Knowing When...

It’s ironic how just a month ago I was pretty confident that I was going to be able to finish out my goal of writing a post every week. I am not so confident now. In fact, I am confident that I will not finish it out. That’s because I am intentionally breaking it off this week. I am just going to call it quits on this goal and move on.

Yeah, I know, I suck. As I noted in my mid-year goal update, I am relearning a lot of things that I’ve already learned over the years. As a whole, goals have never been very effective at getting me to actually do anything, and this year I am likely going to go 0 for 4. At this point the only one I haven’t given up on or moved the goalposts on is the album goal, but I can never seem to find the time to do it so I’m never catching up on that one either.

But as disappointed as I am in how this year has gone in regards to the goals, I also think it is important to know when it’s time to stop sinking time into something that’s not rewarding and find something else that is. For me personally, I think that constant frustration is a good indicator that something is not going well and maybe it’s better to leave it alone. And to be fair, one of my goals this year was to get better at letting go of things I’m not enjoying.

The act of writing itself has never been much of a problem. Finding time and focus can be tricky, but if there’s something to write on, it’s very doable. As I’ve said from the start of this year, it’s finding the thing to write on that’s hard. And I’ve gotten fed up with falling farther and farther behind because I just can’t think of new things to write about.

And let’s face it, none of this is my job. It’s a hobby. And hobbies are first and foremost supposed to be enjoyable, or at least developing a skill that can lead to something more rewarding. Writing is more enjoyable for me when I don’t feel pressured into doing it, and I have no delusions of thinking that getting better at writing is going to lead to a career in it. I honestly don’t even want that, I’d much rather keep my software career and leave writing as a hobby. Sure I want my writing works to be enjoyed by others (yay stupid ego), but I do not want to have to depend on it in any way.

There’s another reason why I want to shift away from writing these posts. It completely pulls me away from working on anything else creative. Not in terms of time, I have the time to work on both posts and stories, it’s just a matter of prioritization. No, it pulls away my mental capacity. I worry and fret about the posts that I’m not writing, and that makes it way more difficult to justify spending time on other projects. It’s the same nagging that you get when you procrastinate on chores you know you need to do but don’t want to do. I get enough grief from that, I don’t need to add onto it with worrying about arbitrary deadlines that no one is holding me to.

However, this does not mean that I won’t continue writing posts. I know there are at least a few people who read these regularly and I know they would be sad to see them go away entirely. Yes, there may be long stretches of time between posts from now on, but as long as I continue to set aside time to write, some of it will be spent on topics I think are working talking about. At the very least, every once in a while I will read/watch/play something that is worth giving a review on. Ultimately where I want to end up is posting excerpts from the stories I’m working on, or maybe even micro stories that can stand alone and don’t take too long to read.

I don’t want to phrase it as a goal because we know how those seem to go for me, but if I imagine an ideal situation for me with my writing, I see myself getting up every Saturday and Sunday, a little later than usual but still early morning, sitting down at my computer with some coffee or tea, and slamming out 3-6 hours of writing while grooving on some good mood music. By then my wife will be up and we can do some brunch and look forward to the rest of the day. Over time the work adds up to things I can release, probably a few times a year.

Obviously I can’t do this every weekend, there will be travel and other events that will get in the way, but it’s a nice place to be. I’ve tried the daily routine and it just doesn’t work for me, especially with how unpredictable evenings are. It’s a lot easier to do bigger chunks on days when nothing else is planned, especially during the mornings when I won’t get interrupted by others.

Honestly, I already feel a lot better after writing this all out. I did think I had a good chance of writing a post a week if it was limited to just one year, and I’m happy I was able to go as long as I did. But stepping away from the weekly deadline will take away a lot of unnecessary stress I feel, and I will feel even better when I’m able to put the time into actual stories instead.

Here’s to knowing when it’s time to move forward.

On Creativity

This week’s post might get a bit rambly, but I’ll try to provide some scaffolding to what I want to talk about. Incidentally, if you’re wondering why I would say something like that at the beginning of a written piece of work, it’s because I never go back through these posts and edit for content. They are all streams of consciousness and I just proofread for grammar and clarity. I don’t have time to go back and rewrite these to be essays. Which is part of why I came up with this post’s topic: creativity and how I try to make room for it in my life.

