What you say is true, but not enough. It is also essential to have a clear idea of what you are trying to build and how you are going to build it. Without those, time in the chair is not going to be used well.
Agreed. I've showed up nearly every saturday and sunday morning for the past decade, and I'm still working on the same stupid side project because I keep rethinking the fundamentals and going back to the drawing board. I'm finally nearing completion, but looking back, some time management and a clearer vision would have radically improved the outcome of my life thus far.
Apply that to a larger scope than writing a program.
Your family is something that you're trying to build. Put into that the time needed. If you wind up with not enough time for writing a program, that's fine. In the battle for time between your family and your program, the program should lose.
One of my biggest failures was focusing too much on my pet projects when I had small children.
It is always difficult to balance our internal drives with the needs of those around us; both spending too much time on ourselves, and denying ourselves an outlet for creativity, can lead to resentment one way or the other.
I would say that I have been “lucky” that my childhood was a bit more difficult than some, so I had a clear vision of who I didn’t want to be, and that meant some personal sacrifices, especially around hobby projects.
I hope you’ve managed to rebalance now your kids are presumably a bit older.
I don't completely disagree with that, it's just that the ones who are really familiar with their tools will also iterate on half -baked ideas faster, because there are many things that come come up while on the chair.
And this is something that I actually intended to bring this point up in a thread I saw yesterday regarding thinking time and typing time but I procrastinated on it until today.
I follow the same principle whenever I type a reply. I'm not gonna pretend that the text I'm currently typing is a draft, but thinking about the things that are worth mentioning is something that I can afford after I started typing a response to your comment, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that's definitely true. I find that I'll often be excited about an idea and immediately start putting in the time to build a rough prototype. Once I realize the true scale of the effort involved I second-guess my commitment to the idea - is this really something I want to spend the next year+ working on? I think having that clear vision and enough conviction that the results will be worthwhile is very important and definitely something I struggle with.
Comments
What you say is true, but not enough. It is also essential to have a clear idea of what you are trying to build and how you are going to build it. Without those, time in the chair is not going to be used well.
Agreed. I've showed up nearly every saturday and sunday morning for the past decade, and I'm still working on the same stupid side project because I keep rethinking the fundamentals and going back to the drawing board. I'm finally nearing completion, but looking back, some time management and a clearer vision would have radically improved the outcome of my life thus far.
Absolutely correct. At a minimum you need:
- the vision of what you want to achieve
- the skill to achieve it
- the time to build it
I find that time is the most difficult problem to solve, especially since I had a family.
Apply that to a larger scope than writing a program.
Your family is something that you're trying to build. Put into that the time needed. If you wind up with not enough time for writing a program, that's fine. In the battle for time between your family and your program, the program should lose.
One of my biggest failures was focusing too much on my pet projects when I had small children.
It is always difficult to balance our internal drives with the needs of those around us; both spending too much time on ourselves, and denying ourselves an outlet for creativity, can lead to resentment one way or the other.
I would say that I have been “lucky” that my childhood was a bit more difficult than some, so I had a clear vision of who I didn’t want to be, and that meant some personal sacrifices, especially around hobby projects.
I hope you’ve managed to rebalance now your kids are presumably a bit older.
Why not? You just have to use the time in the chair to sketch out a clear idea of how/what you are trying to build first.
I don't completely disagree with that, it's just that the ones who are really familiar with their tools will also iterate on half -baked ideas faster, because there are many things that come come up while on the chair.
And this is something that I actually intended to bring this point up in a thread I saw yesterday regarding thinking time and typing time but I procrastinated on it until today.
I follow the same principle whenever I type a reply. I'm not gonna pretend that the text I'm currently typing is a draft, but thinking about the things that are worth mentioning is something that I can afford after I started typing a response to your comment, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that's definitely true. I find that I'll often be excited about an idea and immediately start putting in the time to build a rough prototype. Once I realize the true scale of the effort involved I second-guess my commitment to the idea - is this really something I want to spend the next year+ working on? I think having that clear vision and enough conviction that the results will be worthwhile is very important and definitely something I struggle with.