It’s pretty rare that I take a break from my work for more than a few days at a time. Recently the major breaks I’ve had were for my wedding, honeymoon, a trip to Baltimore to donate stem cells, visiting family in CT, and this weekend, where my wife and I spent an absurd amount of time dealing with complications from a cat bite she received a few days ago.

After every one of those breaks I’ve had a rush of ideas. My day to day thoughts are usually just additions to those ideas. For example, while we were cruising in the Caribbean for our honeymoon I came up with a few ideas for potential start-ups. Since then, I’ve just mostly been making small changes to those ideas and not coming up with anything radically different.

This weekend I spent very little time at the computer and I came up with some other ideas that I’m really excited about. Somehow this always surprises me. Its like I don’t want to admit that I’m not as clear headed on a normal basis.

I’m not sure whether its because of the break itself or because I get more sleep during those times.

The problem is that whenever you’re taking a break you’re not getting work done. If you work too much you never have any great ideas. If you are always taking breaks you’ll never get any work done. The key is to find the right balance between work and rest. I don’t think I’ve found that yet. Usually if I’m tired and have a decision between programming and sleeping I’ll choose programming.

Also, I think my body requires 8-9 hours of sleep to really be 100%. I get 6-7 normally, which would mean I have to sacrifice two precious hours each day to achieve my potential. So I work at 70% mental capacity for 4 hours vs 100% for 2 hours. Maybe a good compromise would be to go to bed an hour earlier, meaning 3 hours of 85%. Mathematically that works out to be the best, although it seems like a stretch to represent the situation mathematically.

Regardless, the key is to get regular breaks. You won’t work at your potential otherwise.

Let limitations guide you to creative solutions
There’s never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough people.

– Getting Real by 37signals

Despite having about two hours less each day of free time I’m making better progress now than I was in the past? Why? I don’t have time to bullshit around on Hacker News or read all 45 updates on my Google Reader.

Every minute counts.

My wife received the following email from Netflix this morning:

This is a great email in so many ways.

The wording was not hastily thrown together. A lot of work went into making sure there were no unnecessary words in any of the paragraphs. It’s short and to the point. The tone is apologetic, but not incompetently so. There are no excuses and they don’t try to downplay the seriousness of the problem. They’re basically saying We screwed up, we’re sorry, we’re going to fix it. They offer us resources to get more information if we’re confused about what’s going on. They’re going to credit our account, which they didn’t have to do. Also, the layout is smart. They could have sent an unformatted email hoping that it would put some distance between the red Netflix theme and the screw up. Instead, they prominently display their logo and the Netflix colors – which makes me feel more like their taking responsibility for their mistake. Also, the width of the paragraphs is just right – not too compact, not too wide.

This reflects highly on their customer service.

Kudos to Netflix.

I’ve been using my time poorly lately. I’ll be at the computer for a few hours and have no idea what I accomplished. The way I see it there are three major factors:

• Lack of Clear Goal – Since I’m not actively working on a project, there’s no push to accomplish certain tasks each day.
• Distractions = Hacker News + Google Reader. Yeah, I know: blasphemy.
• Working in Chunks – My best work is accomplished when I can work uninterrupted for several hours. How do you do this and maintain a healthy relationship at the same time?

I use Rescue Time plus a similar program I wrote back in February called Usage Monitor. Rescue Monitor kicks my program’s ass (which is a good thing). I keep them both going because its interesting to compare their totals. Rescue Time has me at about 88 hours (2:50/day), Usage Monitor 82 hours (2:40/day). The difference I figure might be the idle rate, I’m not sure. I trust Rescue Time.

The only area where mine is remotely better is that I can quickly see how much time I’ve spent using a browser vs everything else. I think you can do this with tagging in Rescue Time with tagging, but its not entirely clear. (Also – is there an easy way to breakdown my Rescue Time data by day of the week? I’d like that.) According to Usage Monitor, I spend about 70% of my time on the internet – eesh.

It’d be unfair to classify all of that as wasted time. I do research, dabble in web development, and write this blog among other things. However, in that 87 hours there’s certainly some fatty sections:

• This Blog – 18:06
• Hacker News – 8:43
• Google Reader + TechCrunch – 4:00
• GMail – 2:37

I could definitely limit a lot of those by doing my daily reading during my slow times and lunch at work.

Goals – I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to come up with a killer idea. Something worthy of a lot of time over the next few months. Given the amount of startups that fail, that’s probably not a bad thing. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. I need to learn the technical skills before I can really launch into a big startup. So, I’ve decided to just pick one of the ideas, even though its probably not a killer one, and go with it.

Many kudos to anyone who is successful founding a startup with both a dayjob and a marriage.

Now, I’m wasting time.