I haven’t been writing as much in this blog in the past couple months. It isn’t because I have been extraordinarily busy. (I’ve been busy but not more than usual.) I think it is because I’ve spent a big portion of my time writing code. At my last job I spent a significant amount of time in meetings. And I’m not just talking about the kind of meetings where you can actually do other work. I’m talking about meetings where I was an integral participant. Nonetheless, there was a lot of wasted time waiting for the meeting to start, waiting for someone to get the conference call working, waiting for someone to stop bloviating, and so on. And wasted time meant time for me to think about other things. And thinking about things leads directly to things to blog about.
The other factor to having a schedule full of meetings is that it really fractured my days. I didn’t get a whole lot of focused time to do things like coding. Many days I did little else other than keep up with emails, prepare for meetings, attend meetings and follow up after meetings. So to maintain my sanity I needed some kind of productive outlet. And blogging provided that outlet. I would write a blog entry during lunch or during a break between two meetings. I’ll leave it up to someone else to decide if I managed to maintain my sanity.
These days, I can spend the majority of most days writing code, doing design and helping out with project management tasks. I feel much more productive. (I can’t say that I wasn’t productive at my last job. I did the work that was assigned to me to the best of my abilities. But I didn’t FEEL productive because at the end of the day I had very little concrete work product. Attending meetings doesn’t make me FEEL very productive.) Spending time writing code is great–I’m really enjoying it again. But this makes me wonder if there is a limit to one’s ability to be productive and creative. So while a day full of meetings meant that my excess productivity flowed over into the blog, maybe now I’m using up my productivity in coding and have none left for blogging. Or maybe I’m just more busy than I realized.