do. People tell me to "stop working so much" and "relax", but this is my relaxation. I'm in control. I see improvements, I learn from an abundantly infinite pool of complex material. I am at the mercy of no one but myself. My fingers, my mind, my decisions, and my tangible result. No matter how small. It's Zen.

My schedule now is still the same. I code ~4 hours a night. Fridays are usually spent coding, too. It's far more fun than a hangover, and far more rewarding than watching TV. It's going to make me a lot of money one day, and even if nothing comes out of one of the apps I create, I have the irrevocable optimism that one day something will.
And in that state, I'm happy.

Well, it's my job. So during the day, I get paid to do it.

But even aside that, I love it. If I were homeless and had to hack code at a public library terminal, I'd find a way and make the time. So I find a way. If that means staying up late, whatever it takes, I do that.

Yes, I get paid to program, but I don't program to get paid. I love doing it. The fact that I can make money at it is a nice added bonus. When I started programming a couple decades ago, programming for a living wasn't even something people thought about, and very few people did. I just loved it and found it fascinating, and I made time.

Sometimes you're just hit with inspiration and code non-stop for hours and stop only to get more pop/coffee/other caffeine delivery system. It's almost like a trance, you're never bored and you just keep going, I've found myself adding features that had been pushed to another release because I ran out of tasks at 3 in the morning and was still in 'coding mode'. It's almost like being really into a video game, and since you're making progress all the time you feel a constant sense of achievement. And building something that works, whether in software or engineering, is the best feeling in the world.

This feeling dissipates the next morning when you realise you now have to add error handling, documentation and unit tests :). But sometimes you can code for 18 hours for days on end when you have a task you're focused on, and it never feels like a chore. It's not something you made time for - you have nothing you'd rather do with your free time.

Few people are always like this of course - for most of us, it comes in bursts. But the worst thing about becoming a manager is that I'm now focused on meetings at 10am, not code at 4am :)

Programming. It becomes the most important thing for a programmer. Once you get the knack of thinking logically, you start using that technique to almost everything you encounter.

Non technical people stop understanding you and you stop understanding them. Your thought process is altered forever. To them, your thought process appears to be too complicated. But inside you know, that it actually couldn't have been any simpler than that. You break everything into logical and finite steps.

You start seeing the problems in life that could be solved by writing code, by creating an app or a website maybe. All sorts of ideas start flowing in.

I for instance, think about the ideas that come to me while I travel, while I walk and even sometimes when I am taking a bath. Its wonderful to challenge yourself with these ideas. You think of all the problems that are in between you and the solution to your idea. And you take them them one by one and sort them out. Every small problem at a time, because unless you solve the bigger puzzle, nothing else feels as important as solving the problem at hand. If you are doing anything that does not help in figuring out a solution to it, it keeps bugging you. Anything you do, your mind is still stuck on that problem. And it kind of drags you back to find an answer. And when you finally do, you sense an excitement like no other.

This excitement is generally short lived. And you find another problem. And you start solving it just to find that genuine excitement once again, however short it may be.

The rate at which you find problems around you is much higher than the rate at which you solve them. Thus you develop an endless list of things to solve. You can just never have enough of it.

Programming is like drugs for the brain. Your brain initially doesn't understand it. But once it gets used to it, it just cant live without it. It keeps pulling you back. Programming keeps you alive.

They have exactly the same time you have. The difference is they spend it programming while you do not.

I "discovered" the concept of programming by my own when I was 10 or 11. At that time no one I knew had the slightest idea of what programming was (and neither did I, it took me a few years to realize what I was doing was writing computer programs).

Since then I think I spent 80% of my time awake programming and probably a lot of sleeping time too.

I worked as a programmer in my twenties. I have not programmed professionally since 1999. I did write some code that I used at work in 2003, but it was for a very short time (a month, maybe).

I still spend some hours doing some exercises, mostly because I'm trying to learn a couple of new programming languages. But that's not really programming. Real programming, in the professional sense, requires working on huge projects, with other people, from concept to delivery (and beyond). That is not what I've been doing in the last 10 years.

