After my editorial this week on Coding By the Sea, my boss actually pinged me to say that I could have a week if I wanted. I could work on a project of my choosing for a week that would benefit the company in some way.

At first I thought, very cool! I could take a week off, maybe even disappear from the house for a week and work on something. However reality set in pretty quickly and I wasn’t sure this was the thing for me.

Disappearing from my life for a week is hard. I have a family, busy kid life, and if I were gone for long hours to dedicate to some project it would be a burden on my wife. Even if I came home every night, would that work? Would I get enough done? Then there’s the matter of SQLServerCentral. For me to close down for a week I’d have to spend a lot of time over the next few weeks doing double work to get my pipelines ready for a week of me not working.

I think the first thing I’d have to do is decide on a project. I have a couple book  ideas, but I’m not sure how much I’d get done in a week. Even full-time writing at my pace I’d get something done, but I’m not sure how much progress I’d make on something that should be 150 pages.

I thought about some type of software, but I’m not sure I’m a good enough developer to actually take ideas and make them work. In all likelihood I wouldn’t get out of my own way and spend too much time debugging things.

I could work on some reports, after all Reporting Services is on my list of 2010 goals. However I’m not sure what benefit there is to my company (SQLServerCentral or Red Gate) with that one.

The one thing I did think of was to work on getting 2-3 top-notch presentations done. Things I could share with other people in Red Gate or even outside the company. SQL Server presentations that would incorporate the Red Gate tools into the presentation. I think they are good tools, and there is value in purchasing them. It would be good to find a way to show DBAs how the tools help without making it an advertising commercial. It’s an interesting challenge, and one I’d like to tackle at some point.

I heard back from my boss that Red Gate is actually scheduling a down week for some teams (development groups) where they can try to knock something out in a week. The timing for that doesn’t really work for me, but perhaps I’ll try to get a week sometime this year to work on some personal project.

As long as it’s after ski season, I think I could get a lot done in a week.