You know? It’s really… just… do it.
I keep Romanticizing the whole thing.
I put hours away. Huge blocks of time.
I gather all the caffeinated drinks at my disposal.
I think about how much I hate GTD, and how I used to have a system that worked. At least, I think I did.
I think about writing a blog post about just how to do it.
I guess this is that blog post.
Hey, look, it’s June 1st. You know what that means?
The more I wait, the more antsy I become.
It’s go time. Like it is: every other day.
Both are important. And for once, I’m realizing the reasons and ramifications of each style of blog posts.
It’s great to get something off my chest at a very quickly. It’s also easier to put together since it can be a lot of content, but with a probable drop in quality. This “morning’s” post can be grouped into this category.
The more recent posts can be grouped in this spur-of-the-moment style category also. I think it’s good to have a method to have a self-check, now and then… If I don’t tell myself to do it just once a day, I end up either never doing it or going as far as logging what I did every 30 minutes (a feat only possible by Twitter). But sometimes I just get lazy, and stop.
And what’s my excuse? The excuse is that I want to write in depth, analyzing. But what ends up happening is I just end up getting bored, latching onto the next shiny thing.
At this point, I have to talk about my wrists/forearms being in the state they are now, disabling me from writing anything for too long, anyway. I have this feeling that this pain actually is doing more in stopping me from doing anything productive in general.
Which brings me to the lovely conclusion, the obvious parallel: I’m not just talking about blog posts, but the general attitude that I’ve been having towards my projects.
The solution is simple: create smaller tasks. And I think the problem is that I’m still not in HanMeta mode yet: I’m still taking that month-long vacation I’ve been wanting for so long. And the freaking wrists/forearms/eyes/physical pains… the question is should I even be doing anything other than coding on the computer?
Looks like it’s going to be difficult for me to write any focused essays. See where this post is going?
/scream
It happened again. Just like two days ago.
I couldn’t go to bed.
I mean, to make sure I rectified by sleep cycle, I pulled an all-nighter before. Then I made the mistake of taking quite the long nap.
But I have this weird feeling that it’s not because of that. I’m just really excited for what I have to do. What I feel like I must do, in spite of all things that I keep throwing at myself.
Oh, and by the way: Ctrl + Opt + Cmd + 8 is your friend when you’re trying to blog after you have had your eyes closed for a while.
I feel like I’m going to end up blogging the things that I find interesting. But I forgot to think that… maybe I have to find that thing interesting enough to blog about it.
Since I never thought about the possibility of the existence of such a catch-22, I was able to write supposedly knowing that I would write on what I wanted to write.
This, of course, is just an example of the many annoying roadblocks in my life. My mind keeps running away from what it really should be thinking about.
And I think that’s all I got left in me tonight. It’s weird how I just start typing sometimes, through the wrist pains… blah.
I guess by typing this, I’m actually validating my need to record, but hear me out:
I’m going to need to record all the time anyway. So what changes when I record than I need to record? Nothing.
So stop being silly, and start doing. Let your actions/work/code speak for who you are.
Of course, there will be times when I need to record, such as version control for a project or a deadline for a feature.
Always remember: Your main purpose is not to record, but to do. Task #1 is not to provide insight into JK’s mind, but to show what JK’s mind is capable of.
Silence the screams for meta.
Summary: Brain Dump at 5 AM
I don’t normally lie in bed. When I’m in bed, I sleep. Maybe it’s the ridiculous sleep cycle I’ve been on, but I’d like to think it’s because of all the nonsense that’s been happening in my life.
One huge issue? Physical pains are returning. What a great time for my wrists to start acting up again… And my jaw? Well, that’s something I probably should have taken care of earlier before I quit my job about a month ago. Then my rib pain started flaring up again. I could never get a final diagnosis on Fibromyalgia, but it seems like that’s what I have… completely useless diagnosis since there really isn’t something I can do to fix it. Oh, exercise? I do that, thanks.
But specifically, the wrists are so painful now that I probably could get away with blaming that on the recent drought of content on this blog. (And yet, here I am, typing away… Of course, I was thinking about recording this, but… I still prefer the writing…) But no, I blame it on the incredible lack of focus in my life.
And maybe this kinda leads into the slight depression I’ve been going through. It’s been little over a month since I left my full-time position, and yet I haven’t done much of anything. I realized that I’m no longer working at a 9-to-5 much too late. It’s not like before when all I had to do was perform at my job and get paid a certain salary at a certain time interval. I mean, I could get away with coasting (and yes, there were times when I did coast). But now? The game has changed.
Another interesting realization is that I have somehow hacked myself to live on very little. My runway might be longer than calculated. Funny how this is probably a very small win in the big picture, but I should count the small wins so that midst all these fails, I can feel just a tiny bit better about myself.
Realist JK, meet optimist JK.
… and so little time to do it.
Literally, as I traverse through my feeds, I see so many problems that need solving. Heck, having so many problems to deal with is a problem, too. And let’s not forget that the feed reader I’m using has issues…
It’s funny because I’ve been seeing a rise in interest in ideas that I’ve thought up before. It feels great that other are having the same problems as I (and not only in the project sense, but in personal relationships in general). However, it feels not so great that someone else might solve the problem before me (and, again, relating to real life situations: That I wasn’t prepared to understand and apply the solution that others have figured out).
But they’re just ideas. Not only are they just ideas, but they’re a lot of ideas. Lots of simple to complex ideas. But at the end of the day, those things are worth as much as the small corner of my brain I give it.
Starting continuously. Iterating rapidly. Adapting quickly.
Rinse, Lather, Repeat.
This is just a tribute.
Summary: The quick analysis of where I’m at with the blogging.
Yes, I stopped posting daily. I felt bad at the beginning, but I started to care less and less and less. The reason why I chose to do it every day initially was that I wanted it to become a habit.
Of course, as with all of my projects, I started to “optimize” early. I started pushing back the ship date. Posts got larger and greater in number, and I just sat there, being demanded around by my own words.
That ended a couple minutes ago, when I cleared out all the old posts I’ve had lying around. There was one about video games, and how I jumped back into that world fairly crazily around fall of last year. I wanted to talk about how I’m starting to see it as the awesome form of art it’s becoming. Jumping off from that was a post about my foray into the independent games, and how I wanted to dive deeper and deeper into that world. Heck, I even bought a domain name to do a podcast on the very subject. Subway, the fine dining experience, was the topic of a post, where I wanted to go through the horrible user interface and user experience it has, and how to correct it. I wrote a post on equating how I’ve improved my guitaring over the past couple months, and how I need to apply the same methodology to my projects.
Then I realized: If I really wanted to write on these, I would have already. And so, with this in mind, I nuked them all.
The funny thing is, I’m almost certain I can rewrite those posts again, with greater speed and clarity because of it being a second draft.
This insane need to log every single action of my life needs to die. Get it close to perfection, but freaking finish it already.
And that, my friends, is the beginning of yet another post.
/* May 1st. Being the first of a month, a nice day to start something. Of course, in reality, every day is a nice day to start something. And so I start again, with May 2nd. */