I want to free up time later this week to focus on Quantified Awesome and explore something new, so I spent part of the weekend working on the Drupal engagement. In addition to the feature requests, there’s a fair bit that I need to do to clean up the previous code and make the site more maintainable, so I’m chipping away at the task list.

Still, there’s time to spend with friends and family, and that’s important, although I woke up too late to talk to my mom.

It’s a little odd shifting time around like this. The crunch time is temporary and self-imposed, and the freed-up time later this week might come in very handy.

I would like to spend more time on building the things that people are asking for, but I can’t think of anywhere else I’d want to take that time from. Sleep, work, and socialization are all important, and I enjoy working on my personal projects too. Chores don’t take us a lot of time – not enough to justify the cost and time of outsourcing them.

So it’s a matter of patience, dealing with the fact that there is only so much time in the day. I’d still rather build this slowly than not do it at all. At work, I’ve been opening up my extracurriculars to other people so that I’m not the bottleneck. For Quantified Awesome and these other personal interests, I’m not quite at the point of paying other people to work on them.

One of the books I’m reading is “Money Can Buy Happiness”, by MP Dunleavey. The book quotes:

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only
you can determine how it will be spent.

• Carl Sandburg (quoted on p63, Money Can Buy Happiness)

I am okay with how I spend my time. It would be interesting to have more of it, but the constraint of 24 hours is fair and equal. In a few years, I might experiment with different balances, but there are still many things I want to do and learn with this balance.