I can’t neglect that this year, I didn’t spend much time on my beloved web development newsletter. Here are a few reasons for it…

I now have a son who’s by now already 18 months old. He’s lovely and it feels so great to spend time with him and my whole family. When I work these days, I’m away from the family from early morning to late afternoon. No home office for me anymore during Summer. So once I get home, I don’t want to be away from my family anymore. Instead, I choose to play with my child, talk to my wife, be there for them and with them.

Already that leaves only little time for other projects but then there are all the small things and projects we need to do besides our main work: taxes, business planning, business documentation, marketing and more. Then there are all the small things at home to do: Cleaning, repairing small stuff, building useful helper tools, caring about the bike, the car, the home, or our firewood.

And then there’s some required time for self-care. Already way too little time, I try to get a few minutes of time for myself in my busy days to do some meditation, stretching, Yoga or self-acupressure. Or just reading a book for a couple of minutes. It’s important and gives me a reset for my mind when I’m a bit stressed out.

But now, there was one more reason why I didn’t write a newsletter in spring and summer. First, I needed to upgrade the software to a new version because the old one didn’t get any security updates anymore. This was combined with a server switch and due to incompatible API changes it took me way longer than expected, actually about three months to complete this side project during my main work. And when it was finished, I sent out two or three editions before my computer broke. Ordering a new one is easy but the first order got lost in delivery and it resulted in chaos at Apple. It took me 9 weeks to get my ordered computer, including multiple calls (each taking 30mins+) and a lot of nerves. As a reward I got a 100EUR cashback that I needed to claim which took me in sum 2hrs calling time additionally. Yay! Then, after two months I could finally restore backup from backup disk and had a working computer again. After two months these days it ends up in chaos. Billing, taxes, business documentation, communication — it all adds up and took me two weeks to restore normal business.

So now we’re here. It’s the first week that I have time again to think about my newsletter, to think about writing an article about what happened. And it’s one of the first weeks that I work less than 50+ hours since December last year, except for 8 days of vacation in Summer. Having two businesses, one of them being seasonal and in nature, is a lot of work. While it’s rewarding, it’s hard manual work and tricky to manage.

For now, I realise I need to think about if and how I’ll continue with the WDRL newsletter project. I’ll give that some thoughts until end of the year and keep you all updated for sure.