Last summer I started to re-evaluate my life and started my path towards working less and working smarter. Taking a full time job was my first step. Deciding to sell ReceiptWallet was my next step. Now that my work consists of one day job, it’s time for me to clean up my act and make better use of my time both during the day and after work. A friend of mine sent me a link to a Merlin Mann podcast about blocking off time and “ganging” requests that people make of me. While the podcast may offend some with the language that Merlin uses, it is definitely worth a listen. Most of my work day is spent in a reactionary fashion; instant messaging is part of work and reacting to issues is another part. Luckily, in the last six months, my IT team and I have been able to turn the constant fires into something that is a lot less frequent. However, I still am finding that I need to carve out time to focus on the harder projects. I need to take the incoming requests, log them and get to them later. Ever since I wrote NotifyMail, I’ve interrupt driven. (Curse email…I got addicted way too long ago!)

Most of the people I work with are in the central time zone, so around 3 pm my time, the interruptions pretty much stop. I’m going to try to use the time from 3 to 5 pm as a daily time to focus on the bigger projects that take a lot more concentration. The smaller projects, I can do during the day as they don’t take as much concentration. I’m hoping that I can really stick to this. Already I’ve met my goal of working less (my boss probably doesn’t want to hear that ), so I think it is achievable. While I have handled as much work that has been thrown at me in the past, I’m in a different position juggling more. The key to thriving, in my opinion, is to work much smarter and work less. Some people can work all the time, but I found that I’m not really effective after 5-6 pm in terms of my heavy thinking. Believe it or not, I never pulled an all-nighter in college; the closest I came was staying up to 3 or so working on the school paper, but that was monkey work doing page layout.

I’m crossing my fingers that the changes in my life in the past year will help make me a more balanced person. Next up, finding a hobby and actually doing it! LEGO building is fun, but I’m looking for something challenging as well. We’ll see.

So what do I do? I don’t have much of a clue on a day to day basis! I handle all kinds of requests ranging from our internal IT to working on projects that could affects customers. Now that I’m six months into it, I feel like I’m finally getting a handle on part of my job.

What will the next six months bring? I don’t know. Do I have any regrets about not being self employed anymore? Not really. I didn’t become self-employed out of choice, but out of necessity (the last company I was with didn’t have any work for me and frankly, I was bored, so we parted on good terms). I stayed a contractor because I was doing well and didn’t think I could find a job with as much flexibility as I had. I like what I’m doing and it presents much different challenges from when I was self-employed. As long as I’m challenged and feel like I’m accomplishing something, I think I’ll be happy.

As I was changing some setup stuff on one of my machines, I added an item to the login items by using the contextual menu item in the dock. I then opened up system preferences and began adding and removing it via the menu again. To my surprise (and delight) system preferences immediately indicated the change. After a bit of searching, I found some sample code called LoginItemsAE which was first created last October. I download the code, added it to my project and attempted to compile. Hmmm…it relied on stuff in Mac OS X 10.4, but I was targeting 10.3 (and 10.4.), so it didn’t compile. I double checked the sample code and it says it goes back to 10.2. After a lot of research, it turns out that in order to get the code to compile, even if targeting 10.3, I had to set the SDK to the 10.4 SDK. I didn’t want to do this as I have 50+ targets in one project that all use one configuration file that sets the SDK to 10.3.9; this kind of change could be bad as it would allow me to use functions only found in newer OS versions and then crash on older systems. So if I’m not careful, I’ll get a crash. By setting the SDK, if it doesn’t compile, it won’t run on the older OS version which makes life easier. It would be nice if there was a way to warn you about which functions aren’t available on newer OS versions.

To make a long story a little shorter, I had to whip up some stub code to get it to compile which was a whole lot more work than I had expected.

Today I spent over 4 hours working with an excellent QA engineer to track down a bug; he did everything I asked him to do, sent me logs, reinstalled software, tried on a second machine, etc. Turns out that if I had read the log a little closer, I would have been able to fix the bug in minutes instead of hours. Having a QA resource like this makes it so much easier to find stupid bugs.

As for being self employed…I’m not sure that I could work for anyone again. The ability to take off when I want without permission is great. The tax breaks are definitely worth being self employed. The big downsides are that if I don’t work, I don’t get paid which causes me to work a lot more than if I had an employer and if I’m sick, I don’t work and don’t get paid. This, of course, can lead to a lot of stress.

Overall, being self employed and working at home agrees with me.

To add to my backup strategy, I’m going to get additional TrayDocks and have 2 backups at home so that this doesn’t happen again.

while (running)
{
	[NSThread sleepUntilDate:[NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0.10]];
}

Now that I’ve thought about this, 1800 doesn’t sound all that bad, however, if you keep doing this without giving the OS a chance to do the autorelease cleanup, you’ll run out of memory. A better way of doing this is:

while (running)
{
	NSDate *newDate = [[NSDate alloc] initWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:0.10];
	[NSThread sleepUntilDate:newDate];
	[newDate release];
}

This way you won’t have anything lying around. Hopefully this will save a crash or two and lots of time scratching my head figuring out why it is crashing when I can’t reproduce the problem.