From 1998 to 2004, I was bumming around without full-time employment, spending part of my time in grad school, part playing poker, and part on projects like the seasteading book. I've discussed the financial and productive aspects of this period on my personal journal. Obviously this left a lot of time for working on the project, and included a lot of freedom which made me consider expatriating or going to live on a prototype floating platform.
From the end of 2004 to the end of 2005, I made some dramatic life changes: I got a full-time job, got married, and became a parent.
I no longer have much free time or energy for working on projects like seasteading. Furthermore, since I'm in the stage of starting a family, it's important to be around good medical care. So my focus is elsewhere these days.
However, this doesn't mean I've given up on the projects. I have been lucky enough to get a job with extremely generous financial compensation, which should enable me to shift my focus back to projects like seasteading in 5-10 years. And having the book out there on the web means I end up hearing periodically from interested people, and thus am slowly building up contacts and getting my ideas into circulation.
Furthermore, one of the projects I do make time for is intentional community. I lived for 6 years in a communal house in Sunnyvale, and spent a year and a half helping start a community in Mountain View which I'm moving into on 2/8/2007. One of the great things about living in community is that along with producing short-term benefits (I find it a happier way to live), it gives me important experience for future projects like seasteading. Any seastead will, while quite unusual, be a type of intentional community (more here), so there is substantial overlap.
Once I have achieved financial independence, I may continue working for a few more years, both because I love my job, and in order to build up an extra cushion for starting companies. When that ends, my two main goals (at least at this point) are to spend more time with my family, and to pursue projects. While it's hard to say now what my priorities will be then, seasteading has been my top project for many years.
So my tentative plan is to work another 5-10 years, take a break of some months to recover, and then start investigating seasteading seriously. Begin by revising the book and seeing if I can get it published, then write a business plan, do market research, and seriously investigate the financial feasibility. If it looks like a go, pick a promising approach, find some business partners, and start a company.
While it may sound somewhat discouraging to hear that the project will not be active for many years, my belief is that this sort of honesty, life realism, and long-term planning are key elements to success. I could lie to y'all, or to myself (like many of the other nation founders) about how we're going to have a prototype any day now or whatever, but I'm just not that kind of guy.
And while that may make things sound superficially like it's less likely for anything to happen, hopefully if you think about it a bit, and think about how the projects with the most outlandish claims invariably end up in the dustbins of history, you will reach a different conclusion. The people with the least demanding employment have the most time to socialize, post, and promote themselves - and the least chance of ever succeeding at a project of this ambitious magnitude. Please don't view this as a diss of people whose role is as participants, rather than founders - the venture can't happen without them, and their socializing and debating on forums and lists helps keep the dreams alive. But any successful nation founding will be a deeply entreprenurial activity, which requires (in my inexpert opinion) the ability to singlemindedly focus on a task, and to do things rather than talk about them. Right now, seasteading is not that task, so my doing is focused elsewhere. Hopefully, you will find this to be encouraging, not discouraging.