This will have to be short, but I need to get started.

In June 2024 I stepped away from my latest professional role as co-founder and head of engineering at Scenery. It was a friendly parting of ways, with 5 years of work completed and a great person available to step in. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to give family and the company the time and focus they each needed through the summer, and I didn’t want to do both poorly. Later while describing some issues that were concerning me, including hightened anxiety, poor sleep, and others, my wife pointed me to a few detailed descriptions of burnout. I didn’t realize there were so clearly defined definitions, but yep, that was me; juggling family, startup work, and trying to find time for physical activity was proving to be too much for a bit too long.

The summer was great. I stayed away from the computer, spent a bunch of time outside, and had a wonderful time not feeling stressed and enjoying family. Yay!

With the start of school in August I settled in to the routine of getting the kids to school, then sitting down with at the computer for a few hours with the goal of exploring and educating myself on tech that I wasn’t able to pursue while working on Scenery. I’ve pretty successfully done this, but haven’t produced much more than a bunch of exploratory projects (and a bunch of learning on what works and what doesn’t). I still want to roll the hundreds of hours of exploratory work into a shippable project or two, but I’ve found that I need to focus on structure now to give myself some accountability and track what I’m doing.

I also had the opportunity to contract with the Scenery team as they transitioned into new roles with Adobe, which was awesome and I’m so happy for the outcome and to be able to close that chapter with the team.

But now, for that accountability and tracking.

My goal: Spend ≤ 50% of my time each day on the computer producing digital work, and the rest on family and healthy active activities.

Ideally both sides of the day can also generate income. Contracting is always an option, but my (digital) goal is for personal projects to produce income as well. Unfortunately I’ve always been more driven by curiocity and learning than income generation, so I have some growth to do to stop stopping when my questions are answered and turn my work into finished projects.

Immediate plans:

My to-do list has had a bullet of “set up AI assistant” on it for a few months now, so I’m going to do that. This journal post is an attempt to force myself to follow through. I don’t think anyone will read it, but I’ll know it’s here.

I’m inspired by Daniel Catt, and have been impressed with his exploraitons of how to best use different forms of social media, video, and writing; and now the addition of AI to track projects, etc. I’m going to see if his “Kitty” assistant can be a useful part of my workflow. My next step is to set that up. Hopefully I don’t waste too much time coming up with a clever name.

My 50% computer time is nearly up, and I have a Ski Coaching clinic to get to. I guess I can call today a success?

Tomorrow: write an update on setting up my version of Kitty.