Creativity has always been a big part of my life, as it is for everyone really. We all just go about it in different ways. We may not all remember it, but almost all of us grew up with active imaginations because that’s just how kids figure out how the world works. We all grow up with books, movies, TV shows, music, art, and games that suggest new ideas we hadn’t thought of before, and it’s only natural to take those ideas and smash them together into new ones. And once in a while you come up with an idea that is completely new, and if you have the means to get it out into the world then it can inspire millions more after you.

For me growing up, the first outlet that I can remember using for my ideas was through writing short stories and poems. Of course none of my ideas were original back then, I was actually known for taking existing stories and modernizing them. I didn’t realize it at the time, obviously, but I was doing the common thing of adapting an old story for a new audience. It worked out pretty well for me though since a few of them were recognized for being really good for a kid, and one even turned into an actual play that my class put on for my high school.

During high school my outlets grew significantly as I started getting really into music, video editing, and programming. While I never actually got around to picking up an instrument until after college, my desire to play mostly began there when I started going to shows and seeing other friends play in bands. The video editing centered around mashing together songs I liked with clips of video from other things I liked. I had essentially stumbled into making AMVs (anime/animated music videos), and it was my music outlet for a while since I couldn’t make my own music. I did some other video projects in college, but nothing close to actually making a film. And as for programming, it was largely just making dumb websites and calculator games. Looking back on it, I didn’t see them so much as creative outlets as learning how to do it. Unlike my writing and videos, I had no real intention of having my programming projects viewed by others, I just did them for myself.

From college onward, the only real change was swapping the video editing with making music as writing and programming have stuck with me. While I had a great time making videos, it was too time consuming and it would only get worse if I wanted to improve on the skills I had. There’s only so much you can do with other peoples’ works, and to be a real editor I would’ve had to learn how to do effects and other advanced compositing that I didn’t want to learn. Learning to play, and eventually write my own, music was a lot more accessible and rewarding.

And that’s where I currently sit in terms of what areas I want to put my creative energy into. Writing, programming, and music. I know that I don’t have the patience to make videos of any kind these days, and I’ve never had an eye for visual design, whether it be drawing, painting, illustrating, or making graphics.

Of these three, the easiest one to do is obviously programming because that is what I do for a living. And as a job it is rewarding, especially when the end product is both elegant to look at (as code) and useful for others. The second easiest one is writing because it requires only something to write on and your brain. For the time being I am doing it all through these posts, but still aiming to do more. Making music is a little tougher now that I’m not in a band anymore. I have the means to come up with the music, but in order to actually listen to it I need to invest in learning some DAW software to make it happen. It’s either that or get a lot better at playing multiple instruments.

As I just mentioned, I do spend some time on writing these posts, but I want to do more. I would not qualify these as creative, I’m simply writing down what I’m saying in my head about a topic. It has been many years since I actually completed something that I would consider a creative work (the albums with my band don’t count here). Probably not since I did NaNoWriMo back in 2010. I find that rather disappointing.

What keeps me back? It shouldn’t be a surprise. It always comes down to prioritizing doing creative work over other things. I’ve been talking at length recently about passions and priorities, and the writing ideas I have in my head don’t quite reach either one of those driving factors. I think about the ideas all the time, particularly when in bed. Scoping out stories is the quickest way I know to actually fall asleep because it turns off the rest of my brain that’s constantly trying to relive past events. But, obviously, that doesn’t get me any closer to actually having a written story. None of the ideas are so good that I’m mindlessly driven to work on them, so I have to actively set aside time to work on anything. Sadly, playing games and watching videos are easier to do, so I default to those most days.

The nagging doubt is also always there. If I was passionate about these ideas, then I would find a way to make it happen. Since I don’t, then it must not be worthwhile right? This occurs to me all the time, and it’s a big reason why I have been okay with not pursuing these ideas for so many years. My stupid ego wants to see the completed projects because then people will praise my work, but it has largely come to terms with the idea that none of it will ever see the light of day. Making stuff is easy when you are young. You have all the time in the world and you don’t really care if it’s good or not. Now that I’m older, I have no time and my views change year after year, so I find it more difficult to believe that anything I have to say will matter.

I think that last point is the most poignant. While it is not required to struggle to make good art, it certainly helps. It makes it easier to empathize and create themes you want to get across to others. To some degree, the point of making art is to have other people relate to it. And I just don’t see myself as someone with a message needing to get out there. I’m a middle-class white guy, privileged as all hell, and have wanted for nothing my whole life. Basically, the last person anyone should ask for an opinion about anything. On top of that I’m not an expert at anything, so I can’t even come from that angle.

