The Ramp-Down

Over a period of several weeks, I gradually ceased all personal projects. I replaced them, one by one, with reading books on the couch.

I left each project intentionally incomplete.

Now, to understand why this is a big deal for me, you need to know that I usually do the exact opposite: I often worked extra hard before vacations to try to get projects to some sort of completion state.

But that always sucked. It may have taken a couple decades to see the pattern, but I was determined to do it differently this time.

In performing an intentional ramp-down, here’s what I was hoping for:

In case it’s not obvious, the problems with rushing to get things done before a vacation are multi-fold.

First of all, now I have with two stress-points: the project (which always takes more time than I think to complete) and preparing for the vacation itself.

Secondly, it means I’m starting the vacation in a heightened state of "hurry, hurry, hurry!" So the first couple days are essentially wasted as I re-learn how to relax and enjoy myself.

Yes! It’s now been over two months since I started the "ramp down" and here’s some key points:

The single biggest project I’d prolonged finishing was Forth: The programming language that writes itself: The Web Page. It was 99.9% done, but I postponed the last edits and posting it to RSS and Mastodon until I got back. Again, this is completely against my nature. It was so hard to delay completing something I was so close to finishing. But I knew that there would be a fair amount of feedback and I didn’t want to have all of those messages and emails coming in while I was on vacation. (I was more right than I knew. I got some amazingly thoughtful feedback.)

I really enjoyed completing and posted it shortly after we returned.

Other projects were left "on a cliffhanger" and have proven to be easy to start back up. (Written notes are also essential here, e.g. next-note.)

So that was the planned part. 5 out of 5 stars: totally recommend!

But it turned out to be even more important than I realized. When we got back, two things happened:

The sickness was initially due to our exposure during the process of air travel. Then it was extended because the kids went back to school, which always means getting a fresh round of viruses. As I write this, we’ve been fighting overlapping cold/flu symptoms for about five weeks straight. I think we’re finally starting to emerge from the woods on that.

As for work, that was semi-expected. I knew there was a deadline looming upon my return. But I did not imagine how chaotic it would be, nor that a second, smaller deadline would suddenly appear simultaneously. As with the sickness, this is just starting to quiet down, a full five weeks after we got back from the trip.

So I extended the permission to myself to not work on any projects.

This has been vital to avoid frustration and burnout and has probably made me 200% more pleasant to be around during this time than I otherwise would have been. :-)

An entire two months after ramping down, I’m only now starting to ramp back up. But I’m being cautious about it, too. I’m still reading for a good portion of my evenings (as family obligations allow) and enjoying that very much.

Though I am itching to work on projects, I do not feel guilty about not working on them. (Perhaps the idea of feeling guilt about not working on personal projects sounds strange? I believe it stems from the notion that I have somehow let myself down.)

I’m also feeling very energized to start on projects again and enjoying them quite a bit. In some cases, I’ve even discovered new perspectives while I’ve been away from them. (Example: Year of the Microcontroller: Chapter 6.)

The only thing I’m not 100% sanguine about is that my personal email inbox currently has over a dozen messages with very high quality correspondence that date back as far as seven weeks ago. None of them are things I absolutely need to act upon, but it does bother me to have so many.