Production-Consumption Balance

Some people struggle with a work/life balance. You’ll see tons of articles on how people try to keep it in check. I’m lucky in that I have a wonderful wife and family that come up with plenty of things for me to do besides work. If it wasn’t for them, I would probably ‘work’ way too much.

Where I have been really struggling lately is in the production/consumption balance. For the past 5 years or so, I have spent a large amount of my non-billable time consuming information about web design and dev. I’m insatiable when it comes to learning about the web. Recently I realized that spending so much time consuming has left me with much less time for producing.

For the past few years, I have probably consumed 10+ things per day. This being some combination of reading articles, checking out sites and watching videos. My read-it-later queue is generally over 100 items at a time. I’m significantly slowing down. Lately I’ve been more in the 1-5 range per day and I’m using that time to produce things: mainly writing and working on a backbone project. My focus now is much heavier on learning by doing instead of learning by reading. We’ll see where it takes me.