I've been very confused and maybe even lost for the month, havn't really done a lot of coding other than for work. So I've been doing a lot of soul searching and trying to get back to my normal efficient state. So this is what I have gone through for past 3 month.
January, 100% efficient. I was coding for almost 14 to 15 hours a day, right after work I was coding Pickup Sports, I was able to release highly polished app I Journal on iPhone and Android for my work. After work, I was able to finish web, android, iPhone, WebOS revamp in matter of 2 to 3 weeks
Feburary, pushing for the limit. One of the side open source project TEDxApps got interest of my employer, which they want me to spend my full time job working on it. This became interesting because I was working on it without being paid anyway. Pushing other projects from full time job and Pickup Sports aside, I was able to heavily improve the TEDxApp engine, making it database indepdent, running purely on Google Fusion Table and made it complete transparent. Now I am putting almost 15 hours per day just on this open source project. Right before TED Conference, we pushed both iPhone and Android into App Market and my boss Steve Brown was very happy with it.
March, burnout. I went to Android Developer Camp on the very first weekend, and compete in a 3 day Hack-A-Thon. My team was awesome and we worked 12hrs/day on the weekend and we were able to snach 2 awards by the award ceremony. Right after the event, I was finally able to have a good night sleep. After waking up, I just didn't want to touch my computer anymore... My friends from East Coast and Los Angeles were nice enough to come up and visit me, so I just kept going to Lake Tahoe and Ski every weekend, and throughout this period I have not even turned on my computer. A new problem has arrived, now I am both mentally and physically exhausted, on top of it I got addicted to ski, looking at weather channel to see whether mother gaia would pour more snow down.
After not touching my computer on the weekend, this morning I was walking to work and start being aware of other things around me. I saw 2 Indian resturant on the way to work, the word "trinet" on on the road blocks, 3 breakfast place, chase's "Save Money" campaign, along with other thigns that I have missed despite walking through the same block 3 to 4 times a week. I've been using yelp so much that I have completely ignored anything in my presense, google navigation literally eliminated my way of looking around. Even during my walks to work, my mind has been filled with past and future, figuring how to do things more efficiently, possibly what will be said on techcrunch. I have completely lost my sense of awareness.
This brought me to one big question, I havn't seen one technology that helps us to improve our instinctual awareness. Most of the technology out there are simply sorting out data according to our needs, communicate with people in similar interest, tracking our records to help us improve memory. But none of us has been able to optimize our "mind, body, and spirit".
When I am on a ski slope or having a hike, I want to feel the breeze of the wind, have a view of the beautiful lake, slide down and avoiding falls, it destroys the purpose if I have to turn on my phone and make sure record how much calories I have burned. When I am in a concert, I want to enjoy the music of the singer, sing and enjoy the "now" moment, it totally defeats the purpose if I take out my camera and looking for that perfect shot because I will miss the experience. When I am sky diving, I want to feel the thrill of defeating the enviroment, I don't want to check in on my facebook that I am in middle of the sky. When I am driving at 120 miles an hour and feeling dangerous about the speed, I have no intention of twittering that because I will get into an accident.
Those are the moments I rememer in life, moments that gives me a high. I enjoy it when my mind and body are optimzed, I feel the "me" inside, I feel that I am pushing my limit, and I feel happy. I don't even have a startup idea that can create more experiences like those, maybe this is not web or mobile, or maybe we just havn't found a good way of solving that. The 3D TVs very good at giving the mind the experience, but it still havn't sold the body problem yet. I just can't wait to day technology is able to solve this problem.