Fire & Motion

Good article. It sounds true to life based on what I hear from fellow developers. Procrastination is not so much a problem for us. We tend to wake up in the morning ready to go because we know that our day will probably make use of all our skills and wits and challenge us in new and unusual ways. Being an entrepreneur bootstrapper means that you have to be willing to do everything because there is nobody to delegate to, and there's typically not enough money to hire anybody else. You are IT! When things go well, you can't really take credit because it is probably just dumb luck, and you get to take all the blame when things go badly! Ha! :-)

In addition to being a developer, my other duties include -- accounting department, webmaster, advertising department, PR, sales force, product management, investor relations, customer support, IT department, janitorial crew, cafeteria... and whatever else has to get done. The health of the business takes a bit of everything. Jean tells people I'm the president, Stuart is the programmer, and she is Customer Support, which is true, but it also isn't true because nothing we do can ever be that easily compartmentalized. She is just proud that I'm the "President" of the company. (Aw mom!) When Scott was working with us as "the Windows" programmer, he helped a lot with the Mac stuff and the eCommerce site too. Stuart worked a lot on the Windows code. My mom, Jean, in addition to handling tons of customer questions, has helped on the documentation, knowledgebase and the web site. In a really small company, you can't just do "your job" because it simply isn't practical.

Stuart and I often do "pair programming" which is mentioned in the article. Any major feature additions often takes the both of us to make significant headway, which can be a problem, especially if my time has been eaten by a grue. (Ten points if you know where that reference comes from!)

In our experience, not working alone on code dramatically increases the number of productive development hours since the two of us together don't get stuck. We were really excited when we discovered that this style of programming had a name. We used to say that we were more "social programmers" rather than "introverted programmers" but there was more to it than that, which we kind of picked up by osmosis when Stuart was working with Professor Licklider at MIT. There are also some very good books on XP Programming by Kent Beck, that I can recommend if you are interested.

We recently have started to block out days that are more oriented for coding vs. days that are more oriented toward detailed customer support or business activities, and that helps us keep the non-code time more focused so that it doesn't take on a life of its own at the beginning of each day. I actually schedule a task for "coding", by calendar, so that I know which days are going to be more coding oriented, and check it off if we've made good progress keeping the focus where we wanted it to be! That is in addition to using Life Balance, and our database to track features individually.

I absolutely agree that rolling up your sleeves, pitching in and taking whatever steps you can take to keep your project moving forward every day is absolutely the way to go, whether your project is coding related or not. That is the Life Balance way....make progress on your long term goals, push forward, steadily.

How can you procrastinate when you know in your heart that EVERY task you do contributes to reaching your goals!?

Our motivation to stay on track is even built into the software. :-)

Best wishes,

--Catherine--*
Catherine E. White
President
www.llamagraphics.com
Creators of Life Balance software
for Palm OS, Macintosh and Windows.