No Time To Play
I came across another excellent article from Joel Splosky talking about what motivates developers, and having spent a significant portion of my career on the business end of a compiler I found myself agreeing to every one of his points. (Joel is one of those guys who I subscribe to then drop off of but always get dragged back for some new piece of wisdom).
Of particular interest was “Use cool new technologies unnecessarily”, or as it might also be phrased, “Time to play”. The amount of time that I’ve spent futzing around on different things because they were shiny or new or interesting has declined linearly since my initial working life back in college. However, my “time to play” has dropped off considerably since I switched out of hard-core engineering and into Product Management. I think this is a major blow to both my overall job satisfaction as well as my job effectiveness.
The reasons are vast and varied: more demanding work deadlines, more mature personal commitments, part-time school, home ownership, etc; but the result is the same, I’m not as abreast of interesting/useful innovations and I’m losing competitiveness for both myself and my company.
Whether your a developer looking for new tools or a business person looking for new ideas, having adequate time to do unstructured exploration of new technology is critical I think. You get new ideas for your own projects based on minor features you might see in unrelated products, you develop new ideas for how to deal with your customers based on what you see in unrelated services, and you give your mind the breathing room to step back and actually be creative, instead of just grinding out the next deliverable.
The good news is that “free time” doesn’t have to be scheduled or rigorous or detract from daily output. In fact, its better if its none of those. You should take free time when you feel you can be most useful with it (like I am right now). You should avoid extending it unduly (as this Guinness here will help with) so as to not go down totally wasteful rabbit holes, and more often than not it should be done when there are no pressing deadlines/after hours/when there’s absolutely nothing else to do. Boredom can actually be the harbinger of great ideas.
I think I need to build some free time into my week a little bit more. <insert obligatory smiley>
