One of the earliest economic concepts drilled into any first-year business school student is Opportunity Cost. In simple terms, opportunity cost is the value or benefit you surrender for pursing an option not chosen.
My time has an inherit value – there is only a finite amount of non-work hours available to pursue activities that I'm interested in or have the energy to complete. Right now, those interests are, in no particular order:
- Family
- Cooking/Baking/Smoking Meats
- Fountain Pens
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes
- Reading
- Fitness (Rowing a 5k per day / Cycling a 6k per day)
- Streaming Television
Missing from the above list is maintaining my Digital Ocean WordPress droplet and making sure that it's kept current with WordPress updates, the theme is kept current with updates from its creator, and the myriad plug-ins are updated. That work, while fun at first, became tedious.
Different directions
When I was first starting out my career in website design & development in the mid-1990s, the idea of creating a website from scratch was exciting. By the early 2000s, I was self-hosting with my own domain name on a shared hosting plan. I had the time, I had the energy, and I wanted to learn. Eventually, I dabbled in setting up WordPress instances in Heroku, AWS Lighthouse, and ultimately, Digital Ocean.
As my career progressed and I moved from website design & development to User Experience roles, I started to notice the old world of web infrastructure pass me by. I didn't have the time - or energy - to keep up. So, I did what any self-respecting, career-orientated person in my position would do: buy a WordPress theme and let it do the heavy lifting on a Digital Ocean WordPress droplet. It was painless.
Back to the opportunity cost
This is just a long-winded way of saying that I'm kind of done with maintenance and upkeep. I'm 42, my parents are in their late 70's, my kids are in elementary and middle school, and there are way better things for me to spend my time on than babysitting a vanity website.
Letting go was initially very difficult – I have so much institutional knowledge of the byzantine world of DNS, SSH, et cetera to go to waste. But, what I've come to realize is that what I don't have a lot of is free time. And the maintenance headache is a cost I'm happy to forego.
