decidedlyodd

I don’t talk much about work here because once I posted a little bit too much information and had to retract it later.

Without getting into too much detail, I’ve felt less motivated than usual at work as of late. Combined with the commute (which I already hate quite a lot), it’s made work less pleasant than normal. I rarely work on the weekend, but something out of the ordinary came up on Friday afternoon that I needed to take care of by midnight this morning. After putting in a couple hours of coding last night to take care of this issue, I realized something important–my job satisfaction seems directly correlated to how much time I spend writing code. Boring meetings in particular kill my productivity, motivation and general satisfaction. Not all meetings are boring, but a lot of them lately have been and I don’t have a laptop I can use to occupy myself with other tasks when meetings get boring. Unlike a lot of developers, I enjoy interacting with others at work socially and when a useful interchange of information is occurring. In most cases, I’d much rather walk over to somebody’s office to talk than call or email. There is a line though where a meeting starts to resemble an uninteresting lecture I have to listen to. I was never able to stay awake in class in college for this very reason.

Basically, last night was the first time I’d written code in a while as opposed to writing documentation or sitting through meetings. Thankfully, in the next couple of weeks, I should be spending the lion’s share of my time writing code again. In the end, I need to keep in mind that all of this is cyclical. Dissatisfaction at any given point in time isn’t an indicator of my overall satisfaction when averaged out over an entire ship cycle.