But at the same time I know that if I never get these ideas out of my head, they will never go away. So even if I have nothing important to say, perhaps it’s worth my time just to say I did it? It will always be a hard choice because I have no intention of making doing creative stuff my actual job, so the opportunity costs have to be weighed against just relaxing and having fun. Between time needed to work, commute, eat, sleep, and do the other necessities, I only end up with 15-20 hours a week to do what I want. And of course I want to spend some of that time being with friends and people I love.

I think I’m going to continue taking the fun for now. But I could put aside even three hours a week to work on some stuff, that’d be a good step in the right direction. I can spare at least that much.

Goals Update: Mid-Year 2019

It has been super hard to find time or motivation to write lately, but at the very least I can get in a quick update about where goals are for the year. There were some changes I made about a month ago to one of the goals, and I’m going to talk about another one I decided to make. So the TL;DR version of this post is: two goals are still on track, though lagging behind lately, and two goals have been outright changed to better reflect how things are.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours -> Beat My Best 5K Time

I knew a month ago that there was no way I was going to run a half-marathon by the end of the year, much less crush my previous best by 15+ minutes. While I have been good at working out more often, my eating habits have not been improving, so progress is hard coming. I still think it is possible for me to get fit enough to improve in some way though, so we are just going to switch the half-marathon to a 5K.

I’ve run plenty of 5Ks, especially in the early days when I started running and I was working up to longer distances, but I didn’t get many of them recorded, so I don’t know what my actual best time is. All I have to go on is what I do have recorded from my races, which indicates my best 5K is 26:30. This was basically right after my first half-marathon as a way of recovering, so not me at my best fitness, but still a decent time. Thus, new goal, beat that time.

Publish a Post Every Week

Up until this past month I was doing well here. Having to catch up sometimes, but mostly getting them done on time, even if at the last minute. But lately the motivation has been lacking. For once I have enough things to write about, but I’d rather just do other things. It’s summer now, so doing more activities and I’ve also had some bad luck with illness. Got a summer cold that knocked me out for four days this past week, which means watching a lot of SGDQ and playing easy games.

Still, I have no doubt that I will be able to finish this out. I’ve got a few posts to catch up on right now, but eventually things will get back to the normal cadence. Just a bunch of distractions lately that will go away soon. Hopefully motivation will come back too, but I can always push through until I do (like I did with this post).

Listen to 200 New Albums

Last update I was at 33 albums, this time I’m at 51 albums. Halfway through the year, that’s not great progress. I basically have to listen to triple the amount of music I already have so far.

There are a couple reasons for this. One, I haven’t had nearly as much time to listen to podcasts or music or anything at work as I expected. I knew pretty early on it would be harder than it was at Amazon, but it’s gotten even worse as people have gotten to rely on me more. The pros and cons of open space offices. Collaboration is undoubtedly better, but focus time is much worse. I get pulled away from my tasks so often to help others that it’s not worth having headphones on most of the time.

So yeah, my original plan of using work time to get a bunch of listening done isn’t working too well. Need to find another strategy. I really want to increase the amount of time I spend on writing, so that will be a perfect time to get new music in. That’s not super reliable though since I can’t guarantee more writing will happen. I think ultimately it’s going to come down to reducing video consumption since that eats into podcast time, which eats into music time.

No real updates on albums that have stood out to me since last time. Finished the whole Queen catalog, and I listened to a lot more Stone Sour than I probably should have, but I just really like their stuff (Come What(ever) May is legit one of my favorite albums ever).

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

As I (tried to) explain in a post a month ago about Passions and Priorities, I have effectively given up on this goal. I haven’t fully decided what it should be replaced with, but what I’ve been trying to do since then is focus on one thing at a time, even if it’s not fun to do so. It’s not a new concept to me, I’ve tried it a couple times over the last few years to short-term success. But, going back to that previous post, since I find it hard to keep focusing on something unless it grabs my attention fully, it’s not going well this time around either. So it can’t be the long term solution, but it can help for now until something else clicks.

The other question with this is simply figuring out how to give myself the time I want to focus on anything. Inevitably it always comes back to being lazy about doing the things that are high priority and getting distracted by things that are the lowest priority. The internet is bad and I find it harder to ignore it all the time.

