The Difference Between Work and Play
The other day I was wondering what the difference is between work and the screwing around I do at home for fun. After putting quite some thought into it and coming up with the typical explanations like not getting paid, being able to choose what you want to do and stuff it struck me: There are no deadlines for stuff.
Example: A colleague of mine was to configure a server to do some port forwarding to a virtual machine a few days ago. Since I usually don't get to do much administrating these days and am always keen to learn new things I kinda hijacked the project and tried to get it to work with him. We couldn't figure it out and after a few minutes he said: "Well this was the hour scheduled for it. Let's see if we can back to it Monday."
That's something I pretty much never do when I'm doing projects for myself: quit. Usually I just keep on poking and prodding the problem till it gives up and goes away. I would even go so far and call it one of my greatest strengths.