Personal development time

Travis had a good idea about a different way to spend the time we normally take in staff meetings.

I like the idea of personal development time; right now, I have to get up early and drive in to work without knowing whether there'll be a meeting. I don't mind it too much, because coming early means I get to leave earlier, but it can be a pain when I was here too late the night before. (Luckily that doesn't happen too often, and when it does, it's generally either my own fault or else totally outside anyone's control.) Knowing I would have a chance to work on my own stuff would give me a better motivation to come in those mornings.

I'd probably spend the time learning stuff like advanced CSS coding, because that's something I've fallen behind on but would really help me with web page design. It would also be nice to work on automating some of the more repetitive tasks I need to so, like feeding webserver logs into the Urchin log analyzer, and setting up web permissions, and stuff like that. I have a serious case of "programmer laziness"; I get frustrated having to do the same stuff over and over, and would rather build a tool to do it for me, even if it takes longer to build the tool! I'd love having time to do stuff like that.