A problem with time
I recently read a talk by the founder of GitHub saying that I (and everyone else) should start a side project. I’ve been thinking that I should do this for ages now, and the author made some good points that provide me with even more reasons to do so. One of thing things that he points out is that you need to allocate a chunk of your free time to working on your project. Fine; that isn’t the problem.
The problem I encountered was when I tried to implement one of his time-freeing suggestions, which was to stop reading RSS, and instead keep up with things on Twitter. This sounded like a good idea, and I’m already on Twitter, so I decided to give it a go. I started to follow John Gruber, author of the excellent Daring Fireball, and ran into the problem of the title. John lives in Philladelphia, which is on the east coast of the US (I admit I had to check this on Google Maps). This means that he’s five hours behind GMT. Given that Twitter is a more-or-less real-time service, the difference is immediately apparent. He doesn’t get up and start twittering until fairly late in the day where I am, and he carries on way past my bedtime. The upshot is that I get up and have a bunch of unread tweets, which isn’t all that different to my usual habit of reading RSS over breakfast. I’ll give it another few days, but I suspect I’ll be back on RSS before too long.