Jimako’s Blog

1. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak. 
2. He who laughs last thinks slowest. 
3. Those that live by the sword get shot by those who don’t. 
4. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. 
5. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong. 
6. The things that come to those who wait will be the things left by those who got there first. 
7. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll sit in a boat all day, drinking beer. 
8. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture in a dark room. 
9. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well. 
10. When you go into court, you are putting yourself in the hands of 12 people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Recently, I needed to cancel some leave to get a jump start on some requirements gathering and design work over the holiday season. It wasn’t a real problem as I had not made any real plans — in fact, I had planned specifically not to schedule any activities or tasks for myself so as to allow me to take some down time.

I haven’t taken more that a week of in a single stretch for almost three years now, so I was looking forward to a solid four weeks away from software development. I thought to myself that postponing that break by a month or so was no big deal.

Boy, was I wrong!

While it was absolutely the right decision at the time (for a set of very real commercial considerations), I have found that my effectiveness has plummeted over this period. I don’t know how much of it was just burn-out and how much was related to the last-minute change of plans, but the effect has been very real and very noticeable. I wake in the morning and just can’t be bothered going in to the office. I can’t get excited about what is going on. I can’t even be bothered to go out and socialise with our friends.

I was already a little off my game, which was why I had planned to take the time off, but in the month or so since I postponed that leave I am sure that my performance has steadily declined. It’s hard to quantify, but if I take a wild guess that I was at 90% effectiveness in mid-December, I am probably now at 60% (in late January). At this rate, if I don’t take the time to recharge, I’ll go into negative effectiveness sometime in March or April…

So, I will definitely be taking time off in February, probably the whole month.

And who knows, I might even get back to doing some more regular blog postings.