The most finished man of the world would be one who was never irresolute and never in a hurry.
Schopenhauer
I wake up usually 15 minutes later than I should, quickly shower, dress, and head to work. I speed most of the way there.
I get to work and spend most of the day moving fast. There’s a lot of work to do and usually not enough time to do it.
When I get done with work, I speed home while busily planning in my head how I’m going to spend the next five hours before I need to go to sleep. The later I get off work the faster I tend to drive. I drive 10-15 over the speed limit because it shaves 5-10 minutes off the drive, which is an extra 5-10 minutes I can spend with my wife or programming each night.
On nights that I’m short on time, I don’t program and I spend the time with her instead. It’s not a hard decision, but its one I wish I didn’t have to make.
When I program I code fast. I don’t particularly like writing test cases because they take time. Usually the code is hacked together. Usually it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
I like Five Star notebooks. I keep one at work and one at home. I use them to track the things I’m working on. I make small squares next to the tasks I need to do and check them off as they are completed. For the times in between work and home, I have a todo list app on my phone. It can be helpful to track all those random ideas that come up when you’re not trying to come up with ideas.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot the past few days: I need to slow down.
I took a look around on the drive to work today. I never noticed most of the stores I pass on a daily basis: dry cleaners and audio equipment stores and a sub place I’ve heard of and even a place that sells sheds, to name a few. I bet that sub place is pretty good, but I never noticed it because I wasn’t looking. There’s also beautiful vast cornfields that I’ve never really looked at before. If I wasn’t running late, I may have even stopped on the side of the road to watch the sunrise. It’s really quite something if you catch it at the right time and the right place. Call me a sissy, whatever.
Work’s kind of the same way. I’m so busy focused on getting the next task completed that I’m missing out on all the really amazing people and things around me.
Programming too. I’ve gotten so absorbed with Domain Pigeon that I forgot why I started it in the first place–to learn new things that’ll help me found a start-up one day.
On that note, I’ve been trading sleep for programming and I’ve come to one conclusion: it’s a terrible trade off. I get to program for a few extra hours a week but I become a walking zombie the rest of the time. Ironically, the lack of sleep also results in more typos when I do program which costs more time in the long run. And for what? Is it that big of a deal if I found a company at 30 instead of 28? I’d rather spend the next six years taking it slowly and enjoying myself than work my ass off and miss out on the best years of my life. Taking it slowly helps in other ways too: you won’t get burnt out, you’ll have more time to learn, and should you fail, you’ll still be able to look back and remember all the good times you had along the way.
Lesson learned: Enjoy the ride.
Matt Mazur 