But on a completely different level, I'm still programming. 80% or more of my time. When I eat, when I shower, when I go for a walk. Always. My mind is perennially crunching some interesting algorithm or data structure or algebraic abstraction. I may be contemplating the monadic structure of the description of a process or the implications of a feature in a programming language. Maybe I'm trying to figure out the denotational semantics of an abstract machine I have recently read about which was described in terms of it's small step operational semantics.

These are higher level views, but they are the equivalent of the kind of processing my mind was captivated by when I was a teen. Math teacher just explained how you can solve all sides and angles of a triangle given just three of them? I immediately started figuring out how an assembler routine (the only language I knew at the time) could be written to do just that kind of computation. And I may spend hours with that program slowly forming in my mind, till I eventually decide to try writing it down (pen and paper, I had yet not seen a computer for real, at the time). Only to then spend several days munching on it and eventually figure out errors, inefficiencies or whatever.

When programming is something you like doing, it's something you do. All the time. It's a sort of mental priapism you have. Except it's not painful at all.

How do you have time for anything? You make it a priority. You organize your friends around that thing and attend events that have to do with that thing.

In other words, programmers still have to cook, and eat, and sleep (some of us don't sleep as much as we should, however), and hopefully you don't stop exercising (although many, at least in the US, don't seem to care about staying healthy, programmer or otherwise). But we schedule the rest of our time around programming.

On my weekly schedule, I workout 10 hours a week (which involves socializing with people at the rock climbing gym), sleep 8-9 hours a night, go to Church ~8hrs/week, cook roughly 2-4 hours/week, and still find 15+ hours to spend with my wife (partly because we workout together, and cook together, which is awesome). I also hold a 40hr/week job. Despite all of this, I still have roughly 10-15 hrs/week to devote to hobbyist programming.

How do I do this? Simple. I don't watch television... ever (a decision I made a long time ago), and I make sure my needs for most of my activities overlap. My workout time satisfies both my need for health and my need for social interaction, and also my need for fun (climbing is really fun for me) I recharge through meditation and prayer, and that gives me the energy I need to spend the rest of my free time writing code in coffeeshops and going to programming meet-ups.

Some people will look at this and say 'what a sorry life'. But the fact is, I write code for projects I care about and that line up with my values, which ends up making it also a spiritually satisfying endeavor; I get to explore the world and hang out with awesome people who are not engineers through rock climbing, and I still get good sleep, so I feel physically well; I get to spend my time doing the mundane housework I don't care and transform it to something enjoyable through communing with my wife; I love to write code and problem solve and love working with like-minded programmers, and being in the coffeeshops most of the time means I also meet lots of other interesting people I wouldn't normally encounter, so I enjoy that social scene; I still find time to meditate and let my mind wind down every single evening; and in all of this, it has become routine, so it's not stressful for me to keep what many people think is a 'busy' life. It's all just become hanging-out to me, just in different places at different times in different ways. It's really a great life.

The main thing you need, really, is to learn patience with yourself, and to be FLEXIBLE with your personal goals. Work will put enough pressure on you - make sure you keep your personal life stress-free and for fun. Believe it or not, you will get better at whatever you choose to do FASTER by caring LESS about how quickly you make your goals and choose rather to do things and think of things in ways that make them the most enjoyable.

Because it's the most fun and interesting thing for a person to do in the entire history of fun and interesting things that humans can do.

Many have made a living by planting plants and reaping harvests but it's such a slow process that I would die of boredom.

Another thing to do would be to make stuff out of wood, glass, or metal. Spaceships even. But, it takes a long time. It's slow and is ultimately limited by the speed of a craftsman or the amount of money one can spend to hire them. Robots could speed that up but now we're talking about programming.

Some prefer politics, or business, which seems interesting if what you crave is human interaction. In any case it's slow, or at least limited by the speed of communication and commerce. The speed of communication is facilitated by technology - coding again.

Reading books is fun. Watching video is fun. Making those is less passive, and more compelling, but in the end it's a slow, limited, process to produce those things just the same as building bridges from wood or cars out of metal.

Making music is a contender for fun and interesting things to do but in the end it's limited by a persons ability to physically perform it. Moving past the human limitations for music performance comes back to programming.

