After 2 years working on a data conversion and software implementation project, I’ve finally started to get caught up on a few things.  The past 5-6 months have been particularly intense, and during our go-live weekend I spent something like 50 hours straight at my office.  Now that it’s behind me, I’m glad it’s done and the project was a success, but as I took stock at what I’d missed out on, I realized how much I had let other things slide.  I was 6 weeks behind in reading the daily e-mails from SQL Server Central, and I had somewhere north of 600 unread blog items in my Google Reader.  Even more importantly, I practically dismissed blogging and forum participation, two activities that I enjoy and have helped me establish a decent reputation in the SQL Server community.  I allowed myself to get too busy doing my job to make sure I stayed good at my job.

So how do I keep this from happening again?  First, the past week of doing little more than playing catch-up has educated me in the importance of keeping up with the little things, like reading blog posts and composing same; suffice it to say that this was a lesson learned.  Next and most importantly, I have developed a plan (more on that in a later post) that will not only ensure that I return to a level of participation that I am comfortable with, but will help me to push myself to be even more involved in the SQL community.

On a mostly unrelated note, this will be my first blog post using Windows Live Writer.  I had been using the web interface at SSC which worked well but lacked a few features (offline composition, real-time spell check).  We’ll see how this goes…