Tom McFarlin

Of all of the various blogging and/or digital publishing platforms that are available, the one that has intrigued me the most has been Medium.

Last night, I received an invite (though I’ve yet to write my first post), but there are already points of tension that I feel when it comes to writing on Medium.

Before I actually get into that, I actually really dig what they are doing with comments, authenticating with Twitter (one less login!), collections, and so on.

But here’s the thing: I feel as if the service looks so good that it invites only the best content that I – or anyone – can write before actually hitting publish.

There’s a lot wrapped up in that.

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Late last week, I received an email from a fellow developer asking me if I had any thoughts on the pros and cons of using Vagrant versus Apache in in WordPress development.

At one point in my career, I would have spent extensive amount of time researching both, reading articles, and even testing out the two pieces of software along side one another because I didn’t want to respond with an “I don’t know.”

Years ago, I got over that attitude – in fact, I don’t think it’s possible to keep that mentality up and actually advance your career – but I responded with the following:

As far as this blog is concerned, I rarely share anything personal. That is, I rarely share anything outside of WordPress and/or general development practices, but the thing is, when you make your living off of just that, it’s hard for it not to intersect with your personal life in some capacity.

When I was in high school, I remember feeling especially stressed out about a number of different things that I had going on all at once. At the time, it seemed like a big deal. I remember talking with my parents about it and my dad specifically saying:

You’ve got too many irons in the fire.

Though I knew he was right, I still laughed a little bit because that’s the kind of wisdom that, as a teenager, you expect to come from your parents, right? Plus, the implication is that you have to remove some of the said irons and I wasn’t going to do that (again, because I of the whole stubborn teenager thing).

But here I am over 10 years later with that phrase going through my head again.

And again.

And again.

Too Many Irons in The Fire

Though this isn’t true of all, I’d venture to say that most people are busy – busy with jobs, busy with significant others, busy with exercising, busy with traveling, etc.

We’ve all got stuff going on. The only thing is that we have different stuff going on – and one person’s level of busyness is hard to compare to another person’s level of busyness because they’re two different types of activities so the whole I’m-busier-than-you-are-and-you-don’t-understand mentality is pointless.

So anyway, one of the things that I absolutely love about balancing my time between self-employment and working at building a company is that I get to work on a lot of really fun stuff with some really amazing people (and great friends).

On top of that, I have the opportunity to speak at some really cool events, contribute to a variety of different blogs, and I have the ability to watch all of the little characteristics and personality traits develop in my 16 month old.

But the challenge of balancing all of this is that you eventually find yourself having to juggle too much or, to use the same idiom, manage too many irons in the fire.

If you want to continue working on the things that you love with the people who are worth surrounding yourself with all the while being fully present as a husband and a father, then something has to go.

As I mentioned earlier in the post: the implication if the idiom is that have to remove some of those said irons.

And that’s no easy task.

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