Occam's Razor

While I love to blog, I am finding that it is increasingly hard to find the time to create posts as often as I would like. In a typical month, I put out twelve to fifteen posts, which means I post every other day on average. Since a typical blog post is one and a half to two and a half pages long, this represents a significant commitment of time and thought, particularly since I edit each post four times before publication.

I have many other duties and hobbies. I added another one to my plate recently: adjunct teaching. I haven’t taught a class since 2004. However, I started again this semester so I can plausibly claim I still have one foot in academia. Academia in my case may be a community college, but it is academia nonetheless. My motivations are a general interest in passing on knowledge to future generations, as well as to improve my chances of making teaching a second career. I am hoping to retire from federal employment in five years or so, but I already know my pension won’t pay all my bills. It is unlikely that my 401-K will make up the difference either. So I will need some sort of job, although it can pay significantly less than my current salary and perhaps be part time. Whatever it turns out to be, my goal is that it should be something I will enjoy more than my current job, which actually I like quite a lot, but comes with a number of rather heavy responsibilities. I am envisioning myself as a full time community college professor shortly after retirement. Whether it will work out this way remains to be seen, but I figure I have a better chance of realizing my vision if I keep a foot in academia.

As anyone who has taught a class knows, teaching takes time, typically three to four times the time you actually spend in class. The course I am teaching has been laid out rather well for me, but even so is requiring eight to twelve hours of work a week on top of my full time job. Something has to give, which means you will be seeing fewer posts here. My goal will be to post a well-written and thoughtful post every three to four days, which will translate into about eight to ten posts a month. That is still a lot and matches my pace when I started blogging in late 2002 and 2003.

My other hobbies and activities include selling my software services. I have stopped taking new clients to make time for teaching. Fortunately, perhaps due to the recession, my existing clients have not had much work for me either. I also host a number of other domains, which take time to manage. In addition, I am the author of two popular modifications to the popular phpBB forum software that I want to keep maintaining but am now struggling to find time to work on. In addition, I must fit regular exercise into my agenda, which I have been doing all along, and juggle other responsibilities as husband, father and general household manager. In short, I have a full and satisfying life that generally keeps me going without too much downtime seven days a week.

So expect two to three posts a week on average in the future. If pockets of free time become available to do more blogging, I will probably step up the pace.