I’ve got nothing else for now. Turning out to be another year where I’m re-learning the lessons that I’d forgotten from failing in previous years. On the plus side, this really only impacts my hobbies. I’m still a very responsible person with a good job that I excel at, so I’m not a total screw up. I just have too many freaking interests and too many freaking distractions. Feeling like crap all the time because I can’t get healthy is having an impact too.

Sigh.

Passions and Priorities

There’s still a month before I do my official goals update at the mid-year mark, but I can’t get this idea out my head this week, so here’s a brief post that will act as a precursor to that update. I’ve been doing this focus tracker thing for five months now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it isn’t helping in any meaningful way. I’ve also come to the conclusion that it’s wrong to say that I have a focus problem to begin with, it’s really a problem of passions and priorities. Let me try to explain.

First, let’s talk about the problems I’ve been having with the focus tracker I started. Like many other things I’ve tried to do, it was really useful and enlightening for the first couple months. But by March it became obvious that it wasn’t really providing any useful insights into what I was actually doing, aside from seeing if I was reading every day. So I tried to switch it up to assign different projects to different days of the week. That lasted for another couple months until May when I discovered that also wasn’t helping, so I switched it up again to try to do more daily, consistent tasks.

Of course that hasn’t really worked either. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself over the last decade or so is that I’m not programmed for consistent practice of anything. I keep flipping back and forth between consistent practice (shorter periods of time every day) and batch practice (longer periods of time once a week or so), but I can’t do either one well. Yet I continue to try because every single person who’s ever been successful at anything will tell you that you have to do either one to succeed. And I want to be a successful person as much as anyone else, so I keep pushing myself into failure because neither method seems to work.

That’s why I come up with things like the focus tracker. I convince myself that if I track everything and see trends, it will give me more information on what works and the motivation to keep doing it. But it’s an inherently flawed system because it was never a problem with focusing on things in the first place. I am actually very good at focusing on tasks, and can pound away at something for many hours at a time.

The real problem is that focus only comes from passion. And I’m not passionate about very many things. And those passions very rarely match up with my priorities. Therefore, trying to force myself to focus on priorities that are not passions is doomed to fail.

A couple months ago I wrote a post about my perpetual games, those games that I play for years and keep coming back to whenever I can. Those are perfect examples of activities that I am super passionate about, but are super low priorities. For example, I probably put in 20 or so hours into Heroes of the Storm this week, both in playing it and watching videos about it. I think about that game all the time and I want to play it all the time. But I know in my logical mind that spending all my time on that game doesn’t improve me, as a person, in any meaningful way, it just feels good. The same goes with the thousands of hours I put into playing drums in Rock Band or guitar in Rocksmith. Learning to play music is a worthwhile endeavor, but in the grand scheme of things, the time put in hasn’t really justified the outcome.

The thing that really gets me about this is that I should be okay with it. It’s my free time and I should be happy with whatever I do during that time. And while I’m doing those activities, I am happy. It’s only later, when I see how much of the day has gone by, that I get down on myself for not doing other things that have a more tangible reward. Most days I get to the end of the night and the line from Hamilton plays in my head, “He will never be satisfied.” The big difference between me and Mr. Hamilton is that he had the passion to fulfill his ego, I just have the stupid ego.

So after five months, I have to concede that the focus tracker idea was never going to be the tool that gets me motivated to complete more things. It ended up being yet another tool for me to look at and realize how bad I am at doing things I’m not super passionate about. It was definitely the right tool for determining what my priorities should be, but that doesn’t mean much when missing those priorities has no consequence.

The quest to find the right tool for getting those priorities taken care of continues. What I really need is to get those priorities at the same motivation level as these weekly posts. Outside of using my existing tools to remind myself that it needs to be done, I haven’t had any trouble being motivated to write, as long as I have something to write about. But doing other things like reading, playing non-perpetual games, watching new TV shows or movies, cooking, exercising, each one feels like a hassle. And I like doing all those things, I just don’t love them.

The motivation for writing these posts largely comes from the public nature of them. There are enough people reading them that I feel bad when I miss a week. I also get more motivated to clean the house or cook when people are coming over. But I don’t know if I can rely on that same external pressure to read or play games. I guess I could set myself a review schedule so that I had to finish things in order to write about them, but then it becomes like an actual job. Is that what I really want? Of course not. Is there any other way to motivate myself? Probably not.

