Long story short, I retrained in tech because I wanted to get out of politics, and then my first tech role (as a full employee) ended up being for the House of Commons. Which, as you can probably guess, ended with me tapping out.
So now I find myself unemployed, and when I have too much time on my hands is when I struggle with feeling unproductive. I need plates spinning around me to keep me focused, mostly because the dopamine keeps me satisfied (probably). And whilst I have learned to deal with this problem in a workplace and educational environment, I have struggled over the last few years with how to manage this in my actual “real life”. Now, productivity is not really the word I want to use here, because I do not need to be productive (that is for work and education). What I want to do here is keep practising my web skills simply because I think the web is cool and I want to keep playing around with it.
And so, here I ask myself, can I commit to doing at least 1 hour of web stuff a day. For fun. Will it feel fun when I am forcing myself to stick to a schedule, maybe not.
I don’t think blogging about it will be part of the “web stuff”, but maybe I will change my mind.
I might just keep a running list of the week on what I did each day for an hour to keep track. Who knows.
There are some projects that I have done that I haven’t completed that I might go to. These are:
- A fresh easier to use website on WordPress for a friends business (that I designed years ago but just didn’t follow through with)
- A new blog website using Wagtail instead of WordPress
- Transforming UK parliamentary bill and amendments into fully accessible content
- A recipe app for my Mum (to be honest this would probably be a website)
- Improving a local charities website (this is a bit of a cheat because I am planning on doing this as volunteer work 1 day a week anyway)
- Something fun using CSS transitions.
- Update/improve some of my old uni projects now that I know better
- Mess around with Javascript
But I can do whatever I want really. Maybe I will start tomorrow. Maybe I will start Monday. Hopefully I will start at some point.
Wish me luck