core/dump

*note: this is only a little rant… I am actually a pretty happy guy at the moment for a lot of reasons… so don’t let this get anyone all worried :)

Here we are 21 days into the new year… a new year I promised myself would see a more reasonable balance between life, work and play. Yet I have managed to be in a situation where for the last week or so I have been averaging 3 hours of sleep a day because I took a contract that has proved to require time constraints that are simply crazy.

The good news? This is a "perfect storm" kind of situation. With my Sensei away I have no flex in my Dojo schedule (though the guys and Kimiko have been kicking ass on that) and because this project pays less than it should I have not been able to really put my other client work on hold. So I have learned a few lessons here…

• As long as my income is at the mercy of freelance work… as long as I am trading the limited inventory of my hours for money directly I will fail to make significant progress in solving these problems.
• As long as I am selling my time for money directly, I should not compromise on the amount. At my normal hourly rate this job would be much more tolerable.
• As long as I am selling my time for money directly, I need to stick to my intuition on where and how I do the work. Being onsite is not only a pain in the ass it is inefficient and stupid.

In short, I did a dumb thing. So I am not sleeping, stressed to within an inch of my life and by some measures loosing money.

• I took a job that would require a lot of time and at a point in my life when I had almost no time to give.
• I then agreed to do it for less money than I should have
• I then agreed to do the majority of it on site.

Now, I am not an idiot – I did have what seemed like good reasons. For instance there is good karma involved with my agency and that will pay dividends in the future. A number of factors seemed to be advantageous. It just turns out I was wrong.

No harm done really – it is a lesson well learned and a mistake I won’t make again. I will take contracts in the future, I will just do it on my terms, for what I know I am worth and I will be much more strict in how I evaluate the risk / benefit.

In the meantime I am having some fun, learning some stuff and pulling in some cash. I might even get a trip to California out of it!