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And still more work: Day 12
Oct. 18th, 2011 05:02 pmOne of the things I really, really struggle with is balancing my work time with my "personal" time.
In some ways, having a job or having children gives a rhythm to your days--you have to be somewhere at a certain time, you leave at a certain time, there are days you don't have to be there, etc.
Since I don't have any of those things, it is entirely too easy to do one of two things. The first thing is to procrastinate all day. If I start crawling the web or playing a game or something, I don't have anything at a specific time that would automatically set a limit for me. The second thing is that if I get on the trail of a bug in the code, the time disappears and suddenly I'm blinking and looking around and wondering how the hell it got to be 2 in the morning.
Obviously, neither extreme is good, because either I'm working too much or I'm not working enough and then have to work too much to catch up.
One thing we did is start serving dinner at a regular time. That does help, because the growling of my stomach will break me out of whatever trance I am in. Another thing that helps is if I have things to do in the morning, I actually set the timer so that I can drink my coffee and wake up and play a game or read the news without getting sucked in--when the timer buzzes, it's time to put that stuff aside and get to work.
I think I'm going to have to do something similar for the work-too-much problem, set a time at which I'm done whether I'm done or not and stick to it.
Still, it's amazing how easy it is to lose oneself when there aren't any outside cures.
In some ways, having a job or having children gives a rhythm to your days--you have to be somewhere at a certain time, you leave at a certain time, there are days you don't have to be there, etc.
Since I don't have any of those things, it is entirely too easy to do one of two things. The first thing is to procrastinate all day. If I start crawling the web or playing a game or something, I don't have anything at a specific time that would automatically set a limit for me. The second thing is that if I get on the trail of a bug in the code, the time disappears and suddenly I'm blinking and looking around and wondering how the hell it got to be 2 in the morning.
Obviously, neither extreme is good, because either I'm working too much or I'm not working enough and then have to work too much to catch up.
One thing we did is start serving dinner at a regular time. That does help, because the growling of my stomach will break me out of whatever trance I am in. Another thing that helps is if I have things to do in the morning, I actually set the timer so that I can drink my coffee and wake up and play a game or read the news without getting sucked in--when the timer buzzes, it's time to put that stuff aside and get to work.
I think I'm going to have to do something similar for the work-too-much problem, set a time at which I'm done whether I'm done or not and stick to it.
Still, it's amazing how easy it is to lose oneself when there aren't any outside cures.
