I’ve decided that I’ve been wasting too much time on stuff that serves no purpose or provides no benefits to me. I keep trying out new technology and add pages to my notes but most of it is just idle work. For example, I recently spent hours copying some information on JavaScript optimization from a book to create a web page on that topic for my notes. While this is not entirely useless it was not a good use of my time.
My New Years Resolution was to spend more time on billable client work and creative work. Unfortunately I have not kept to that plan. Instead, I have read several books on ASP.NET and documented enough obscure features to fill 60 web pages. I’ve also been messing around with many Web 2.0 APIs. None of that pertains to my projects and it has failed to attract any interest when I blog about it.
In order to become more tightly focused on my goals, I am shelving several books that I was planning to study in too much detail. I’m also going to stop reading blogs that are devoted to programming and start reading blogs that have more to do with web design and creative work.
I also need to spend more time on projects for my clients. This is a difficult goal because a project frequently gets bogged down on some technical difficulty that makes me want to avoid working on it. I think I need to find some small task to tackle each day to keep things moving along.
I spend some time on online marketing and self-promotion but I don’t think this is worth the effort. Writing for my blogs and trying to keep up with the latest silicon valley buzz isn’t proving to be very effective in creating my "online presence". There really is no need for me to concern myself with marketing because I’m not looking for more clients. This is just a state of mind that I’ve adopted due to the bad influence of the attention whores who keep me entertained. Instead of getting wrapped up in their silly games I should focus on the real benefits of social networking. For example, I would prefer to make contacts with creative people and professionals in certain industries rather than get involved with superficial individuals. I won’t elaborate on that.
Just to keep myself on track, I’ll provide an example of how I want to narrow my focus. I’ve read a lot about unit tests and source control so I feel some responsibility to learn more about NUnit and Subversion. However that would really consume a lot of my time and I judge it to be too programmer centric. I would rather expand my knowledge of Photoshop.
