{"id":1589,"date":"2008-04-01T08:00:52","date_gmt":"2008-04-01T13:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1589"},"modified":"2008-04-01T01:51:49","modified_gmt":"2008-04-01T06:51:49","slug":"the-balancing-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=1589","title":{"rendered":"The Balancing Act"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table width='320'  cellpadding='0' cellspacing='0' border='0' align='left'><tr><td><img src='https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/images\/article_mugs.jpg' class='insetimage' width='320' alt='article_mugs.jpg' title='article_mugs.jpg'\/><\/td><\/tr><\/table>That did it, I pushed it too far.  <\/p>\n<p>For the past couple of years my life has been a carefully managed collection of projects.  Once my day job ends, I have to ration the remaining hours of the day among my many projects and responsibilities.  Family time. The comic.  My exercise regimen. Writing for this site.  Reading time.  Weekly D&#038;D game.  Videogame time.  Taking care of my wordpress plugins and fulfilling my other admin duties here.  I do not pretend they are done in that order.<\/p>\n<p>A couple of weeks ago I began <a href=\"?p=1570\">a new project<\/a>, and I managed to bite off more than I can chew.  I figured if I cut out videogame time I&#8217;d be able to get by.  As luck would have it, Shawn suggested <a href=\"?p=1568\">a break from the comic<\/a> just as the project began, so that was <em>two<\/em> items off my daily itinerary. Still, I have too much on my plate now.  I can&#8217;t bear to cut anything, which leaves me at something of a loss.  There are only so many hours in the day, and no degree of diligence and self-discipline can change that.  I tried borrowing a few hours from sleep time, but you can&#8217;t ever get ahead doing that and at my age the <a href=\"?p=1415\">interest payments<\/a> are <em>murder<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s odd, because having one too many projects doesn&#8217;t just mean I fail one of them, I seem to be failing all of them.   One problem is that I underestimated the drain that the new project would put on me mentally:  After a long day of coding at work my brain is mush.  It seemed reasonable that I could drop my two hours of videogame time and replace it with scripting, but I failed to take into account that I needed those couple of hours of mental rest.  The exercise program is a similar problem.  I figured I could handle an hour of exercise a day.  I failed to account for the fact that after the workout ends I&#8217;m too exhausted to do anything productive. I&#8217;m rushed and distracted during family time, because I&#8217;m thinking about all the other stuff I &#8220;should&#8221; be doing.  I&#8217;m not getting all the things done for my website that I want (I&#8217;d planned on doing an April Fool&#8217;s day theme for this site that would make it look like a horrible mid-90&#8217;s Geocities page) and it is only by the narrowest of margins that I&#8217;ve avoided resorting to YouTube and top-ten list posts. <\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s like I&#8217;m juggling:  Adding one too many items didn&#8217;t just make me drop one, it made the entire act impossible. <\/p>\n<p>Looking back, I know that at 26 years old I could have kept up with this workload, but I lacked the self-discipline.  Now at 36 I have the discipline, but my mind and body can&#8217;t keep up. I&#8217;m not sure what I&#8217;ll do next. Chainmail Bikini starts up again soon. I really need to start cutting things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That did it, I pushed it too far. For the past couple of years my life has been a carefully managed collection of projects. Once my day job ends, I have to ration the remaining hours of the day among my many projects and responsibilities. Family time. The comic. My exercise regimen. Writing for this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}