id: wdtg title: Where Did Time Go? previous: fsdi date: 2024-05-22 ---

## Where Did Time Go?

I keep trying to get to work on personal projects. Expanding this website, making some new ones for a business and some utility things.

I am also trying to stay healthy and get better at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Sleep enough. Spend time with my Fiance. Learn Japanese. Keep journaling.

I don't know if I am crazy but I feel like life should have time for things like this.

If I am up early enough to spend time building stuff I inevitably get frustrated when I have to stop and get to work. It takes time to get into the flow of building something new and getting a couple of hours (or even an hour) on a weekday is hard. So I wind up working on it on the weekends and just trying to capture ideas that I have throughout the week.

Obviously to me the time is going to work. Very often over the last few months I am spending time outside of regular work hours on work. We are trying to finish off a big project.

In the past most of the jobs that I have worked are physical. Coaching gymnastics, fixing hot tubs, sauna construction. They all require you to be there in person and therefore are not something that you can just casually log on outside of your normal hours. Software development is so much different.

There is this weird feeling of guilt when spending time coding my own stuff. There is always more work to do at work with most jobs. But software feels different in that this is also something that I like to do on my own time as well. With project deadlines looming and the simplicity of logging onto my work computer instead of my own to do broadly the same thing I feel bad when I spend my own coding time on my own projects. Writing that out sounds insane but it is the case a lot of the time.

Working from home a couple days a week also does not help. My desk is no longer my workshop, but partially an extension of my desk at work. Being able to work remotely feels like a gift. And for a lot of reasons it is. I can do laundry or cook meals during breaks, less commuting. However it really does make the lines blur between work and not, especially when I am wanting to code in my free time.

I think the answer is to treat this job as a physical one. Get a locker, leave my computer there. I wouldn't be able to work from home during regular work time anymore. That also means that I can't work outside of work time. I need that sharp delineation between work and the rest of my life. It just bleeds over too easily for me.

Which brings me to my more general thoughts that everything that we do has a cost associated with the benefit that it brings. We often get excited about the benefits and forget to take the cost into account. Working from home, adopting a new software tool, etc.

I am more and more often finding that the costs are not worth it. It has taken me 2 years to get to this realization with working from home in particular. I think the benefits were front loaded with realizing that I could get things done during work breaks. The costs however were slowly training me over time to see my home desk as a workspace and for my mind to associate the two. And it isn't worth it so I am going to try without and see how that goes.