This coming week I’m traveling to Whistler, British Columbia for a Mozilla event. The week after that I’m going on a cruise to Alaska with my family. Then I’m off to drumline camp at my school, followed by the start of full marching band camp. Combined with volunteering at Mozilla and completing summer projects, my free time is dwindling fast, and inversely, my stress levels are rising. The simple solution is to do less things, which is why (after being coerced by my parents), I will be halting development on Terml.io for a little over a month, and it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

In software development, there are always things to be done. Always new issues being filed, random ideas that are conjured in the shower that “will only take a minute to code,” a phrase all to familiar to devs who end up staying awake for hours throughout the night trying to do just one more thing. I’ve finally gotten Terml.io to a stable release. Sets can be created, definitions are cached for quicker retrieval, the design is beautiful, and I couldn’t be happier.

Except for I’m not. When I’m not contributing to Mozilla, I feel the urge to open my laptop and code something, maybe as a way to procrastinate from doing summer work, or something else. I’ll be hard to let go of Terml.io, just for a month, but I’m willing to accept the challenge. So, how am I preventing myself from hopping back on?

As of this morning, I have put myself into a position similar to a horse wearing blinders during a race. I deleted my local build (backed up on GitHub so no worries there). I have turned off all notifications on GitHub relating to the Terml.io repository, as well as unsubscribing from all email notifications for the repo. I have also instructed my friend, Jeffrey, who helps out with the development in his free time, not to contact me about it unless something’s on fire, and if we don’t push anything to production, it should all be fine.

I think it’s safe to say I’ve put this project on lockdown. Let’s hope I have enough willpower to keep my blinders on and focus on what’s important – summer projects, and Mozilla.