Downtime Is Good

I'm back from the Hackers Conference, where I spent three days getting almost no sleep. Before that, I spent six days getting way too much sleep due to my illness and the codeine-infused medication I was on. So I guess it all balances out and I'm back to normal.

In the first two days of my illness, I would literally wake up, sweaty and delirious, dreaming of code I'd either already written or was about to write. Groupthink was occupying so much of my brain that it took over my dreams as well. That was one of the reasons (other than being sick as a dog) that I knew I had to take a break. But, it wasn't until a full day later that my dreams returned to normal. Though I haven't stopped talking about Groupthink and I have demoed it biefly, it's now been almost a week since I've looked at the Groupthink code. I have to say I feel energized and ready to get going.

When I was working on FullWrite Professional at Ann Arbor Softworks, we were all working crazy hours. I used to joke that we had a totally flexible schedule -- you could work any 20 hours a day that you wanted. I wasn't working quite that much on Groupthink, but my 12 hours a day / 7 days a week schedule certainly took a toll. I have no regrets about launching an intense project like I did. But, if I do it again, I'll also schedule some downtime.

Yesterday, I spent some time working on my todo list (in Groupthink, of course). Today, I'm working on a talk on Puzzles that I'm giving tomorrow at Google Kirkland. Tomorrow, I'm giving that talk and have a couple of other meetings, all scheduled when I thought I'd be done by now. So, Thursday, I'll be back in earnest. I feel I'm only a few days away, so it shouldn't be long now.