I need to start creating limits, or I’m going to burn out very very quickly.

The Cycle

Sure, I don’t have to go to bed at any time anymore, unless I have, for some reason, scheduled a meeting at 8 in the morning. Heck, for that matter, I don’t even have to go to bed, period.

This morning was an interesting one. I went to bed at what seemed to be around 4 AM, woke up at 8:30 (leftover from my full-time position), then went to bed again sometime and woke up at 1 or so.

Sidenote: I’m not trying to do an Uberman (Polyphasic sleep) here, but I may start thinking about doing one soon.

Already, not knowing when I did something is annoying to me. It already feels like I’m not in control of time and space. (Which is already a tall order, if you ask me.)

But this brings me to my next point.

Focus

I keep trying to blog about each twist and turn in the road to awesome, but not only am I not able to do write it all down, I’m not even driving.

I hope to, from this point forward, be a little bit less perceptive about myself (the car), but instead be more preceptive about the things left ahead (the road). Not sure how I’m going to do this, but it’s something I realized as I was checking the car for the Long Road Ahead.

The billions of projects that keep getting created daily need to be whittled down and categorized into a few products. Heck, maybe it just needs to get whittled down into one. I don’t know of too many solo dev’s rocking out with multiple projects on multiple platforms/frameworks. And I’m only trying to cover iPhone (Cocoa), Mac(different, but still Cocoa), and Web (Rails).

So much time is spent on trying to figure out how to maximize something. I keep running into the fact that sometimes, there’s not to maximize.

Lists

I stopped making lists.

I stopped using the calendar.

Where are my metric methods? I don’t know.

Again, I don’t want to focus on how I got here, but what I intend to do from this point forward. I’ll probably fall back to writing down what I must do, and start creating smaller tasks in manageable chunks.

Multitasking

Not doing this again. Unless I have to, of course.

There will be times when I’ll have to juggle 18 things at once, but I really should be opting out to be tied down to one task at a time. It goes back to having a good list to go through.

Resolution

New Cycle: Eight to late. 8 AM to whenever it ends up being. Wake up at 7:30 and prep.

Focus: Continue with iPhone development until the end of the month. Restart Rails at around Railsconf (May 4th to 7th), so you can be prepared for the oodles of lovely content afterwards.

Lists: Start using lists like a madman again. iCal is good too.

Multitasking: Try not to do it. Stick to the list.

Of course, these are just ideals again. I’ll start changing them as I go, but I need some limits. Too much freedom is not always a good thing.