I was gonna sit down and write about how hard it is for me to spend at last 30 minutes once a week to sit down and write because there’s work to be done and OMG why aren’t I doing that work right now?! I was also going to publish my writing from last week because having thoughts that are written with the purpose of being shared that are unshared make me feel uncomfortable. However I am unable to log into my website to share my thoughts from last week and, since I set this time aside for writing and not for website troubleshooting, I’m going to write and not troubleshoot.

All our technologies and accounts and subscriptions are sold to us with the idea that it will make our lives easier. The entertainment subscriptions will entertain us and the productivity apps will make us more productive and all the other promises that say “just set this up with us and we’ll take care of the details”. It makes us want to squeeze more into every day because we’re told that we can because the hard things are easier now. This is… mostly (halfway?) true all the time. However it leaves us very little time, energy and attention to really focus on troubleshooting the thing when the thing fails to make our life easier. Many of us will just ignore that the thing didn’t work right and try again next time or we don’t focus on the issue and ignore the really helpful error messages and move on with our day or if we do try to troubleshoot the issue we are upset about the time we have to take to communicate with customer support or read documentation to fix the thing because we have all this other stuff to do!

One of the fun parts about working in technology is that when the thing I’m using to get work done doesn’t work as expected, it is my professional responsibility to find out why the thing isn’t working and to find a solution. If the code library I’m using to connect securely to a server isn’t working as I expect I can’t just ignore this or hope it works next time, I have to find a solution. It’s still frustrating since I was expecting the library to make my life easier but this kind of work is what I enjoy about being a software developer and doing the work as a job means I can justify the time I spend researching and troubleshooting as important work because it is.

I wonder if I can do more to justify the time I spend researching and troubleshooting in my personal life? That might make things more comfortable. Cuz then, THEN I can write my thoughts about the weird urge to overwork myself AND I can publish thoughts on my blog AND THEN I can feel more comfortable with how I’m spending my time.