On Project - the personal story

When I worked on my first intranet application I worked with a lead programmer and a project manager. We would code all day long and maybe once every two or three months we would have a meeting, but usually product specs were communicated in ten minute meetings where the client or project manager dropped by and explained something. These ten minute meetings would rarely be as much as twice a week, so we really did code all day long.

I am now in a position where I'm still working on intranet applications, but I'm deeply entrenched in the corporation and its politics. I love the interactions with people, the brain storming, the give and take of ideas, the multitude of projects, the deeper knowledge of the business process, and the richer experience. There are days though when I have only ten minutes to work on each thing before I am pulled away by something else. The inefficiency of having to pick up things I've dropped off and frustration with distractions has me day dreaming of my former life when I looked forward to the distraction of a meeting instead of the distraction of actually writing code. It's no exaggeration to say that some days now are an inverse of how I used to divide my time between talking about work and doing work. (At heart I'm a DIY guy and although I logically know that talking about a project and developing a spec is work, I never feel like it's work.)

So I spend time thinking about these two different realities:
1. Working 90% on code, but missing out on the world of ideas, social interaction, and the business.
2. Working 10% on code, but feeling that little things get done slowly and big projects get put off for when "there's time for it".

And I love both worlds. I've been happy and satisfied in both, so rather than leave one for the other, I'm interested in having the structure to periodically transition. Most developers I know are stuck more in the second world than the first (I think I may be an extreme case on the days I'm fully in world two). In thinking over all of this I came up with the concept of going on project.