An odd effect I’ve noticed over the years is that when I have a whole day free to do something versus a tight two hours before I have to go somewhere and/or meet someone and/or tend to some other responsibility, I’ll get more done in the two hours than in the full day.
I acknowledge that it might be a problem relatively unique to me. I’m a terrible procrastinator, and something about knowing I’ve got the whole day ahead of me leads me to procrastinate more and do less compared to the forcing function of limited time.
These days I’m finding a similar problem on a longer arc. I held a gap-less sequence of full-time job for twenty years, since the day I graduated from university in 2007. More recently, after an acquisition, I started working for myself to see what I could do with River.
It’s been going decently, if not swimmingly. Since then we’ve released workflows V2, TypeScript bindings, a stuck goroutine handler, metrics, and active job rescue, to be followed by Turso support, active job rescue, and rate limiting in the coming weeks. But being solo on the project and never having done anything like this before, I’ll be the first to admit that the amorphous shape of my daily schedule has been a challenge. I don’t have anywhere to show up to at 8 AM. I don’t have anyone to check in with for weekly planning or midday standup. I don’t even have investors to keep an eye on me. Many days I don’t waltz into WeWork until 1 PM, something I would’ve been caught dead doing only three months ago.
I’m thinking back to that more productive two-hour timebox, and how it can apply to the months ahead. This too shall not last. My instinct is that I’ll have all the time in the world to get River up and running, but of course I won’t. Sometime in the months ahead, I’m going to take another tech job, wave the white flag on entrepreneurship, start a new life as an Uber driver, etc. I don’t know what it’ll be exactly, but it will be something.
And when it does, just like the feeling of a wasted day due to an insufficiently ambitious schedule, I’m going to look back on this long span of unprecedented, once-in-a-lifetime freedom and think, “What a waste!”
In the spirit of minimizing that feeling, here’s what I’m going to try and do:
Reflect daily on how rare and incredible this moment is. It’s never happened before and it may never happen again.
Timebox a little better. Right now my schedule is to work for an arbitrary amount of time sometime between 7 AM and midnight. Carve out a more normal core and operate inside its boundaries.
Redouble my efforts to get things done like it’s my last chance to do so. (It could well be, who knows.)
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