Weekly Noise - Week 1

Series: worklog October 24, 2010

I was recently inspired by this post, which lays out an interesting “discipline” for working on side-projects. The basic idea is to set aside time each weekend to plan out what project you are going to work on during the coming week. Then, after the week is over, you reflect on what progress you made with a blog post and then write out next week’s plan. Rinse and repeat.

Since I work on lots of side-projects of my own – and most of them are left in some state of ‘unfinished’ – I think that this might be a good way for me to record what I learn. And I always end up with too many projects “open” and then I never actually make progress on any of them so maybe a more structured system can help me stay focused.

Lately I have also been struggling with the guilt-vs-motivation dilemna; I know that working on new projects and exploring technologies is something that I should be doing for professional development (and I like learning new stuff!) but sometimes I just don’t really feel like doing anything but sitting on the couch all night. I start feeling bad when I spend a week without making a github commit or working on that thing I started last weekend.

So what I have decided to do is add a time limit to my “Weekly Noise” posts. I figure that if I have a set time commitment each week, it will be easier for me to stay on track and make me feel less guilty on those days when I can’t even bring myself to open up vim.

I was originally planning to start this last weekend – gotta love procrastination – but now that I have this post written, I will have some accountability. And now that I have my GitHub Pages setup, there is no excuse to not do it!

So with that said, here are my goals for this week:

I’ve got a whole stack of books that I need to do write-ups for:

I was on a real reading binge for a few weeks…

Estimated time: 2-3 hours

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