In some sense I better understand why I was so stressed for time before, given how little slack I had in my schedule. The root cause of this is a combination of parenthood, my wife restarting her career, and my own lack of organization, but I am trying to not be too hard on myself about not making as much progress as I might. I took this break from work with an explicit goal of trying to take it easy.
Can relate/empathize. Please go easy on yourself and use this break to re-frame what’s important to you in life.
(And though making anything explicitly useful isn’t my goal, I found it funny while I was working at Figma how often some random technical challenge would come up, and I would say “oh I did a project in this area once, I know a bit about it”…)
In the past year or two I’ve stopped beating myself up about never finishing any side-projects. I still have to actually deliver stuff for $DAY_JOB, but I realized that I really enjoy learning, and that’s what motivates me to do side-projects. When I stop learning (either because the remaining problems are too easy or two hard) I lose motivation.
While some of them might be useful to others if I finished them, I’m not self-indulgent enough to have that motivate me. I am however self-indulgent enough to enjoy learning for the sake of it.
As it turns out, sometimes, my past side-projects turn out to be useful experience for the day job, but I suspect that’s largely because I also tend to choose professional paths that allow me to learn and create rather than simply execute.
Can relate/empathize. Please go easy on yourself and use this break to re-frame what’s important to you in life.
In the past year or two I’ve stopped beating myself up about never finishing any side-projects. I still have to actually deliver stuff for $DAY_JOB, but I realized that I really enjoy learning, and that’s what motivates me to do side-projects. When I stop learning (either because the remaining problems are too easy or two hard) I lose motivation.
While some of them might be useful to others if I finished them, I’m not self-indulgent enough to have that motivate me. I am however self-indulgent enough to enjoy learning for the sake of it.
As it turns out, sometimes, my past side-projects turn out to be useful experience for the day job, but I suspect that’s largely because I also tend to choose professional paths that allow me to learn and create rather than simply execute.