I blame Microsoft and bloggers for my brain function lately. I just can’t keep up with everything going on, and I don’t really even try to. At any given time, I have 10–15 tabs open in Firefox of webpages that I want to read. And it stays that way. This is how my day goes:

Check email with Gmail. I’m a stickler for keeping my inbox clean and less than 25 items in it at any given time. So I go through my email, mark them with labels, star them and archive them. Right now I have 20+ emails (that I can remember) that I really need to address. Probably more.

Open my rss reader. Go through all the items and flag the stuff I want to read with purple flags. I’ll open several of the items in my browser.

Now by the time I have finished this, I have more email in my inbox again, more unread items show up in my rss reader, a bunch of unread tabs in my browser and work to do. So naturally I work on what I get paid to do, which right now is a business rules engine and entity translators for services to domain objects. In order to not really screw up the team velocity and sprint regression trends, I stay on top of my work all day, not to mention there are deadlines to meet.

More email shows up. More unread rss feeds. More stuff open in my browser from searching for work related stuff.

And my day ends there. I flagged a bunch of blog posts, flagged a bunch of emails, didn’t really read any of them because I can’t keep up with the emails and rss feeds that just keep pouring in. I get a lot of emails from people asking for help on items related to blog posts of mine. I just can’t respond to them all, and it makes me feel bad for not doing so.

Also trying to get a hold of WPF and WCF right now too, and its just hard to find time. My daughter likes to dance when I play guitar and to play hide and seek too, so those items naturally take precedence. I spend an hour at the gym every day Monday through Friday. I also blame Cory, Dan and Jason (especially Jason) for keeping me out too late at night lately (2 am most times because that is when the bars close down). Even though it might have been my idea to go out drinking, its still their fault for agreeing to it.

So much stuff is going on that I only have time to address the most immediate item at any given time, just like a stack. What happens in the morning is the last thing to ever get addressed because of priority levels. I’ve certainly got to do something to get my life going queue style instead so that I can address items and get them done and feel some sort of sense of accomplishment outside of seeing our sprint burndown chart in a nice downward slope of regression. But I get paid to code, not read. My family is my life, so I address that first too. Work and family. When I think about the presentations I have to do, code camps to organize, a user group to run (with the help of other officers, of course), conferences to plan, attend, speak at, whatever the case may call for, books to read, emails to reply to, blog posts to read, blog posts to write, books to write (putting that one off big time), wikis to read, code to play with, ideas to play with, calories to track, miles to bike, software to evaluate, productivty tools to play with, home improvements to finish, watching YouTube videos, and just learning in general (which is my favorite hobby), well, I need a time machine. I’m aging too fast for all of this.

I think a feel a LiveBetter II post brewing, on living with stress and feelings of “non-accomplishment”, because all in all, I’m still a happy person, so something is going right. Its just time to scale back and prioritize some things and just let go.

Did I just describe your day too?

Oh yes, I blame Twitter for occupying too much of my time too. Feel free to follow/add me as friend. http://twitter.com/rlewallen

I promise more technical posts are coming soon, in the spirit of CodeBetter. I’m working on a project where we are doing a few interesting things (a usable EF would be killer right now, because I know what their vision is, and I wish that vision was in place sooner than its going to be) that I will blog about later, including how we ended up with our fake MVC for the web (Monorail was not an option that we could use and I just didn’t have the time to look deeper into Igloo to see how well it would work with our architecture), and how we ended up doing control behavior mapping to custom controls based on workflow status and user roles.