Let's play a thinking game for just a minute.  Count up how many hours you've spent in front of Windows progress bars, those seemingly interminable percentages slowly crawling across the screen.  Hours?  Days?  Maybe even months of your life?  I mean, really count ‘em.

Now think for a minute about all the other productive things you could be doing during those hours.  Learning a new technology?  Making yourself more useful for your business?  Spending more time with family and friends, and fewer nights and weekends patrolling the hallways in search of one…more…install…

Packaging software.  You've surely heard of the term before.  "Create this software package-like thing that runs without asking any questions."  Running silently means it runs like any old command line tool.  You run it, and you're done.

"That's technology for the big boys," you've probably also heard.  "It's complex.  It takes forever to figure out, and half the time somebody accidentally screws up and corrupts every computer in the entire domain."  No way, no how, not here.

And yet, the hours…watching scroll bars crawl by.  Hours wasted.  Eats away at your soul, those hours.  Even solitaire lost its entertainment value by about year three in your career.

Software packaging, eh?  Takes too long.  Too much work.  Too hard.  And yet installing even a single new application adds to that knowledge debt that you'll never get back.  Thirty computers times thirty minutes per install (plus all the coordination time) starts to add up after a while.

Yea, they aren't the simplest tool in existence.  But that is why you're in IT, because it challenges you.

Maybe it's time for another look.  Maybe it's time to get your life back.  Maybe it's time you started packaging your software, and getting back to that long-lost forty-hour work week.

Read my article "What do I need a Software Packaging Tool?" to see how I reason this out.