11/29 — Side Projects, Mindset, and Balance
Today I listened an interesting episode from the LifeHacker podcast The Upgrade. Titled “How to Pursue a Side Hustle”, the podcast hosts talk with Chris Guillebeau on side projects to pursue to bring in revenue on the side and/or for a fun learning experience.
As I’ve become increasingly apathetic toward my academic studies in my senior year of college, I’ve also become immensely interested in pursuing side projects to
- make me happy in pursuing my interests
- maintain my sanity by releasing stress working on things I want to work on
- give me experience working on projects I could see myself working on in a full-time career
- learn for fun
To that extent, I’ve been working on several web development projects throughout the past couple months. It seems as though a few minutes before I finish one web site or web application, I’ve thought of 2 other web-dev projects I could work on next, 3 new features I could add to my current project, and a better design I could implement for another project. There’s a never-ending stream of ideas and projects I can pursue, which is all made possible by learning how to develop web applications.
I absolutely enjoy that aspect of my life, but I sometimes feel it detracts from other aspects of my life. Working on my side projects has made me almost completely disinterested in putting in extra time and energy into my academics, something I did in my first three years. It’s consumed my life, as described above, wherein now I spend at least 75% of my day in front of my computer. It’s taken away from my friendships and human relationships — I avoid social media and my phone so that I can claim that I didn’t get messages to hang out. My brain sort of shut off today during a meeting with my business fraternity, after I discovered the process behind connecting my MongoDB database to a Google Spreadsheet using a third-party-application, and that was all I wanted to do during that meeting.
I don’t really know what it is. Part of me finds a solace in working on projects I know will personally benefit me, and I really enjoy doing that as much as I can. I know that I’ll have to find a balance — I’ll need to filter out the projects that won’t make an impact on my life or teach me something new, and keep the ones I legitimately care about. This will give me time to have a social life and have the human interactions I’ve missed for the past few weeks.
I just need a more stringent project policy. My web-dev projects this semester have taken priority over my writing projects, of which I’m also not a big fan. My projects have given me material on which to write, but I need to start writing more and accessing the creative parts of my brain.
It’s all about the balance, and as I try to improve myself, I’m excited for the challenges that await me, and I’m even more excited for the balance I know I will achieve soon.
