In the course of finishing my education and entering the workforce, the dynamics of my life have changed dramatically. Besides diet/living situation/car/DEBT/money, it has been a welcome adjustment of the division between work and free time, and the stress associated with it. Obviously in school, you are in a constant state of stress for 15 weeks at a time about your grades (and then on top of it, the ridiculous extra curriculars I loaded on top), and could only occassionally trick yourself into taking a night off or imagining that you didn’t have any studying/assignment to do. But now that I am consulting… outside of the hours of 7:30 and 5 every week day, I am free. Now of course given the nature of the business I still check my work e-mail at night and I freely give out my cell phone number to team members (which allows for business discussions while I’m roaming the Costco aisles, as happened yesterday), but unless there is an urgent need, there is no expectation to kill yourself all day and night.
So after an eight or nine hour day, commuting, going to the gym, dinner, errands, I’m always a little wierded out to have 4 or 5 hours of free time. Wait, you mean I don’t have to do ANYTHING? It’s always tempting in that time to do just that… nothing. Watch TV. Maybe even read (I’m currently reading this, this, and this, all at once). But I find that most nights, after spending 8 hours a day looking at and working with code…. I’m coding.
What am I coding? I’ll talk more about that in another post.
