Welcome to “The Life“. This week, I’m taking a vacation from my day job and spending it working on WebnoteHappy full-time. I’ve done all the development on WebnoteHappy in my spare time, on weekends, nights, holidays, but never have dedicated a full workday to it until today.

I thought it would be interesting to take you behind the scenes of the development of WebnoteHappy and talk about lessons learned. I’ve already started giving away the freeware version, WebnoteHappy Lite, so go check that out for a taste of what will soon appear.

So the first order of business was to manage myself. When you’re an employee, you sort of live in a structure. Same thing goes if you’re a student. But when you’re an entrepreneur, you have to create your own structure.

So I went out to lunch today with a friend and ended up spending 3 hours at lunch. Yes it was nice to chat and talk about technology and business, but I had “long lunch remorse” afterwards. I realized that I probably that even though I could take a lunch for 3 hours, I probably shouldn’t. Instead I should spend an hour at lunch and the other 2 hours programming or marketing. Lesson 1: Create some structure for yourself when working alone.

Later on, I had some pretty good hours “in the zone”, partly a result of drinking a bunch of Coke at lunch. Lesson 2: Caffeine = good for programming.

Then I smelled something. And it was bad, like the sewer. Yuck. The glamour was gone. Sure, when you watch the Evening at the Adler video, it all looks so easy and glamorous. But really, when you’ve got a home office, things are different. When you’re at an office, you find something wrong and you call the building engineer. But at home, you don’t really have that luxury. So I had to get out of the zone and do some handy work around the house. Lesson 3: Home offices aren’t maintenance-free.