Yesterday for example, I spent a couple hours in Excel (ick, sorry, not a huge fan of the whole Office Suite), at least 25 minute in TrackIt (Task Tracking Software) a few hours in SQL Query Analyzer and about 15 minutes coding in C#.  The only reason I got the 15 minutes was I wrote a little console app to write some very long SQL Queries. Mostly because I didn't want to have to write them by hand. The rest of the day was spent working on an issue a user had, duplicated it and we reported it to the vendor.

I find that more often then not most of my work days are these kind of tasks. If I'm not fixing a users issue, and creating a fix (most of the time it's a browser setting), I'm coordinating with vendors on updates of their software they need to make or service issues that come up. This leaves few and fewer hours in the day for doing the part of my job I love, writing code. Heck for writing HTML pages, AJAX, Javascript and XML I still rather hand code. I use HTMLKit for this kind of work, and it's brilliant!

I've recently started reading and putting into practice the task management principles of GTD (Getting Things Done) and I find I'm becoming more productive and getting through my task much quicker with greater follow through. Initally I felt that by being more productive and getting these task done quicker I'd have more time to code. Of course that hasn't quite been the case. A former boss use to say "no good deed goes unrevised", and believe me, truer words have not been said.

Where I work being Sr. Web Developer means wearing lots of hats. I do web development of course, but I also do server management, log management, vendor management and about ten other things that just aren't coming to the top of my head. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to get to work on all these things. They help my to be more well rounded and I'm grateful for the opportunity to learn all these things. But the thing that got me in to Web Development in the first place was the code. Or more importantly learning to code.

You see simply writing code that I've written before isn't what I'm after. I mean anything I have to write more than twice, I've already created a template in CodeSmith to do. You see what I'm after is the learning that goes with a big new project. Pushing yourself to learn more, be more creative and to write applications that people really use.

So I've decided, like all things of this nature, I just have to take it back. I'm going to start slow, and see if I can set aside 1 hour during the work day to write new exciting code that makes me think and learn. I'm going to try the first hour of the day. 8am the coding hour. What do you think?