As I write this post, my birth time has just passed. I am starting another rotation around the sun along with everyone reading this. It wasn’t my best birthday as I am still fighting a cold that started last weekend as I was traveling again after a vacation. It wasn’t terrible, as I spent it with family, and it wasn’t too bad so my daughter and fam came over and we sat outside and ate cake.

But being sick this week really was annoying because I had so many plans this past week that I wanted to finish. I had promised Jason Romans, who runs the new Music City Data User Group an abstract for my session there on the 22nd of this month. I had planned to do something semi-new by adapting my concurrency session and adding in SQL Server 2025’s optimized locking feature (and dropping in memory tables).

This is now for a future event and I will be doing one of my core design sessions. It has changed a lot since I did it in Nashville last!

Beyond that I had hoped to not only to create that event, but also to write a blog (or two) about optimized locking to post this week, and then start to compile the examples I had written about GROUP BY and Window Functions as well.

All this to say, this mouse loving blogger had big plans.

Cut yourself some slack

What a horrible balance this all is. I have a vlog about the importance of keeping a schedule that you set for yourself. I still 100% mean it. You need to have a targets set of work to get done.

But as I wrote about last week, unrealistic deadlines lead to failure. And as I so well know, while failure is a great teacher, sometimes it teaches you that when you fail a deadline, no one notices. This is very true with a blog. I know I don’t have an huge audience just sitting out there waiting for my Monday editorial to see what bit of knowledge I am imparting. I miss it one, I can slough off the next one easily. But then the next miss is easier, as is the next one.

Priorities

So I push through as much as possible. But sometimes, I need a personal life sick day. I only missed one day of work last week, but it was a struggle (even if I did get some cool stuff done that I hope to share one day! And I have a blog for Simple-Talk I need to finish up.

So like anything in life, having a deadline is great, but also have a plan for what happens when you miss that deadline. I mean what database programmer/administrator hasn’t had to make disaster recovery plan before.