I will say that only coding offers a possibility to make something, and then to make something more out of that something, and to then continue building. Perhaps only coders understand how the tools written can pile up into something amazing and how Moore's law fuels this possibility and how every other human activity pales by comparison.

Therefore: the only other contenders are food, sleep, sex, and children as possible activities. These are biological imperatives and I have sometimes wished I could be like Data from Star Trek TNG.

A true coder doesn't 'find' time for programming. A real programmer reluctantly schedules time for everything else.

One of the interesting aspects of software development, is that you need big blocks of uninterrupted time to get things done. The reason for this is usually because of the huge complexity of the entire system you're working with. I've worked mostly with reasonable small applications and teams, with the average project being 4 developers for 3 months, and even so we usually had more then 10k lines of code using very concise languages at the end of most projects. And if you were to count third party dependencies, which we need to have a basic comprehension, it easily reaches in the hundreds of thousands.

And if you were to use less concise languages or more complex projects you probably go into millions of lines. But differently from books, these lines of code are deeply connected, meaning a change in a line inside of one file may cause mayhem somewhere else entirely. In order to avoid this several patterns/tools were created, such as object oriented languages and unit testing, but even so you still need to load a LOT of information (maybe thousands of lines of code at a time) into your brain before you can figure out where or what you should be doing next.

Its actually so hard to load so much information at once, that most good developers I know (including myself here as well) enter a 'development mode' in which they don't stop for nothing until whatever they are building is finished. Its exactly the same as when you find yourself a good book, and when you notice it you've spent the entire day reading and (almost?) forgot to eat. We get very focused, and we hardly multi task.

So since we need huge blocks of time, we usually move everything else out of our schedule to make way for software development. A single 11am meeting can easily kill our entire day, since the amount of hours before or after the meeting may not be enough for a complex task we were planning to do. So we move it to the beginning or end of the day, and the same applies to emails, twitter, facebook and every other possible distraction. What ends up happening is that we drop a lot mundane tasks to maximize the amount of time we can spend in the same task, and by doing so we increase our productivity time.

Since software development is also a creative task, and there are always new technologies to learn and improve, there's no way to reach a point in which there's nothing interesting to do anymore. What usually happens is the more you develop the more you want to continue doing so. (and vice-versa, since developing too little will lower your productivity and self esteem) Its quite frankly like an addiction, after you reach the turning point you can't go back anymore. Even on our spare time we end up developing personal projects or learning new and interesting stuff we can't yet use on production applications.

As the great Yoda once said: you either do or don't there is no try

P.S.: You also need to buy a laptop so you always have your tools with you, and a very, VERY comfortable chair (or sofa)

I very much agree with a lot of the previous posts, but something that I've found is that a general interest in building/making/creating something will offer up a lot more time than you would expect.

It really is tough to sometimes squeeze more things into a busy day but if you're passionate about something, rather than watch that fifth episode of Parks and Recreation on Netflx ( I'm speaking from experience, :) ), then you'll grab your laptop, and get creatin'.

So find yourself a passion project, or a business idea, or anything else that you'd like to make and run with it. You'll get a lot more done that you ever thought was possible!

Most of my friends are under the medical industry(most of them are nurses, physical therapists and such) they consume more time than I do with their studies, hence decreasing their available time for socializing. That being said, I have lots of time available, especially on the weekends and most of that time are being consumed by programming or reading programming related articles.

I also stopped playing computer games, I used to play them 24/7 but I grew out of it. I still play games but not often as I used to.

Lastly, I always see programming as a "game" a game that exercises your mind. learning new technologies, programming paradigms, talking or engaging in your local dev/programming community is a lot of fun!

If you're working a full-time job, then you're working 40 hours a week -- i.e., 8 hours a day five days per week. If you're also spending 8 hours a night sleeping, then you have 40 hours left over. In theory (barring commute and making food) you can spend the remaining 8 hours per weekday coding, meaning that if you also code professionally, you can be spending 80 hours during the work week programming (and you could be spending 32 hours extra during the weekend, making for 112 hours per week).

