Moonlighting

Well, as I am sure you have noticed, the frequency of updates to our blog have become quite a bit less frequent. This has two causes. #1. There hasn't been too much exciting going on in the household on a regular basis, what has occurred has been posted. #2. I am working way too much as of late. My time is generally spent working, spending time with Angel before, during, and a bit after dinner, and working some more with a little bit of hockey in there too.

I am quite sure that most of you are aware that outside my 40 hr/week job, I have other development related projects that I work on. At this time, the list is up to three.

There is one project in particular that I've been spending quite a bit of time on as of late. I'm developing a website for a friend for his business. Well, unfortunately, this project is not yet complete. The user experience is only about 85% complete and the administrative module is roughly 65% complete and before I can resume or start work on my other projects, I have to finish this one.

Anyway, I wasn't anticipating this project to have taken so long. I had picked it up on a whim and thought it would have been a couple of weeks in development and I would have been able to return to my hobby project of the Mindlence Card Game (MCG). Well, due to the complexity of this website, I am still working on it. Which also means the MCG has lost traction. Which is unfortunate because it is such a fun project to work on. The MCG is meant to be a 100% AJAX based platform to be used to play multi-player non-standard card games. The concept is sound, the market is present, unfortunately, time is currently lacking. Although, my interest in the project is not lacking. The third project is one in which I am not at liberty to disclose at this time.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up is that with most things in life, trade-offs are required. My current trade-off is that I'm working on the projects that will bring money to the table in the shortest term. Therefore, the hobby project has taken the back seat until my project has been completed. Hopefully, I will then be able to partition my time between my other two projects.

Anyway, enough about the projects and more onto the point of this post. It has been brutally brought to my attention that my projects have been consuming quite a bit of time in my life. I am not complaining, don't get that impression. I just want to give you the information about what is going on in my life as of late.

So, because of my projects and trying to get one of them wrapped up, just about all of my free time has been devoted to it. In doing so, some collateral affects are coming forward. These affects are sleep and the lack of sleep.

The duration of my sleep has been affected. During the last few weeks, my full time job has been affected by this. Don't take this the wrong way. My projects are not affecting my job performance or focus on my work for my job. However, what has been occurring more often than not is tardiness. Instead of being at my desk from 10-7, I've been getting there more like 10:30 or 11. Thankfully this is not a problem with work. If you know me, you will know that I don't take a lunch. Well, not since the P90X thing fizzled. Therefore, if you do the math, 10-7 is a 9 hour day. Getting to work at 11 doesn't take anything away from my employer. Additionally, even if I were to get to the office any later, I have the ability to make up my missed time by staying later. It all works out in the end as long as I don't miss any early morning meetings.

The other affect is lack of sleep. For the past three weekends, there has been a need to pull all-nighters. The issue usually begins on Friday night (Thursday night this weekend). I would stay up pretty late and then sleep most of the daylight hours away. Therefore, to fix my schedule, I would stay up Saturday night until Sunday night or Sunday night to Monday night. This is the second time that I will be up from Sunday night to Monday night in consecutive weekends. This obviously doesn't affect work, but it does affect Angel. She doesn't like it when I stay up into the wee hours of the morning and sleep the majority of a day away. The reason is that it typically takes time with me away from her. She doesn't get openly upset with me because of it, but she does have her way of letting me know that it upsets her.

Unfortunately, I can't foresee if or when this cycle is going to end. From what I can tell right now, my projects are going to being blurring together. I know once this paying project is complete that I will be taking on the other two in tandem. Working one project is hard enough to produce visible results in a short period of time. Then to take on two at once, either they are both going to suffer or I'm just not going to sleep. I think it is pretty much a toss-up as to which is going to occur. Both projects are long term initiatives. There is no way I could let one or the other of them slide until the other project is complete. Neither of the remaining two projects present any financial gains in the short term and both have long term financial capabilities. Therefore, if I was a betting man, I would say that I'm going to have to learn better discipline in waking up to my alarm on shorter and shorter amounts of sleep.

I am a developer to the core. I wear my Geek badge proud. I don't think I could not have a period of time where I don't have something in my project queue to work on outside of work. Development is not just my job, but my hobby. I love being able to create something out of nothing. To take a vision from my head (or a collection of heads) and produce it into being. Furthermore, the potential to create something which will be the ticket to an early retirement is also motivation. I think I will be learning some serious lessons on balance in the near future.

A rhetorical question just came to mind. When I retire (regardless of age), what will I do? I foresee more development in my retirement. Would that actually constitute retirement? Since it is my job and hobby, I don't think I will ever be free of it. Well, I would hope not anyway. I guess only time will tell.