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Trying Too Much

I probably should have known better. I’ve done this before. But, maybe this is a great reminder for me, and an opportunity to encourage those who might read this eventually. I tried to pick up too much and burned out.

I know I’ve only really got about an hour, reliably, in the evenings. Well, an hour before I go crash into bed regardless of what time that actually is. After work, and my real priorities, my wife and children, and self care like blowing off steam and relaxing so that I can function the next day, I have about an hour that I can work in on average. Some days a little more, some days less or none, but on average about an hour.

I got started on Advent of Code. Which I would love to do; I love puzzles, brain teasers, and coding. I was spending considerably more time on it than an hour daily and for too many days. Burnout. So, then how to refocus becomes the problem, picking back up and getting started agian after getting disappointed.

Permission

I know I’m not superman, or super genius. But, just like anyone, I want to be. I want to be the best coder, the smartest puzzler, and more than anything the best husband and dad. I find that permission to be not the best, to just be me and do the best I can, even if that’s far short of what I want, is one major step to refocus. Yep, I failed. Yep, I picked up too many things and blew out ten or fifteen days of progress that I feel like I should have been making progress on my tutorial and proving out my method. But, I have permission from myself to only be me and not a machine, or mad genius, or superman. And I have permission to takt the ten or fifteen and make it twenty on purpose and give myself time to relax, and cut things back to what I really need to focus on.

Focus

Burning out, overdoing things, is usually not a matter of doing something bad. It’s not a matter of omission usually. Mainly, it’s a matter of not knowing and recognizing our limits and trying to do too many good things for too long. Trivially, it’s not admitting there are only 24 hours a day or that we’re not as fast or as clever as we think. But it’s more than that too. It can be a lack of patience. It can be a matter of not letting others pull their load. It can be a lack of focus that lets us pick up one too many things.

For me, it was the lack of focus this time. As much fun as Advent of Code is, and I would dearly love to go back and puzzle my way through, I need to be paying attention to my project. The pacing is slow, but it’s the pacing I can manage at this point in my life without dropping more important things. I can’t, I won’t, drop taking care of my family. Maybe sometimes I don’t do a great job of that either, and that’s ok, but out of all the things I spend time on, that’s the one I’ll keep spending time on even when I drop everything else to try to refocus.

So, Happy New Year to anyone out there that happens to be reading, good luck in your ventures and give yourself permission to be imperfect and work hard on your focus to keep out the things you don’t need to be doing now.

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