That said, a lot of the best programmers started early. While it's never too late to begin programming, starting early has a lot of benefits. If you are in the united states, you go to school only about six hours per day (rather than eight) and have about two months off in the summer -- meaning that if you start learning to code in first grade (which is unlikely but isn't totally impossible) you can have thirteen years worth of potentially 82-hour-weeks of coding during the school year and 112-hour-weeks of coding during summer vacation *before most people even start*. Again, this is an extreme case: most people don't spend every waking hour coding when they aren't in school. But, ten 112-hour weeks of coding (i.e., a little more than a single summer being overwhelmingly obsessive) gives you a thousand hours of practice. If you start at age ten and spend every summer coding almost all the time (which I did and a lot of other people who start coding at age ten also do) then by age eighteen you've got 8 years * 8 weeks * 112 hours = 7168 hours of practice programming. If you're also doing some coding during the school year, you can easily make it far past the ten thousand hour mark. And, when you're young, barring extreme circumstances, you lack the stresses and responsibilities you would have were you to need to work for a living and purchase your own food and shelter -- meaning that, because coding is not the thing keeping you from starving to death on the street, you can enjoy it more: intractable bugs are puzzles that you can put aside when you get stuck, instead of being threats to your life.

If you want to be a good programmer, you will need a *lot* of practice. If starting early is not an option for you, then you should at least take any opportunity you have to get practice (meaning that, if you are unemployed, you should spend your time coding as though it was two full time jobs at the least, and if you are employed in a non-programming-related full time job you should still spend forty to seventy-two hours per week programming).

That said, the job market still has a place for mediocre programmers who aren't paid very well and do relatively boring work. This particular sector has *more* applicants floating around (in part because of coding boot camps and other systems that produce beginner-level programmers at a fast rate), but there's still high demand and because the low end of the spectrum of mediocre programmers is *very* low you can fairly easily distinguish yourself with just a month or two of solid work.

Prioritization. I often tell people I didn't have time to watch the show/game/movie everybody's watching and I make it sound like I'm apologizing. It's a stupid habit, and I'm trying to stop. Because the truth is, I didn't care enough to make time. I'm just trying to be human and connect with my friends, but we have different interests. I found time to read Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age during the same period my friends were watching Breaking Bad, so clearly I had the time. I just didn't think it was worth it to sit in front of the TV when there was a really excellent book I had not read.

So it goes with programming. If it's important to you, you will make time for it.

But why choose this priority over others? Coding is just a means to an end.

1. What task do you want to improve in the life of your future users?
2. What story do you want to tell?
3. What legacy do you want to leave your kids?

There are many answers to these questions that do involve spending hours a day behind a screen: constructing the next social network, todo list, or tool; storytelling the next big game, or art project; researching better ways to save lives or power our cars. There are many answers that don't. And there are many people who can't answer these questions at all, and they have no business behind a computer. Go live your life!

Someday, programming will not be hard. The people who have have a story to tell or a passion for solving a problem will be better off than the best programmers. Don't waste your life by prioritizing coding, fulfill your life with friends and experiences. Go read a book. Go travel the world. And when those experiences lead you to discover problems that are your priorities, then you may code a way to solve them and help everyone.

When I was at the USA Computing Olympiad camp, one memorable moment was when one of the other students asked the head coach, Rob Kolstad, "I practice for ten hours a week, and I'm still not doing better, what can I do?" Rob responded by saying, "Well there are 168 hours in a week." He then talked about how typically when people say they don't have enough time for something, the time generally can be found if they cut out other time sinks.

There is a theory that if you want to be really good at something like programming, it takes 10,000 hours to master it. I am not sure that I agree with the exact number -- for some people, I would imagine it is less -- but the point is that if you are passionate about programming and/or want to get really good at it, you will just have to make time for it.

I would try to answer this question based partly on my own experience and partly on experience of watching others.

(1) Programmers understand the value of "uninterrupted time slots" (UTS). Its quiet common for creators (authors, painters, artists) to understand the value of UTS. Therefore, they create circumstances like staying away from distractions so that they have large chunks of time.

(2) Programmers find huge amount of intellectual "high" and satisfaction when they create something they imagined. It has less to do with what they created but more to do with realizing their vision. The feedback from environment (world) when they see what they imagined or thought is so powerful that it keeps them to continue to do (1).

