This weekend I have done very little. Yesterday I had a lie-in, a very long bath, lazed around with a book, then went to a party. Today I have had a long bath and lazed around with a book, and will probably wander over to the pub this afternoon to see who's there before going on to the Gallery for usual Sunday things.

This seems to be a running theme recently. Usually I attempt to pack work, free software, social life and sleep into 24 hours a day, with mixed success; for the past few weeks I've been experimenting with leaving out the free software, and I've been feeling a lot less tired. (Apart from this week just past, admittedly, but I blame two consecutive late nights and a nearly-cold for that.)

When I first started full-time work, I gave up free software completely because I simply didn't have enough energy to do it. I resigned from the head of the NASM project, which was my major thing at the time, and passed it on to a new maintainer. For about a year I existed solely as a corporate drone, doing virtually no programming beyond that required by my job. After a year I found I'd recovered enough energy to do free-time coding again, much to my relief, and so I resumed work on PuTTY (which was pretty new and primitive at the time) and that became my biggest project. Ever since then I've been struggling to fit what I want to do and what I have to do into the limited time I have, and I've been gradually running out of energy in the process.

So now I think it's time for another longish rest. I don't think I can sensibly resign from the PuTTY project; I think I wouldn't feel comfortable without giving my personal attention to ensuring urgent security fixes are done promptly and well. However, for anything short of urgent security fixes, my current intention is to do very little, to the maximum extent possible, for several months at least. This applies to PuTTY, it applies to my puzzle collection, and it applies to anything else I might take a fancy to doing. If I really get the urge to do something, I won't deliberately stop myself, but I'll restrict it to things which don't take up too much of my time or energy. (Perhaps one or two new puzzles, for example; those currently only seem to take me a couple of days each to write.)

Around this time next year I qualify for my second sabbatical from work (four weeks' contiguous paid holiday in addition to the normal year's allocation), due to having worked there for eight years. With any luck I ought to have enough energy by that time to be able to spend my sabbatical doing something useful. But on present showing, if I keep pushing myself until then, I'll just fall asleep for a month.

I certainly hope to resume my activities at some later date; I don't like thinking that my biggest contribution to society is as a small cog in a corporate machine, because I feel strongly that I can do more good than that. (I don't dispute that it is useful, in spite of my corporate efforts being directed primarily by profit rather than objective usefulness; it just never feels quite useful enough to be satisfying to me.)