My new contract has started off with the joys of 10 days of offshore conference calls. Due to the fact that the offshore team is 11.5 hours off from my time zone, I'm having to leave the house at 6am. That's been really throwing my schedule off. I usually do most of my writing in the morning.

My usual morning routine goes something like this:

• 4:30 or 5:00am - get up and take a shower
• 5:00 to 7:30am - Read email and RSS, write up articles and work on personal coding projects.
• 7:30 - head in to work

Since this new temporary schedule cuts that an hour and a half short and I've been feeling tired and run down, I'm getting up more at 5:00 and less at 4:30, so I'm down from a solid 3 hour chunk of time in the morning to barely an hour.

While I'm getting some of the time back in the afternoons, I'm finding that I'm just not able to get in the groove and work on stuff. I'm able to do brainstorming and am fleshing out some good ideas with that time, but those hours seem to just not result in anything tangible.

Maybe I need cycles exactly. A couple of weeks focused around coming up with ideas for projects followed by time to do something about them. Or, maybe I'm just full of crap and will waste all of that time instead.

I believe that taxpayer-funded public education, as implemented by the State of Minnesota (probably most other states too) is completely broken. I am not saying that teachers are broken. Quite the opposite. Here's a little experiment that I think would prove it.

1. Take the current Minnesota per pupil expenditure of $8440 per year.
2. Take 25 randomly selected students from *any* district in the state at any one grade level.
3. Give the $211,000 that those 25 students currently generate for the public education industry in this state to any fully qualified teacher.
4. Ask that teacher to take care of the same things for those 25 students that the money currently takes care of: transportation, teaching the subject matter, providing a classroom, providing access to lunch (remember most schools are charging for lunch), etc.
5. Measure the results

Does anyone really believe that any genuinely qualified teacher (no choosing the poster child for under achievement here) couldn't take 2 HUNDRED THOUSAND dollars and not only rent space to teach the kids in, transport the kids, ensure they're taught to at least the standards currently in place, not just provide access to food, but feed them AND still make more money than they currently do under the existing system?

If so, PLEASE don't try to claim that you think highly of teachers. The overhead in the way we structure education is absurd.

I've been reading the Getting Real book here and there. There's some good advice in there as well as some stuff that works well in *their* situation: building web-based tools/services for the open market. Like all business advice, it works for a subset of all available business situations. That both means that you can't treat their advice as universally applicable and you can't treat it as worthless.

Their article on eliminating preferences is what prompted me to write. See, they tied together the ideas of user preferences and user *editable* preferences. The distinction is important because I think that lots of people hear the advice to "Just make a decision." and hard-code every setting in an application-wide approach that hamstrings them later.

The Mozilla apps take an "in between" approach that I think is a happy medium. If you type "about:config" into the Firefox address bar, you'll be presented with a huge list of configuration options, many of which are *not* available directly through the user preferences screens. Any that are in bold have been changed by you (or something on your behalf).

The rest represent the exact kinds of decisions that 37 Signals is talking about. They picked a value that should apply for most folks. However, instead of making it a forced value for ALL installations of Firefox, they put it into the users configuration file. They didn't expose it via a preference screen. That lets people who want to keep things simple do exactly that. However, it means that those whose needs don't fit inside the neat box get at the settings they want.

As a general way to implement this, I suggest making *everything* that power users might want to change into something configurable. Put this in a place where someone who knows what they're doing could get to it. For desktop or console apps that could mean a text file, for web apps, a URL that provides a basic editing grid, etc. It doesn't even need to be visible from the interface. Then, separately, make decisions on defaults and decide the few things that the users in the middle of the bell curve will be able to change and actually create config options in the interface for those.

This compromise lets you implement the 37 Signals advice, while letting the people who are going to do interesting things with your application do just that. I love pushing software a bit, and the first thing I look for is a config file and an API when considering adopting a new technology.

I just got the final bill for my appendectomy and looking at it, it's clear what the real ripoff for those without insurance is: the discounted rate you get by being an insurance company.

If I had absolutely no insurance, the bill for the whole incident would have cost about $11,000.

Then you look at the next bit on the bill and see that the insurance company negotiated the cost down to $4,000, telling the hospital, doctors, etc. that *no one* was going to pay the other $7,000.

I'm on the hook for just about $2000 of it. However, it's obvious that the insurance company actually saved me more money with their giant coupon than they did in actually paying their portion.

I mean, they got me a $7000 discount and paid another $2000. Anyone who was without insurance would be completely screwed in the same situation.

Everybody seems to focus on how much the insurance pays or doesn't pay. However, if we just all had access to the discounted price list for services, that alone would make a huge difference in stopping medical bankruptcies. I mean, come on, the same service at the same hospital costing anywhere between $4,000 and $11,000, depending on who you are, specifically skewed so that the entity who has the most cash on hand pays the least and those with the least amount of cash pay the most is completely messed up.

