Well.

It’s been a while.

As you may know, the reason I haven’t updated in a while is that I went to Fiji for a little holiday with Aydika. While there, I managed to get one post up, but that was it. Computer time was too expensive, the lines were too slow, the keyboard was way too narsty, and, frankly, I just didn’t want to do anything.

It was the first time I had ever gone on vacation. Over the past few years, I’ve taken time off and considered it “vacation,” but I see now that I was basically an idiot. When you spend your “vacation” blogging, coding, and doing all the things you’d normally be doing with the only difference being that you aren’t getting paid for it, then you’re making a big mistake.

That’s the way it is when you’re working for yourself, though. Before you drift off to sleep, you curse yourself and your laziness. Dream time is billable hours. Weekends are billable hours. If you play your cards right, time at the urinal is billable hours. There are no holidays. Days off mean that you work at home instead of at the client’s site.

I’ve figured out that I’m a workaholic, but there are limits, and giving in 100% to your professional life, rather than helping it, actually hurts your ability to perform.

When I’m at my apartment in Portland, I’m surrounded by laptops. I typically have three turned on, and they aren’t just sitting there – I’m using the suckers. Checking email, blogging, coding here and there – there’s always something going on.

And it sucks. Software developers like to fool themselves. We like to think that we can handle whatever is thrown at us, and that people who can’t spend 90 hours a week coding are pussies.

The reality is that we have so much to do, and our attention is divided over so many different concerns (email, newsgroups, code, cell phone, etc.) that we operate as the universe’s most inefficient time-shared CPUs. If you find yourself getting frustrated for no particular reason, and if you feel your stress level going through the roof without an obvious cause, then you might not need to look any further than the 7–8 seconds you spend on any particular activity at a time before moving to the next.

There’s a context switch that happens when you go from coding to emailing to instant messaging and back again. Each time you move between the activities, your brain has to come up to speed on what was previously happening. In other words, each time you switch activities, you lose context. You tire. You stress. You get frustrated.

What a mess.

This became abundantly clear to me one day in Fiji.

I was walking from my resort to another spot on the island where there was an internet kiosk. It was about halfway through my vacation, and I wanted to check my email to make sure that there weren’t any disasters waiting for me at home.

About halfway through my walk, I realized how much different this experience was from my normal routine in the states.

At home, I check my mail compulsively. When Outlook Bing!s at me, I attend to it. Because it’s so easy, requiring nothing more than a little mouse movement and a double-click on the envelope in my system tray, I do it all the time. Constantly switching. Constantly losing context. Constantly working to remember what I was working on before.

In Fiji, when I wanted to check email, I couldn’t just double-click on that little envelope. Instead, I had to commit about an hour of time that included walking to the internet kiosk, checking my mail (on a slow connection), paying, leaving, and walking back to the resort. It made me think twice about the importance of checking my email all the time.

And it was the same for everything else.

If I wanted to go swimming, then I had to walk the fifteen feet to the beach, get in the water, and do it.

If I wanted to eat, I had to quit swimming, dry off, and walk over the restaurant to stuff my face.

Do you see a pattern here?

There was no multitasking. It was like getting sucked back into the days of DOS. There weren’t a million little blinking lights competing for my attention. I didn’t have the option of checking email while eating lunch, and it certainly wasn’t going to happen while I was snorkeling.

It was one activity at a time, and it left me feeling like my head was actually screwed on right for once. I was able to focus. I was able to relax. I didn’t feel a knot between my shoulder blades.

As stupid as it may sound, it’s changing the way I’m choosing to use my PC. For the first time in years, I’m using maximized apps. I’m not darting my eyes between different windows every few seconds. I’m allowing myself to ignore the constant Bing!ing of Outlook. I can see how multitasking has made my life more efficient in some respects, but I can also see how I took it overboard and shot myself in the foot with it.

To sum it up, multitasking combined with the internet was the end of my attention span. I think I was smarter when it was me, a modem, and DOS.

One thing at a time.

I have a lot more to say about my time in Fiji. None of it is as serious as this. It’s just that this was a new experience for me, and I wanted to get it off my chest before moving on to the interesting stuff.

Anyhoo, good to be back. I can only take so much relaxation and reflection before it gets dull.