I’ve been giving my last post a lot of thought.  Its incomplete.

I don’t like being tired, but I do love working on projects that I’m truly passionate about and if that causes me to lose some sleep, so be it. We only live once and I don’t want to sleep my life away. If I get to a point where I can spend 80-90-100 hours/week working on projects that I care about, I’ll consider it a success.  I don’t mind missing out on some things as long as its while I’m doing work I love. 

There is a rush.  In 100 years, we’ll all be dead. Better not waste it.

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.

Last week after a bit of wrangling with the wife, we finally bought an iPhone. Until recently it fell under the “nice to have” category but the more I read about it and the more I played with friend’s iPhones, the more I wanted one.

The day after we purchased it I downloaded Appigo’s Todo app, a simple but powerful todo list management tool. The app was $9.99, the most expensive of the bunch which also included several free todo lists. I liked the fact that it cost money because it holds the creators accountable, at least on some level. It also indicates they think their product is valuable enough to sell and lastly, it’s always good to support fellow programmers, even if they are just getting ridiculous rich from their iPhone apps. Here’s their YouTube presentation, which sealed the deal for me:

Getting an electronic todo list has been one of the most productive decisions we’ve made (next to the Macbook — damn you Apple). Beforehand the iPhone, I would keep a yellow sticky note in my wallet and write notes on it. That didn’t work too well as I normally would lose the sticky note, forget to bring a pen, or be unable to read my own handwriting.

I was in Florida at the time, away from work, Domain Pigeon, Hacker News, this blog, and everything else that normally consumes my time. The mental unicycle was still rolling though; as I thought of things I needed to do when I got back I created a task for it. One by one they piled up.

After one day, I had 24 tasks After three, 46. After a week, 68.

At first I thought the todo list would be a backup for me, but the more I use it the more I’m relying on it as my primary source of things I need to do. It’s kind of sick, but juggling 68 things in the back of my mind is a burdensome, time consuming endeavor which inevitably has a high rate of “Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”

My current todo list is broken up into seven categories: Work, Blog, Domain Pigeon, General, Internet, Projects, and Research.

Work is things I need to take care of at work (“Write Thank You Notes”), blog contains things I want to write about (“Todo List is Great”), Domain Pigeon contains ideas and action items pertaining to the upcoming site (“Check out UserTesting.com”, “Register .NET/.ORG Domains”), General contains miscellaneous things (“Lexmark X2580 Ink”, “Pick up Dry Cleaning”), Internet contains random todo things, Projects is for startup and website ideas (top secret), and Research is for things I want to learn more about at a later date (“Cover Calls”, “Dairy Bad?”, “Flash Development”, etc).

After I had this all set up, I learned about Contexts, which let you categorize things on, well, context. So, for example, I could have a context for “Internet” and then for every task that I have to use the internet to complete, I could add “Internet” as a context rather than having a special group for internet items. I haven’t figured out the best way to organize it, but it’ll evolve as time goes by.

One final note: I had two recommendations for the app, so I wrote the company a quick, friendly email both because I hope they implement the recommendations and because I wanted to see how and if they would respond:

Just wanted to say great app, I don’t know how I went without a todo app for so long!

Two small recommendations: I like making all the task names title case (“Write Blog Post About Blah” vs “Write blog post about blah”). I’m not sure if this is something you can control, but if it is, I’d love for it to be an optional setting so that its done automatically. Second, and this is really a small point, if a task doesn’t have a due date, rather than have it say “No due date” below a task, maybe just leave it blank. The extra white space goes a long way.

Again, great app. I’m sure your effort has paid off :)

Several hours later they responded:

Matt,

Thank you for contacting Appigo.  We always appreciate suggestions and
comments.  We have taken note of your suggestion and have included it
in our list for future review.

Thanks for taking the time to write to us and thanks for using our Apps!

The Appigo Team

The fact that they responded at all was great (I’ve emailed some websites with questions and feedback and generally never hear a word back), though I suspect this was a boiler plate email (note “suggestion” when in fact I made two). Nonetheless, if I were receiving dozens of emails on the same subject (suggestions, for example), I might consider writing a template too…

To sum it up, if you like todo lists, Appigo’s app is a useful, well designed choice and its by a company that seems to value their customers. +1.

“Success is the progressive realization of worthwhile, predetermined, personal goals.” – Paul J. Meyer

This was at the bottom of the RescueTime website and its one of the best definitions of success I’ve seen.

Right now I’m just preparing for the months ahead (like finally setting up RescueTime for this Macbook). There’s a lot planned and I hope to blog thoroughly about everything that’s going on. Stay tuned.