Once upon a long-ago, I had much more time for designs, redesigns, and weblogs. Four years ago, I was a fairly “tertiary” creative worker: employed by a post-production house, serving the advertising industry, in a struggling Southeast Asian economy. Clients were few and far between, and the work came in spurts: little bursts of frenzied, all-day-and-night action, separated by days, even weeks, of office inactivity where I sat around, watching TV, having long lunches, and messing around with new websites. There was time enough “between projects” to do all that.

These days, however, I often find myself muttering, “No time, no time.” There’s a busy busy day job now to deal with, packed with things to do, an overflow of activity compared to my days of interproject idling. Practically gone are the huge swaths of time for free creative tinkering and writing and linking and making five new random CSS designs per day. Nowadays, my still incomplete personal pet projects can take weeks or months to get off the ground.

I mention this because I was previously thinking of relaunching Simplesight.net as a full blown web services site, with design, graphics, hosting, articles, code samples, and other goodies. But lately I’ve realized that running an operation like that would probably take up the rest of my waking hours outside of the office. And then some. Just maintaining two existing clients (old design clients from Manila) takes enough effort. I’ve considered going entrepreneurial, taking it down the self-employed road, but that’s not something I’m ready for.

Right now I need to scale back on things, reprioritize that to-do list, and remember that sometimes, evenings and weekends cannot be devoted wholly to a sideline. Simplesight.net is still my “business” front, but I’m keeping it small and flat for now; so I’ll still take projects, but not in such volume that I can’t also take walks. There’s a cat to feed, a Bible to read, and people to talk to, and before the day I push up the daisies let it not be said I didn’t stop to smell the roses.

(Okay, okay, I’ll stop with the clichés.)