I find myself spending 8 hrs/day at work coding (mainly learning from other devs since I am a jr dev), as well as another 2-3 hours once I am home coding personal projects I have going.

The answer to your question would be we (programmers) spend a lot of time coding because it is what we love to do, or at least I love doing it (I'm not trying to speak for all programmers, but I would assume they all love doing it, especially if it is their career).

Furthermore, it comes down to prioritizing programming over other activities you may or may not be doing, such as watching a couple hours of your favorite television show or going out to see a movie with some friends. Of course it's important to spend time with family and friends, but at the same time you have to prioritize programming above those things in order to remain successful and up to date in the field. Also, like any other skill you have to continuously practice, meaning you have to find time to devote to programming.

As one of the people who taught Rob Kolstad how to program, I feel qualified to put in an opinion here. My first thought is why would you want to become so good at something that will eventually be taken over by machines? Coding is a highly specific skill. When Rob and I were a lot younger, people often coded in assembly language. There were experts in coding back then whose skills were eventually taken over by compilers. The smart ones learned how to apply their coding skills to developing good compilers for languages like C and C++ and, later, into the languages we use more often today. Today's coding skills in these higher level languages will eventually be taken over by even higher level languages. Tools like Excel and Matlab are much more productive for their respective purposes than writing code.

Another question to ask is where you hope to go with this coding skill. If you look at the career progression of the typical software development professional, advancement is not achieved by being a better coder but, rather, by taking on more responsible positions such as software or system architect (with apologies to building architects), software project manager, systems engineer, program manager, designer of the tools that will automate today's programming skill so forth. These require other skills and knowledge - the sort you might obtain by getting a degree in a good software engineering program, for example.

That being said, Rob is right that if you want to get better at anything you have to find the time to do more of it and this means prioritizing your time based on what's important to you. Perhaps you need to play fewer video games or watch fewer videos or spend less time trying to attract girlfriends, or whatever it is that you spend your life doing. My advice is to quit trying to hone a skill that has limited future potential (coding) and work on something that will take you somewhere in life. Winning coding contests may be exhilarating but you have to grow up some time.

I object to the implication of the rest of these answers that good programmers must, or even are in a position, to spend a lot of time on coding. In fact, I find that when I spend many hours coding without a break I produce really shity code anyway.

I love coding but I also love a lot other things. I want to have a family one day, and until then want a social life. I'm not convinced that it's necessary to spent hours upon hours coding in order to become good or build a good product. When I've been coding for hours on end, I will inevitably do something very inefficiently and spend more time than if I had taken a break in the first place.

It is not necessary, or even wise, to spend every second of your free time coding. You do not need to fit the hacker, stay-up-all-night gaming and working on side projects stereotype in order to succeed in tech!

The question is, do you want to?

When I was in school, I used to code a lot.. the stuff for the school but even more my own stuff. It was a technical school with which you usually attend from age 14 to 19 and involves a lot of programming.

I've been working as a freelance programmer afterwards for some years and more and more I began to suffer from health problems and social ineptitude.
I started to reduce time in front of the computer and increase sports time.

After some years freelancing I decided to go to University and study Computer Science where I found that there is much more than "just programming" (in my case, I became interested in Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition, Computer Vision, AI and so on).
Now I have wife and dog and work in research.. when I code then its usually python or c++ and only to evaluate some idea that might then lead to a published paper. Sometimes I really miss "building stuff" and not just writing weird scripts that are mainly calculations and crazy algorithms.

I don't code in my spare time anymore. I read stuff on programming though to keep up a little bit with the current buzzes (TDD, MDD, agile stuff, code analysis, continuous integration etc.). But I can't be that long in front of the screen anymore.. every deadline leaves me crippled and disgruntled, pain everywhere in my body and with some added fat around the waist.

As much as I like it - I don't want to be a programmer anymore.
I know a lot of people from the school I mentioned who completely changed their lifestyle.. one of them actually got his master degree in CS and now studies medicine because of the mentioned problems.
Others I know working in software engineering now are unhappy because most of their time they do: SCRUM meetings, writing unit tests, fixing bugs and hanging around in the ticket system, writing docs.. "enterprise software" you know..
not the tinkering most of us actually love.
But trying not to break the huge, ugly and boring system when fixing stuff somewhere in this enormous haystack.

