Pacing

The past three weeks or so kept me busy both at work and on my personal projects. One of the less pleasant tasks I've had to do is update and upgrade the system that I help host. Normally this would be done on an ongoing basis, but I've neglected it for so long that some of the software is now past end of life and is no longer being actively maintained. All this effort is part of my pet project, a modern website for posting events. As I have only have an hour or two each day it is important to accomplish at least a little bit each time I find the opportunity. In the past I've had trouble with doing things this way. I preferred to work in long uninterrupted sessions sometimes long into the night. That's the way I got through my programming projects while at university, but that is difficult to keep up for long periods of time. One of the problems with relatively short sessions of work is the context switch at the beginning. Sometimes it takes as long as half an hour to get organized and get into the flow of things. To help me with this, I've been keeping a work log, so that even if I'm away from my project for several days when I read over the log it gives me a very good idea where I was at the last time. That way I can begin where I left off. Of course the log is very high tech, well not really, it's a simple paper notebook ...