Ultimately I don’t want to treat leisure time like homework, but my completionist self tends to make it necessary to be satisfied, if only temporarily. It sucks, but that’s just who I am.

Goals Update: 100 Days

As I promised at the 50 day mark, it is time for the 100 day update on how the goals are progressing. I probably won’t take as long to go over them this time around, so this will be short and sweet. This is everything up to April 10.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

Still the area where I’m behind the most at this point. I have managed to do three runs in the first 100 days, which is pretty bad. My eating habits also haven’t resulted in any significant body change, though it is definitely better than it was. Still eating too much and not cooking at home enough, but getting in more healthy and less bad foods.

The hard part right now isn’t that I don’t have the time, since I do have time. I just don’t think about it most days, so I need to start setting reminders and making sure that I don’t make other obligations for when I get home on the days I should do a run.

One option I’m considering is that there is an Orangetheory Fitness next to our train station, which I used for a several years in Seattle until it became too inconvenient. Positives with this option is that you have to go to the classes or forfeit money, which creates incentive. The workouts also balance cardio and strength training, and I do feel like I need both to make any real progress. Just need to figure out what time works best if I go this route. In any case, I need to do something soon or I won’t have enough time to train up.

Publish a Post Every Week

No real change here, I have managed to have a post for every week, even if they arrive a week or two late. This is week 15, and you can see that there are exactly 15 posts in the column to the right within 2019.

The biggest struggle has continued to be thinking of topics to write about. This is mostly due to not having as much time to work on things to review as I’d anticipated. I suppose this is also partially due to having ideas for posts I want to write about, but not willing to do so without having enough data/experience to give a worthwhile opinion. Like, I could talk about my time with VR, but I’ve only spent like 5 hours with it, which isn’t much. I really want to talk about some board games, but with only a couple plays I can’t say that I’ve really engaged with them (which is partially why last week’s post happened).

On the plus side, with my schedule more settled and fewer trips coming up, I have time locked down to do the writing, so I have been getting more consistent at being on time.

Listen to 200 New Albums

As of day 100, I have listened to 33 new albums. That means I’ve almost tripled the number since the last update, but still only 1/6 of the total I need. Considering that we’re only a little more than three months in, I’m positive about the trend.

What has been helping is that instead of forcing myself to follow a set list of albums, I’ve been jumping around between different artists and just going through their whole discography, making note of the new stuff. That was always the plan, but I’m okay with going with what I want to hear rather than doing a purely alphabetical journey. On the other hand, what hasn’t been helping is that I still have to try to keep caught up on podcasts, which eats into music time. My office is also not conducive to consistent listening since interruptions are constant.

Since the last update, a couple albums have stood out as worth repeat listening. Rubber Factory by The Black Keys, Favourite Worst Nightmare by The Arctic Monkeys, and Queen II by Queen (duh). I already liked all those bands beforehand, but these albums were new to me and I keep thinking about them.

Aside from those new ones, I’m also still giving Dreams in Space (my band’s album) a lot of listens, plus I’ve re-remembered how much I love the album Origami Eyes from my friends in American Island, so that’s also eating up some time. But, gotta do what you love.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

In the last update I mentioned that I wasn’t sure where I was with this, and I’ve had to make some adjustments to make it work better. I’m still tracking books (should read every day) and audiobooks (should listen every work day) the way I was before. Incidentally, the percentages for focusing on those are currently 65% for books (better) and 65% for audiobooks (slightly worse).

The games have completely fallen off because I realized it wasn’t actually what I should be focusing on. I kept having other things I needed to do, so what I decided to go with instead was simply marking if I got my focus activity done or not. Each day I determine what that activity is going to be, and then do it (or not if I get distracted). Some of these activities are games, but some are writing these posts, learning new skills, and doing things with my wife. It has made it a lot easier to make sure that the activities I want to do get more equal time, as well as making it less frustrating to see myself not getting things done (because I am getting things done!).

Back on the quitting side of things, I still haven’t encountered anything that I’ve wanted to drop yet. The audiobook from last time (Gone Girl, which I ranted on a few weeks ago) was able to survive the axe. There are a couple more things on the block now though, so we’ll see again what happens. The thing is that right now I’m doing enough different things that I haven’t had a chance to get a full experience of anything.

Alright, that’s pretty much it. Obviously I need to keep going in the areas that are going well, and I really need to get the exercise kicked up a notch. Another update will come at the end of June.