Today went a little better than yesterday. I got about 8 hours worth of “work” tasks done, but I didn’t prioritize them according to difficulty. My morning was spent working on my own projects, writing a blog post and doing some WordPress theme hacking for about 6 hours. After that, I ran some errands and went to the gym for an hour of medium-level cardio (I got sucked into an episode of What Not to Wear and wanted to see how it ended). So I was at the 8 hour mark when I tried to get into doing some coding for another project, but it was for naught I was hungry, thirsty, tired from both physical and mental exertion. I mostly fell in to Happy Bubble Time by default, doing research on full-text search engine solutions, reading articles about trends in realtime game environments, and watching videos of Lindsay Ellis…that girl can talk! I also cooked some dinner (spare ribs with an experimental curry-based rub) and did my bills for the week (always a huge pain), and this pretty much used up my all my resolve for the day. Until I actually counted up all the hours of what I did, I was wondering why I had done so little It turns out that I did a significant amount of work. However, as I said before, I should have prioritized them differently.

The biggest resistance I feel right now is to a particular coding project that involves rewriting someone else’s code. I got about 15 minutes into it around 8PM, choosing a very specific task: find a file, convert it to the appropriate format, and figure out where to save it. This was far too late in the day. Tomorrow I am queuing it up first-thing so it gets some love. I am a reluctant programmer that is finicky about development process, As I’ve mentioned in other articles, programming for me feels likes being trapped myself in a tiny box, turning a crank for an indeterminate amount of time before something good pops out. It’s no wonder that my lizard brain / Stupid Head wants to avoid it.

Knowing that, it would make sense to do these code projects first thing but for one problem: I am also determined to prioritize my own projects as much if not more than other people’s projects. I know it sounds terrible, but as a small business owner that wants to grow a business I have to be very aware of what MY needs are, and treat the preciously. I have seen so many small businesses that have the desire to do something great for their own destiny, but they treat their internal projects as “would be nice” because it’s easier to punt them and work on something that brings in money NOW than speculatively sometime in the future. As a result, these companies never grow.

That said, there’s a BALANCE that must be maintained. The balance doesn’t have to be equal every day, though. In my original plan for the week, I wanted to split the time equally EVERY DAY between my projects and other people’s projects, like getting three square meals in a day, every day. Today, however, shows that I have to be careful about which project goes first, or at least be prepared to handle the consequences. Tomorrow I rebalance.

[process-2013a]