Photo: Lucy Boynton

One of the big things I took away from Dan Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness is how having control over your activities is one of the main keys to happiness. Having the tiniest bit of control over their day-to-day routine was enough to keep a group of seniors in a nursing home alive. Though less dramatic, I think lots of people's experience in hobbies and their professional lives bears this trend out.

When most people pick up a hobby, it's 100% within their control. Thus, it's not surprising that those activities are enjoyable and make you happy. If you're painting, you can paint whatever you feel like. If you write short stories about vampire leprechauns driving taxicabs, there's no one to tell you you can't. And, if you want to post on your site or podcast about the sleep cycles of Bolivian gerbils, no problem. Aside from being able to afford supplies and the time to participate, hobby activities have effectively no restrictions on them.

The enjoyment of hobby activities leads lots of people to have the following thought:

"I enjoy this a lot more than my day job. Imagine how great life would be if I did this *as* my day job."

I know that this thought goes through a LOT of heads because I've had it and I've talked to lots of people who've also had it. The problem is that this is an example of where our intuition about what will make us happy usually fails.

That's because a large part of what makes our day jobs less fun than our hobbies (and what justifies us getting paid) is the fact that there's an outside constraint on the activity. That constraint can be as obvious as a boss telling you what to do or as subtle as having to cater to marketplace demands instead of your own creative whims.

Regardless, when you take a hobby and turn it into a day job, you run the risk of discovering how much joy can be drained out of the activity when paying your mortgage depends on it.

Now, I'm not saying you CAN'T turn your hobby into a day job and end up with a dream job, there's plenty of info out there on how to take a stab at that. I'd like to present a different path for building on your hobbies. It just happens to be the one I'm pursuing.

Dave Slusher has touched on this with regard to his podcast. He knows (as I do) that as a software developer who enjoys his job:

1. Even most "successful" podcasters don't make as much as software developers.
2. That he would have to stop doing it on his terms in order to make a living at the podcast.

There are many things I enjoy doing and would like to do more of. However, for example, the average published novel in the United States makes its author $3000. Why on earth would I aim to quit my profession to write novels, unless I could be certain that I would end up on the best sellers' list? And the odds of that happening for a first time novelist are *literally* the same as many lottery games.

However, all of this doesn't mean that I don't think monetizing your hobby is a bad idea. Far from it. It's just that if you shift your perspective on that monetization, you can keep 100% of the joy in your hobby and still leverage it for your long term financial goals.

Let's go back to the idea that much of our happiness comes from having the freedom to choose what we do with our time. Under that definition, "retirement" is pretty much about shifting the percentage of our time that's under our control. When we're young, most of us hand over control of about 40-50 hours per week of that time, with the rest under our control (to a point, of course). If we consider that 40 hours as having 0% under our control, then full retirement would represent 100% being under our control.

Note that I'm NOT defining retirement as "stopping working". Just as having 100% control over what you do. Consider how your day at your job might go if you knew for a fact that if they fired you, you could live exactly like you already do for 4 or 5 years without *any* job. You'd probably put up with a lot less crap, right?

To me, that's the goal of reaching retirement goals: having financial independence and freedom.

So, any and all methods of earning money for me are about either enjoying my non-working hours now or narrowing the gap between the 2 days + nights of freedom and 7 days + nights of freedom.

To that end, I've been recommending the following approach to monetizing a site or other hobby (in the United States. Adjust in rational ways outside the US):

• Take the first trickle of money and pay for your supplies: hosting, paint, film, etc.
• Take the next tier of money and put it all in an IRA. Because up to $5000 (if you're under 49 in 2008) can go in this plan, and it shelters all of that money from taxes, it's a really good way to avoid having to set up elaborate accounting to deal with your non-paycheck income. If you want the absolute minimum hassle, put *all* of the money in this direction.
  $5000 a year for 40 years at 10.5% interest (60 year average for stock market, including Great Depression), gives you $2 million.

• Do the same in an account for your spouse if they aren't taking advantage of an IRA.
• Build up your emergency fund. My appendectomy a couple of months ago is no big deal because of our emergency fund, despite high deductibles on our insurance.
• Pay off your debt. I'm aiming to be debt free except for the house by the end of 2008.

Basically, this whole approach lets you have complete control over your creative endeavors, even while you pursue monetization. However, rather than trying to squeeze $50,000+ out of your hobby, you turn the $5000 a year it might quite reasonably support (this site brings in about half of that right now from the ads) into a stable retirement. And, if you're already saving for retirement, you push the timeline closer.

I personally intend to "work" as long as I can. However, I guarantee that I'll get increasingly picky about my projects and tend more toward the stuff I feel like doing on the time tables I feel like doing as I narrow that gap. And, my creative work is furthering that.