Web Development has been an ever growing part of my life for the past three years. As I dove deeper into the rabbit hole during my 2nd year of college, I began to love the structure and rules that programming brought with it. I began staying up late, learning new HTML tags or reading posts on CSS Tricks. It was a wonderful world that I had discovered.
However, the honeymoon could only last so long. After a few months, I found myself going back to my beloved video games. Hours on hours of Minecraft and Skyrim exploring consumed my weekends and late nights. This on top of the standard college load made for a 5 day work week, with two days of freedom with friends catching up on the office, and other TV shows.
This was my life for the past three years. A flame began, then under the weight of school, getting engaged, gaming and friends. Five days of productivity, then two days of main numbing (or in my case 1.5 because i’d save all my work for Sunday night). This pattern was my life until I heard a sermon about 6th day projects.
Sometime back in April, my pastor gave a sermon on responsibility, creativity, and allowing ourselves to be used by God, while taking responsibility to ready ourselves to be used amy him. He suggested the idea of a 6th day project. I had limited my productivity to my monday to friday schedule, and rested for two days.
One solution to this problem was learning how to channel God’s wisdom with a 6th day project.
I would then rest during that time or then worry during the week and burn myself out wondering if I was going to make enough. One solution to this problem was learning how to channel God’s wisdom with a 6th day project. God created the earth and everything on it in 6 days, so why should I at least work 6 days and truly have a sabbath on sunday. I knew right away while hearing the sermon that this website was my 6th day project.
During my saturdays from April till now, I’ve been setting aside a few hours on saturday to truly develop myself as a WordPress developer outside of my work week. As a part of this, I’ve began theme development, plugin development, and I have begun the long journey towards becoming a full stack developer. Not only did I learn and grow mentally from this exercise, but God in his grace opened up new opportunities that I would not have been prepared for because of this.
Let’s see what happens
I encourage you, if you don’t do so already, to find a 6th day project. It may turn into a side business, or somehow lead back into a part of your business life that already exists. It may take you in directions you hadn’t dreamed of.