I work as a freelance web app developer[1] (#footnote1), and I run into the same problems (and the same solutions—yay Wii!) I can handle it when I'm working for a client and I have deadlines and hours to keep; in those cases, I'm actually more productive working from home than on-site. But it gets a lot harder when I'm working on personal projects.
So the fact that an author I admire, in a similarly open-ended and self-employed situation, is struggling with this same stuff and succeeding—this gives me hope. Please keep up these behind-the-scenes (http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/tag/behind+the+scenes) posts. They're enlightening.
By the way, here are some tricks that help me. Maybe some of them will be useful to you too. If not, gleefully ignore. ^_^ Sorry if I'm saying stuff that's obvious, or that you already do.
I always work in forty-five-minute sprints, followed by a short break (say, a Katamari level, or a Tale of MU). I bill my clients by the quarter-hour, which makes this easy. I got this idea from a time-management specialist when I was working on two contracts at once and going nuts; she said industrial psychology research shows that 45 minutes is the period after which your cognitive abilities go downhill but your death-grip on the project spikes (much as with Ian's peak in the gladiator story). It also makes you focus intently on getting something done in that sprint. Sorry, I can't cite sources, but this really works for me.
I work out every day. It consistently does amazing things for my brain. If you're able to do anything that gets your heart rate up, it really cleans out the cobwebs.
I also lift weights, and I think that has a qualitatively different effect on my mental clarity, but for health's sake it's mostly superfluous.
I keep to a strict workday, after which I plan something fun. Depending on how extroverted you are, this could be made to work with a variable sleep schedule, I guess.
This is another thing I got from the time-management sessions, and it sounds duh-obvious, but it's effective. The hard part is sticking to it. When I do, I find the evenings off keep me from getting burned out, and the finite workday makes me really focus my work ("What can I get done between now and n o'clock?")
Not rocket surgery, but I hope there's something in here you can use. I know I've learned things from your posts, even from your fiction. Good stuff.
[1] By the way, if anyone is looking for a Catalyst or other Perl web developer, please drop me a line (mailto:felix.tamen@gmail.com); I'm looking for gigs. I do the whole web app shebang: Unix sysadmin, Apache/mod_perl setup, database design, UI design, back-end Perl and front-end XHTML/CSS (including AJAXy stuff). I'm also happy to do a subset of these, or to help with your legacy codebase. Here is my condensed résumé (http://fairpath.com/quinn/resume/Quinn_Weaver_Resume_Condensed_AE.txt).
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ninetydegrees
Shared struggle
on 2009-05-03 07:51 pm (UTC)In a weird way, I find this inspiring.
I work as a freelance web app developer[1] (#footnote1), and I run into the same problems (and the same solutions—yay Wii!) I can handle it when I'm working for a client and I have deadlines and hours to keep; in those cases, I'm actually more productive working from home than on-site. But it gets a lot harder when I'm working on personal projects.
So the fact that an author I admire, in a similarly open-ended and self-employed situation, is struggling with this same stuff and succeeding—this gives me hope. Please keep up these behind-the-scenes (http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/tag/behind+the+scenes) posts. They're enlightening.
By the way, here are some tricks that help me. Maybe some of them will be useful to you too. If not, gleefully ignore. ^_^ Sorry if I'm saying stuff that's obvious, or that you already do.
I always work in forty-five-minute sprints, followed by a short break (say, a Katamari level, or a Tale of MU). I bill my clients by the quarter-hour, which makes this easy. I got this idea from a time-management specialist when I was working on two contracts at once and going nuts; she said industrial psychology research shows that 45 minutes is the period after which your cognitive abilities go downhill but your death-grip on the project spikes (much as with Ian's peak in the gladiator story). It also makes you focus intently on getting something done in that sprint. Sorry, I can't cite sources, but this really works for me.
I work out every day. It consistently does amazing things for my brain. If you're able to do anything that gets your heart rate up, it really cleans out the cobwebs.
I also lift weights, and I think that has a qualitatively different effect on my mental clarity, but for health's sake it's mostly superfluous.
I keep to a strict workday, after which I plan something fun. Depending on how extroverted you are, this could be made to work with a variable sleep schedule, I guess.
This is another thing I got from the time-management sessions, and it sounds duh-obvious, but it's effective. The hard part is sticking to it. When I do, I find the evenings off keep me from getting burned out, and the finite workday makes me really focus my work ("What can I get done between now and n o'clock?")
Not rocket surgery, but I hope there's something in here you can use. I know I've learned things from your posts, even from your fiction. Good stuff.
[1] By the way, if anyone is looking for a Catalyst or other Perl web developer, please drop me a line (mailto:felix.tamen@gmail.com); I'm looking for gigs. I do the whole web app shebang: Unix sysadmin, Apache/mod_perl setup, database design, UI design, back-end Perl and front-end XHTML/CSS (including AJAXy stuff). I'm also happy to do a subset of these, or to help with your legacy codebase. Here is my condensed résumé (http://fairpath.com/quinn/resume/Quinn_Weaver_Resume_Condensed_AE.txt).
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