I really wonder how many of you kept "the spirit" alive.
And partly I really envy you.. I can still remember that burning desire ;) I had about 15 years ago in my first ~5 years of programming. Everything was so cool and new and fun... but nowadays it seems, every stupid idea you could have is already there (and most of it completely useless "web2.0", social, whatever crap in my eyes). There are millions and millions of apps. There are more games coming out every year than anyone could ever play.
But does that stuff REALLY make my life better? Or does it just add another time sink and distraction to my life?

Basically I just wanted to tell you: If you don't want to spend more time on programming, this is fine. There is a life beside coding and it is not unlikely that it is healthier and also fulfilling. Try to be as good as possible in the time you WANT to spend with it (or have to if its your job). Don't let people demotivate you when they tell you that you are no real programmer if you don't code 12h a day. No matter what you do, there will always be people who will be better than you and who do "it" 24/7. If you would like to do more than a single thing in your whole life -> just do it. In the end, it doesn't matter as long as you are happy with it. Nobody will ever give you back that 20 hours overtime you did every week in your programming job because everyone is expecting that from a "real programmer like you".
Nothing wrong with it if you really enjoy it - but make sure it's not because of some sort of weird programmer pride or hoping to get appreciation from others (most people in the world are not impressed if you tell them you programmed 70h/week for years).
Because then it's just stupid, childish and very narrow-minded.
Also if you catch yourself fighting in the ever ongoing wars on technology, programming languages etc.
You know the story: let's praise the hardcore C++ programmers and spit on the Java noobs...
Then it is really time to reflect on yourself.
These are all just tools. They don't define you or your life.
Neither does programming, even if it might seem so.

Coffee. Insomnia. Blowing off friends/family.

It doesn't surprise me that people who love to code and have a different day job spend a good portion of their free time on it. Its fun to make things, and if it clicks for you you can do a lot relatively quickly.

Its much harder for me to understand:
- How people can code all day at work then go home and do more on their own projects. I can't keep my brain in that mode all day very well.
- How people who it doesn't come naturally to keep at it. In my experience professionally and as a TA it is very apparent who naturally "thinks like a programmer" and who doesn't. It take a special kind of messed up mind, and if you don't have that when you start many people won't ever have it.

We don't. We simply cut from other parts. For example I've been coding since 94. You name it, PHP, HTML, JS, VB, Cobol, Pascal, C++/#, Delphi, Java, .NET, ABAP. I've learned all up to a certain degree and used and using them in life. But, that meant sleeping 2-4 hours / night, having almost no social life, not going to weddings, parties .. not taking weekends, not taking holidays. Indeed, it helped earn, just to see that in time the incomes got down, crisis or not, whatever. In one way I suggest anybody to master one or two things only and go ahead with them. It takes tons of time (for me 20 years) to become a Jack of all trades in IT and mostly you will become a master of none because is simply not possible time-wise and because all of them are continuing to get updates all the time. Related to programming in spurts, it happens if you have other important things in your life (wife, kids, holidays, weekends, outdoor trips ..), if not then is not relevant because you are kind of like a robot. :)

In part, the question answers itself.

Notably: Pair programming aside, programming is, even when working on a team toward a common goal, an individual pursuit. So, unless you're sitting with another programmer working on code (pair programming), all of that time you spend working on a task is the programmer's time spent coding.

There's one obvious answer.

Then there's a lot of trial & error, testing. The time consumes itself. So, while you may enjoy gaming in your spare-time, if you sit down and get rolling on a piece of code (instead of gaming), as in several other answers here: You can go for hours and hours and hours until you're mentally tired, or physically tired, or run out of motivation, or get to a point of completion. (Note: "Completion" is subjective, and for those so motivated with an idea, 'completion' can be hard in the sense of that motivation leading to other ideas and continually trying to integrate them.)

It really is a matter of personal motivation. Not all "programmers" have a lot of time to spend on coding. Some are more social butterflies and do not do that much coding, or do-so in bursts, or talk their way through their job rather than show it (code).