The alpha-most Alpha Geek informed me that the silver bullet software that was supposed to replace my adopted home-brew project won't, after all, do all it was expected to do. The good news is that I have a non-trivial project (rewriting a small website in PHP) on which to hone some new skills. The bad news is that I will be doing it on my own time for the privilege of doing it "my" way. The worse news is that I have about two months, and this summer is crowded.
So I'm embarking on an experiment in coding. Basically, I'm coming in half an hour "early" (so as to log my sacred 40 hours) and spending the last half-hour of each day (when the office is relatively deserted) on the project.
The basic idea--taking a page from 37Signals' playbook--is that the daily ration of 1800 seconds for the project will force me to focus in a way that the much more generous 28,800 does not. Granted, those 1800 seconds come at the end of a full work day. Then again, only a rock star or a vampire would consider me a "morning person." Maybe.
For me at least, this should be an interesting exercise. As I understand it, one of the co-founders of Hotmail worked on the project for only an hour every night, so there is precedent of sorts for this work style. I'll report back at least once on the success/failure of this venture, in case such anecdotal information could be useful to others.
