Living with my projects

3rd December 2008

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My life is full of half finished projects. From the stories in my head I haven't put to paper and the software technologies I've yet to realise to the bag of flour sitting in my kitchen cupboard waiting for me to make bread out of it.

I start off full of spirit. In my mind I have the willingness to keep going until my skin is worn to the bone. Then at some point (no point in particular) my heart relents and I'm overcome with the feeling that I just can't be bothered with it anymore.

I'll moap around and beat myself up about how I'm not achieving anything meaningful with my life. I'll play games, I'll watch movies and tv and anime, and I'll waste countless hours trudging the internet mindlessly. All the time feeling sorry for myself while all the things I'm normally good at getting on with like cooking, cleaning, shopping and relaxing (you know, life stuff) fall by the way-side.

After an unspecific length of time I realise that all I need is a break. Working intensly on one thing for overly long has left me mentally exhausted and my brain, quite naturally, has conked out. It's decided it's not going to cooperate with my will and is going to refuse to think more deeply than that which is required to enjoy a good One Piece marathon. "Let us just forget about your project for a while" it will say.

There's nothing I can do but agree. So I close the file on my project and decide to come back to it later on when I feel more inclined.

Before I learnt to organise myself properly I used to find it very difficult to get back into a project after leaving it. I'd find I couldn't remember where I'd left off or that the way I had structured it was somewhat deranged. So this would cause me to spend a long time trying to get back into it.

It seems that all the time taken getting back into a project ends up eating away at the time my brain is committed to thinking about it again. Which means that I will ultimately spend less time on it. And the bigger the project gets and the more time I have to spend to pick it up again after a respite, the less time I then have on expanding it.

Nowadays my problem is different. Even though I'm now organised and able to pick up on my project quickly, I find myself unwilling to start working on it again. I keep thinking that I need to be in a fabulous mood in order to commit myself to it for an extended period of time. I'm just not as willing to drain myself so thoroughly in order to gain progress in something that seems to have no end. I figure though that the trick is to only work on a project in moderation.

I need to learn how to give myself an allotted time to work on a particular thing. When I start working on it I need to have a bulleted list of items I intend to achieve and when I've finished I need to leave myself a note (in a sensible place) so I know where I stopped. And then I need to tune-out, give myself a break and then tell myself that it's OK to give myself a break.