What are the ways to keep the fire burning? [closed]

Question

What are the ways to balance work-life and self-learning ? You learn certain new stuff at work everyday, but for a person who is not really doing what he likes - what are the options?

I am not really worried about balancing work-life.

How would you balance your time if you are stuck at work for about 8+ hrs and then you have family to attend to with small children (not to mention that is the most relieving thing). Where do you find copious time to learn and write applications that make you feel good? Do you have an informal timetable that works?

Answer 1

I love these types of questions. I think we developers sometimes get too technical to attend our lives.

Well, as a married developer (still having no kids) I have to say that life is much more difficult, cause you are now responsible for a family and part of your free-time out of work should be dedicated to your family. Family is just like Media Player. When you've run it, it takes process, no matter visible or invisible. You have to spend RAM and CPU for your family.

However, there are some techniques that you can feel good and technically in shape. Start a hobby project (something not aimed at making money, something just to get pleasure from). Try to make it such that lots of people can see it. I mean, after all we humans do love to be flattered by other people. Their praise, give us energy to follow our path.

While your time is not that much, but the concept of time management can help you out in increasing your productivity, and therefore decrease the impact of lack of time on your projects. I strongly recommend following an agile methodology (XP, or scrum) even as a 1-member team. Try to define your tasks such that no task would last more than 1 or 2 hours, so that you can attend your work every night.

Another thing I can assure you helps, is to make your wife (or husband) get engaged in your hobby project. For example, if (s)he likes a movie archive, then start that, and ask him/her about different parts of it. This way, you can kill two birds with one stone. You can develop, and at the same time, you can boost your martial relationships.

Also don't forget that life is not a short period of time. Some day your kids will grow up. Another thing that you can do is to teach your kids programming at the very basic level. This way, when they grow up, they can help you by providing help, or by encouraging you to implement even projects.

Answer 2

Where there is no self-discipline, there is unhappiness. I've been down this road myself and I thought the best place to start was to timetable what I did with the week. I found I dabbled with several things at the same time and never really excelled at anything. One moment I'm going for my Java Web Certification, the next I was learning how to develop BlackBerry apps etc. I don't have any obligations outside of work, but when I looked at what I was doing, I found I was spending all my time working at the computer. Last year, I took up Aikido and started getting back into playing my guitar. It's said that plenty of right brain activities gets all the stress and worry out of your system, taking care of the human part of you :). In doing this, I've become more organized and I set goals to achieve at the end of the month.

There are various books out there on time management and motivation strategies and I've read a fair number of them. I'd say you need to enjoy what your doing and get a sense of achievement from it, otherwise it just degenerates into a monotonous routine. That's my thoughts anyway.

Answer 3

Unless there are people where you work to have lunch with, take this time to work on your own projects and interests.

Coordinate a time with your spouse to work at home. Maybe you can stay home while the kids are sleeping in on a weekend morning, so your spouse can do something she likes. Everyone needs some along time, in your case, you just need spend time with your kids as well.

No reason you can manage 5-8 hours a week. Let those in your life know this is important to you and ask for their help.

Answer 4

Was about to say Viagra... then realized it was a different fire you were talking about... ;)

I have this same situation, I mostly maintain a large pile of steaming Perl with occasional forays into Pro*C or PL/SQL (none of which are very high on my list of fun languages). I maintain my sanity by doing everything else I can in other languages like Python or Ruby. So when I need to write some code to maintain files on my system or search archived log files across multiple servers, I jump into a fun language to do it.

Answer 5

They are a lot of insights in this ted talk : How to make work-life balance work.

I love the idea that this is about small investments, and not scheduling.