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Last week I worked upwards of 40 hours maybe upwards of 50. This included 10-hour and nearly 10-hour days of pretty constantly coding. (That's 10 hours clocked time so longer from leaving house to getting home.) Bear in mind that most weeks I am pressed to manage 5-6 hour days.
The motivation for this was a perfect storm of a project I have a strong emotional investment in, a tight deadline / demanding client and long sunny days which made it much easier for me to actually get out of bed and get going in the morning/ keep going in the evening.
It may also have helped that this is a rebuild of a system I am (the only one) familiar with, so I have a fair idea of what needs doing for each bit rather than making it all up as I go along.
In some ways it felt really good. Like I actually did a "normal persons" worth of activity over the week, although it was not distributed in the way I would have liked. I had a clear goal that I was making progress towards.
In other ways it felt crappy. Apart from the tiredness I also drastically and repeatedly underestimated how much work was going to be involved at each step. And my work was no less error-prone than usual so there was proportionally more frustration in my week. My erratic finishing times and overall awayness did not sit well with D, who was having a hard week of her own :(
It's also very dangerous - when I'm enjoying working this much I am far more likely not to realise that I have pushed myself too far. Somewhat surprisingly I did not have a complete meltdown over the weekend, but getting to work is back to being difficult this week.
I did not get the project completed despite repeatedly being sure I didn't really have that much more to do :( So this week is also being long days, although I think 8 hour (on the clock) days will be my limit. This Friday is the regional anniversary holiday so it is a short week, it is currently Tuesday, I really have no hope of being finished /and/ able to take the project live :(
It is the sort of project I would really have liked to have a partner on; both to catch my errors and so that there is someone else who knows the system. Unfortunately we don't work like that in our shop even if we had the spare person-hours available, which we don't because several projects have reached the end of the queue at once and the pre-Xmas rush is also on.
The motivation for this was a perfect storm of a project I have a strong emotional investment in, a tight deadline / demanding client and long sunny days which made it much easier for me to actually get out of bed and get going in the morning/ keep going in the evening.
It may also have helped that this is a rebuild of a system I am (the only one) familiar with, so I have a fair idea of what needs doing for each bit rather than making it all up as I go along.
In some ways it felt really good. Like I actually did a "normal persons" worth of activity over the week, although it was not distributed in the way I would have liked. I had a clear goal that I was making progress towards.
In other ways it felt crappy. Apart from the tiredness I also drastically and repeatedly underestimated how much work was going to be involved at each step. And my work was no less error-prone than usual so there was proportionally more frustration in my week. My erratic finishing times and overall awayness did not sit well with D, who was having a hard week of her own :(
It's also very dangerous - when I'm enjoying working this much I am far more likely not to realise that I have pushed myself too far. Somewhat surprisingly I did not have a complete meltdown over the weekend, but getting to work is back to being difficult this week.
I did not get the project completed despite repeatedly being sure I didn't really have that much more to do :( So this week is also being long days, although I think 8 hour (on the clock) days will be my limit. This Friday is the regional anniversary holiday so it is a short week, it is currently Tuesday, I really have no hope of being finished /and/ able to take the project live :(
It is the sort of project I would really have liked to have a partner on; both to catch my errors and so that there is someone else who knows the system. Unfortunately we don't work like that in our shop even if we had the spare person-hours available, which we don't because several projects have reached the end of the queue at once and the pre-Xmas rush is also on.
