Carving out time

Finding a slot in my calendar dedicated to deep work.

Now that I'm back home and settled in, you would've thought I would be back at it grinding away. Sadly, I've been finding it difficult to consistently sit down and achieve any "deep work" this week.

When I write "deep work," I mean working on my project for a stretch of time with no disruptions, focused only on the task at hand. Finding these hours in the day has been tricky since it's the month of December, and the festivities have begun. As I have a full-time job, a wife, and two dogs, packing on additional festive errands has made it hard to find some alone time.

That's the tricky part of it all, carving out time to work on my project. Am I making excuses? Maybe. When I'm truly honest with myself, could I have found at least one hour in my day to work on my project?

I don't see why not.

I've told myself to commit at least an hour of deep work thousands of times, but I've understood that life happens and sometimes, even when you try your hardest, it's not possible.

Now if I look back at this week could I have found the time? I reckon so. Perhaps, I need to be a little harder on myself and try to prioritise deep work over everything else. However, if I don't get around to it because of life commitments, that's fine with me. I can always do it the next day.

The two times that I managed to work on my project this week, I found myself frustrated and wanting to pull my hair out. I had encountered a bug which was preventing me from pushing the changes out to production. Since I'm a self-taught developer my debugging skills aren't up to par, but I told myself that I can't work on anything until this bug is squashed.

I was close to giving up.

However, yesterday I committed to a few hours of deep work and breathed a sigh of relief as I managed to figure it out. In hindsight, the problem was an obvious fix, but it never is when you're in the thick of it.

Now that I can focus on more important things, hopefully on a consistent basis, I'm hoping that I'll be able to make more progress before the year ends.