August 02, 2005

Working two or more jobs

It occurred to me this morning that I have almost never worked just a single job. When I was working at Berkowitz's I was also in high school. Then when I worked for Mark O'Connell I was working a variety of jobs on the one job, and I was working on the side for Jay and Lan. When I worked at Bookman's at first I was working for both Bookman in the lab and with Reeza doing networking. Then I switched over to working for Axon part of the time. At the end of that, right before Australia I was working myself like a dog with Bookman, Axon, and a big contract with Lan simultaneously. Somewhere in there I also found time to write Fret Navigator.

In Australia was the only time I was able to work just the one job. With the extra energy I went into a gym frenzy and lost 80 pounds. When I came back to the States I was working just Axon, but then I started some web work on my own to get the experience. After that I worked at Certive, which, I suppose was just a single job, but it was basically like three as Eric and I held the weight of a whole programming team on our shoulders. And if you count Mel we held the weight of an entire defective company on our shoulders.

After that during the break I did a lot of little side things. Then with Macromedia I got the first book gig and did that as the extra job. Then I started writing articles and the two more books. Now I have what I would consider the most work I have ever had going on at one time.

Currently I have:

  • My full-time job at Leverage
  • Promoting the Podcasting Hacks book
  • The Bound Cast podcast
  • Editing (and/or trying to sell) the Code Generation Network
  • Two articles pending for IBM, with three more on the way
  • The PHP Hacks book which I've got about 75% done
  • Preparation for Foo Camp
  • Writing the news system which analyses RSS feeds, primarily in prep for Foo Camp
  • Book reviews which come in at the rate of about five a week
  • Writing a converter for Studio B to munge Microsoft Word into the XML article format used by DeveloperWorks.

And then burning on the back-burner somewhere is my Story project which I still think is really cool. Story is the kind of "Life's work" project that I would need a year of full-time effort to complete.

Anyway, I think I need to gear a lot of the side stuff back a few notches. It's cool to have all of this stuff running. But it's also cool to spend time with Lori and Megan and to concentrate on being a good Dad and a healthy person.

Oh, and I also have to get a few more cartridges for my freaking printer so that I can print out these article contracts! Grrr.... Won't someone please develop a low cost printer that will actually last longer than a couple hundred pages?

Posted by jherr at August 2, 2005 07:55 AM
Comments
Post a comment

Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)


Remember me?