Day 135: Having Fun

Today was another Hermit Mode day where I didn’t check any social media, emails, messages, etc. and coded all day.

When people asked me why I decided to go into product management rather than software engineering, I told them that I enjoy thinking about the why behind a product more than the how. I cared more about the bigger picture about what should be built and why rather than get mired in implementation details. I saw coding as a means to an end, not an end to itself — the challenge of say, tweaking some system to improve performance by 5% just wasn’t that appealing to me.

Or so I said at the time. Today, I rewrote how Intention injects content into the page, and I had a freaking blast doing it. I’m going to take some time after it’s all done to measure the performance difference, but it’s SO much faster. If I had to guess, I think it cut a full second or two off of the time that it takes for the lock modal to load which is huge.

This isn’t something people asked for — I simply had a realization about how I could do it, and I couldn’t help myself. I embraced the inner craftsman who simply has to make something excellent just because he can.

Whenever I spend time on things like this, I recognize that it’s not the most impactful things I could be working on. It would make much more sense to build out a billing system to support a paid plan, for implement synced accounts that many users have asked for, or um, actually building out a mobile app instead of merely thinking, writing, and talking about it all the time.

But I still wouldn’t consider today’s work a waste of time. Because it brought me a lot of joy. After all, that’s a big part of why I’m doing this indie maker journey in the first place: The question I’m exploring isn’t where I can reach some desired outcome by working tirelessly and perfectly optimizing my workflow; it’s whether I can do this in a way where I can appreciate the entire journey.

Of course, I don’t want to fall into the trap of doing things that feel fun but aren’t actually helpful all the time because that’s going too far in the other extreme. But I want to make sure that I occasionally give myself permission to work on things that aren’t the highest priority or will make the biggest difference, but are simply… fun.