Direction, Motivation, and Manifestation

I have recently been reading about GitHub the atmosphere they create for their developers. A completely flexible schedule, working remote, creativity is encouraged in multiple forms. All around it sounds like a rather ideal environment.

I work at a company that doesn’t afford me all of the pleasures that GitHub allows their developers, and while I’d love it if they did, I understand why they don’t. In order to give myself this environment I think I am going to make my work day a bit more flexible. I need to be more disciplined in parts of my life to make that happen though.

There are a number of things, a better sleep schedule where I get to bed by a decent hour (midnight or so). Getting things like laundry done (preferably) before I run out of clothes to wear. Getting to the gym as well as training on my bike more.

One would not associate those things with being able to be more creative, but these are things I constantly worry about. They bog me down while I am hacking, socializing, existing. I want a sort of hybrid Getting Things Done system. Doing the things that I need to do each day, keeping track of them and trusting myself to complete them, but also leaving space for me to be creative.

The plan is to take the whole work day and use that as my creative space. I’ll have priorities of course, urgent things in our work code base, things other people are waiting on me to finish, etc. But I’ll also allow myself to work on other projects if I am just burnt out on the work code base and need a break as well as if I have an idea burning and I want to write some code to express it.

I have to track my hours at work so it isn’t like I’ll be spending all my time I am being paid to work on other projects. The biggest problem I could see in this is that I’ll work too few hours and my paycheck will be a bit light. I think it will be a valuable experiment though, will be interesting to see how it all pans out.