If I had a consistent amount of time to dedicate to this (or any) project, I’d have finished this by now. The problem comes from not taking care of my garden of time and protecting it from the neverending growth of things trying to invade and overrun it.

Work.

Family.

Friends.

Other hobbies.

Fitness.

Self development.

There is time for it all. But you have to protect the time for each, and not allow one to overgrow, if you want to do them all. There is nothing wrong with having a life filled with just one or two things. But when you want to have them all, you have to maintain that balance by restricting the time you allow yourself on any single area.

For me recently, work has been the primary focus in my life. My actual self has been so far away from my ideal self that I have become miserable and quite honestly, depressed. I’ve felt burnt-out and did not have the energy to socialise, work out, read, cook, or even learn and code. These are all things I love doing and I have not felt pysically or mentally able to pursue anything other than sleeping.

Halfway through December I decided to stop being a coward and stop acting in bad faith and handed in my notice at work.

On side projects, I have made good progress on Spendsloth backend. I have what you would maybe class as a minimum viable backend… The basic features are there and the site is ugly but useable. The next step is to design and build the front end to make it actually attractive to use. After that I can work on some marekting and launch it as a free product. If it gains traction and users, I can speak to them to understand what premium features would be worth developing.

That leads on to the next thing to update on: design.

I’m a serial starter but not a serial finisher, so it is no surprise I started building something else. I’m working on something with the imaginative working title of ‘apptrack’. This is a website which allows people to keep track of theri job applications so they can follow up, and also refresh their knowledge of the role before interview.

The development work was fairly straightforward, but I again hit a brick wall when it came to design. This time however, instead of moving on to something else, I’ve started to learn web design. I understand a lot of how things should be and look, given I work with designers every day and speak to them about their craft. But actually doing it yourself is a different story.

I’m using Gravit Designer to create visuals, then using skeleton css as a barebones framework to make layout easier. I can’t say it’s the most beautiful website in the world but I am learning a lot and while it’s taking a long time, it’s not as hard as I thought.

After layout (which is straightforward with Skeleton’s grid system), it’s a case of adding the right colours and fonts, and making sure things like links and buttons are styled correctly in each state. So far I’ve sorted the header and the homepage layout and styles. Next will be the footer and the main page where jobs are listed. I’ll tackle the ‘add job’ page after this, and by that point the styles will be complete and I’ll just need to finish layout of the remaining pages (archives, register, forgotten password, profile) which will be fairly quick.

With the launch of ‘apptrack’ (still to be named properly), I feel I’ll have enough confidence to finish off the design for Spendsloth which is a bit more challenging. Considering this is something I dreaded, I’m actually looking forward to getting stuck in.