Work-Work Balance: Year 1

Part of my move to a new job last year included formally dipping my toes into some management responsibilities.  My new responsibilities would be split approximately 50/50 between management and hands on technical work.  Looking back at my first year, I think I failed miserably at dedicating enough time to do one of the most important activities to me right now in my career: robotics software development.

Lack of time spent engineering software systems for robotics was one of the main reasons I left my previous job.  I'm fascinated by the challenges at the intersection of software engineering and robotics.  If I take a serious look at my previous job, I don't think the conditions in that organization were right for pursuing my passion of robotic software engineering.  In my new position, the work I want to be doing is being done.  I just haven't been doing it.

In the past year, my software development time has consisted of learning the existing software infrastructure and implementing one medium-sized feature (which is still not fully integrated).  The rest of my time has been spent supporting my boss in managing the team, learning to manage a small team of software developers, managing and setting up some of our IT infrastructure, managing a field experiment, coordinating with partners outside our team, and operating one flavor of our robotic systems.  I can't quantify the split between management and technical work, but I'm positive it's nowhere near the 50/50 mark.

Moving forward into my second year I'm going to make a more conscious effort towards guarding my time so that I can achieve a better balance between my management activities and my technical development efforts.  While I have no illusions that I can set a fixed schedule of my activities, I think I can make an effort each week to maintain a better balance.  If one week requires me to put extra effort into my management role then I'll do that, but I need to make sure that I compensate for that in the following weeks.

This is going to be an ongoing balancing act that I'll have to manage throughout my career.