There’s an old adage that I often repeat because I find it to be so very, very true – at least when it comes to me.

“The cobbler’s children have no shoes

Since the bulk of my day is spent at the office working on the web, when I get home the last thing that I have energy for is taking on another web project. It’s not that it’s hard, mind you, it’s simply that I don’t have the mental bandwidth to fire up another process. It’s for this reason that I’ve been unable to get off my duff and re-do Holly’s web site.

I’ve been whittling at it here-and-there, but every time I get back to it I find that it’s almost like starting over because I don’t recall where I left it and I forget what I was planning to do next. After this stop-and-start approach for over a year, I got a lucky break yesterday – a huge block of free time.

For Thanksgiving this year, we made the drive back to our hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and for the first time in a while, I didn’t have to do any of the cooking. I like to cook, especially for the holidays, but as a guest I opted to take a back seat and enjoy the fruits of everyone else’s labors. Holly’s brother was working late that day, so the family decided to do the Thanksgiving feast in the evening for dinner. This left me with the better part of a day with nothing to do, a rare treat.

After cooking breakfast for everyone, I fiddled on the Internet a little bit, did some reading and even attempted to take a nap. Nothing seemed to satiate the itch that I had, which left me restless like a dog kept too long in his kennel. As I laid in bed, staring up at the ceiling and unable to simply close my eyes for just a few minutes, a voice popped into my head, “You know what you should do? You could go do Holly’s web site.”

My initial reaction was to resist the urge because that sounded like work and I felt like that would be squandering this rare gift of time. Time that should be spent unwinding, not sitting it front of a computer like I do more often than not. Closing my eyes again, I attempted to fight the suggestion, but my mind would not go still. That germ of an idea started ramping up the gears in my brain and bringing to the surface all the things that I could do.

So I got up and sat down at the laptop, put the bit between my teeth and plowed through the mountain of work to create, build and launch her new site. You can find it at http://hollyashby.com.

Although Holly’s web site project was mostly a technical in nature, there was a creative side that was quite rewarding. It’s a muscle that I haven’t been exercising of late and after all the repeated motivating words from Aisha Tyler’s podcast, Mac Sparky, and others, it was nice to flex a little bit. It was actually fun to get lost in the rhythm of building something and it really didn’t feel like work at all.

Photo Credit:shoes”, courtesy of Joel Kramer.