Little Break Over, Back to Work
April 2, 2009 Posted by Tyler CruzI’ve been working a lot lately. While I put in good hours during 2005-2007, I really started to slack off in 2008. I used to average working around 3-hours per day. This year though, things have been so busy that I’ve pretty much been forced to put in more hours. This year so far I’d say I work more an average of 6 hours per day.
I had worked really hard the most of March, doing nearly 60-hour weeks at times, so I let myself have a little break a few days ago to unwind and help rejuvenate myself. Having not played a good computer game since Fallout 3, I decided to buy Mass Effect off of Steam and try it out.
Fortunately, it was far better than I had been expecting and was very pleasantly surprised. I got really into the game and, as usual whenever I get into a new game I really like (especially when it’s single player only), I played it until I beat it, which took 2 days. About a day less than Fallout 3.
With an intense couple days of playing out of my system, I’m now ready to work for another week or so before taking another little break. The few days off I took from work is why you haven’t seem a new post from me in nearly a week.
This Week’s Goals
Fortunately, I don’t have anything that is urgent this week or requires high priority like I usually do. I normally always have something that requires most of my attention whether it be a couple of paid reviews, a broken site that needs fixing, or the launch of a new site. It sure feels good to not have anything biting at my heels at the moment as it’s sure a lot more stress-free.
Here are my goals for this week. They should be pretty easy to achieve:
PokerForums
I don’t give nearly enough attention to my poker site as I’d like to, so I’ve been working hard over the past month-and-a-half adding improvements and updating the site to try to make up for some of the neglection over the past year.
Following an upgrade of vBulletin from vBulletin v3.7.0 to v3.8.1, I kept going by making a number of pretty nice improvements to the site. For those interested, you can see a list of most of the improvements here, here, and here.
Our new poker video section is pretty cool, and we have some players who might contribute some PFO-branded free poker training videos there as well.
These improvements seem to have already shown results, with the forum’s “Active Members” number increasing from an average of around 300 to 328.
This week, my goal is to add even more improvements, about two “batches” worth. This would really help improve the site and give the members something to be excited and happy about.
Blog Posts
I’ve only done 4 blog posts since March 14th, and that’s including this one! This week I hope to post a lot more, maybe even getting 1 or 2 posts backlogged and put into the queue.
Email Catch-Up
No matter how hard I try to minimize the amount of e-mail I receive, by opting out of newsletters and unsubscribing to anything that doesn’t really interest me, I always seem to get bombarded by e-mails.
After taking just a few days off for my little break, I come back to see nearly 100 e-mails. Keep in mind that I use Gmail which means that the e-mails are threaded. So, if I get 6 e-mail responses from a guy and 45 blog comments on a post, that only counts as 2 e-mails.
In addition, a lot of e-mails take a while to respond to because they might be negotiations for some type of partnership or cross-promotion or be an advertiser who wants to do some special unique advertising on one of my sites.
My last goal for this week is to get caught up on all my e-mails.
And off I go!
These 3 goals should be pretty easy to accomplish, but are still important to complete. By doing so, I may be finally able to get back to my PPC affiliate marketing efforts in a week from now.
Im glad to hear that about the blog posts, I cant wait to read 🙂
I am looking forward to your blog posts also
What happened to your RSS subscribers?
They have halved since last time I looked
Just a temporary Feedburner glitch. Should be fixed in a day or two.
I think Feedburner are having one of those wobbler days, noticed it on my site.
It seems you upgraded just too early. vBulletin 3.8.2 came out yesterday.
I know, I’ll be upgrading to that tomorrow. It’s just a very minor bug patch anyway 🙂
Glad to see that you are going to be back to regular posting. Love your stuff, very helpful to new bloggers!
I (and probably others) was wondering what happened to your blog posts and am glad to hear you got a lot of things going on…goals, hard work – signs of progress! Best of luck in getting it all done!!
what’s ur steam nick?
Sounds like you had some fun. I haven’t been playing games for quite some time as they tend to be real timesuckers. I had bioshock installed a few weeks ago, but did not start it yet to my surprise 🙂
I took a couple of days away from the PC to hammer Halo Wars on the 360. Single player was a little too short for my liking but the multi player is superb.
Vacations and breaks, no matter how short, are necessary to keep yourself going. If you work too much, you get worn out and get even less accomplished. Glad to see you’re back though- are you working on the other project you mentioned? I heard some other bloggers talking about something similar…
Breaks are needed once in awhile. Sounds like you had fun with the game.
Taking a short break and making some time for yourself every once in a while (where you can relax and not worry about anything) is so important! Not only will it help prevent mental overload and burnouts…but you’ll be surprised at how much more focused you are when you get back to work.
I usually get most of my BIG ideas on vacation and once I get back I’m pumped and ready to make them a reality!
Glad to hear you are rejuvenated and I’m looking forward to your posts!
I agree, I find breaks to be very important (I tend to take one every now and then if I am also being bombarded by school work too).
I’ve noticed the amount of blog posts has dropped, but I don’t think it’s too big of a problem, I’m guessing you’re still getting most of your readers still, so I don’t think it’s too big of a deal.
Arrrgh… I think I need a little break. 🙂
Start putting in more work hours now, because when starcraft 2 comes you, you know whats going to happen 😛
Yeah I hate finding great games. Every time it happens I just completely forget about the whole world and spend countless hours in front of PC/console. Couple days later when I finish it I look back and feel simply awful – I can never belive how much time I’ve wasted on a stupid video game.
I need a little break myself – it’s been ages since I’ve actually sat down and played some video games
no wonder …with your earnings..you can rest as long as you want