Bite off what you can chew

Preface: I’d like to point out that I’ve had this blog post on my todolist for a little over a month. The irony isn’t lost on me that it’s taken so long to get to writing it.

Also, I love the Dos Equis billboard that reads, “Every once in a while, Bite off more than you can chew.” But that’s another matter entirely.

For the last year or so, I’ve kept myself pretty busy.

I love my job, but there are several weeks where I’ll work at least one night of the week until 10. I read a lot to help make myself a better developer and to help out our team. I discovered podcasts. My commute is about 45 minutes each way.

I co-founded a consulting company with @meezy a few years ago, and we do work for that from time to time. I wrote bgtwt. I rant on bgtwt. I maintain Locked Envelope. We maintain two servers for another client.

I play College Pick ‘Em (and love college football), and watch football games every Saturday (and sometimes Sunday) that I can.

I have an adorable two year old, who loves attention (rightfully so). We gained a (now) 7 month old, who deserves just as much attention as her brother.

I found out I love mowing the lawn (barefoot, and fight about it with @stinkle pretty much every time).

I try to be present and attentive and helpful for my wife.

I started keeping my inbox empty, going out of my way to answer/close everything at least once a day. I blog. I tweet. A lot.

Pretty much everything I do, I really enjoy. I think talking/flaming over Twitter is hilarious and enjoyable. I like the soapbox of the blog. I love my family. I love writing things, building things, learning things, and watching people use things that I wrote/built.

I also love video games, but those have mostly been absent in the past year, largely because of everything else on my plate.

I realized a few weeks ago that my todolist (I use Things, and so should you) was never emptied. I’d have a goal of setting aside everything I was going to do that day, and I was never hitting that. So I started committing myself to less, because there’s no point going around every day feeling like a failure (which is a different issue).

That was a nice improvement. There would be days where I’d get my todolist down to 0, and just say, “wow, now I can do whatever I want.” I’ve found lately that I’m really bad at doing whatever I want, because I haven’t done it in a while. First thing I did? Bought Wolverine X-Men: Origins. It’s fun, mindless killing. We need more of that.

I’ve also realized that I’ve been keeping up with too many projects. I have some private projects that aren’t ready to be announced that I keep up with. I have some public ones (bgtwt, Locked Envelope). It got to where I’d look at my 4 or 7 projects and think, “sorry, I’m just going to neglect you today.” And it sucked.

So I’m committing to fewer projects now, in an effort to consciously only rarely bite off more than I can chew. I’ve stopped development on bgtwt for the time being, and if it starts to look like it’s gaining its own culture/crowd beyond the initial users, I might start it up again. LockedEnvelope is at a standstill, and will probably stay that way until I see a good use case for an API. Navoty site rewrite? That might come sooner, but not this month.

I tried several months ago to drop Twitter and other social networking sites, but I realized (maybe 2 days later) that wasn’t the issue. The reason I’ve had no time to do what I want is because I’ve got too many things to do that I want, and it’s a shitty way to go through life, not completing or having any time to reflect on anything.