It’s really awesome how much you can learn from side projects, I have worked on a number of side projects over the years, and I have learned many things that are useful to me as a programmer.

If you can allocate a small portion of your time for working on such projects, I highly recommend it.

It may feel like a break from your work as well, and by the way, you can build a tool or an app that can actually help you to be more productive and efficient in case you want to add additional benefits to this experience.