Let’s get the 4k jokes out now. All done? Great.

My personal website started as a way of tracking my New Year’s resolution some 12 years ago. It’s still up as a place for putting short stories, rants, and guides. I think cohost as a microblogging platform is taking over that role in some respects, but I’m not ready to make a redirect here. I’ll settle for cross-posting.

I’ve been burned out a half-dozen times in about as many years, and something that particularly gets to me is not long hours but a lack of shipping anything. Spending a year on a project to have it canned is more demoralizing than spending a week under duress. In the interest of resolving this, I would like to ship one small app or game per month. It seems strange that adding more strain to the schedule would cause less stress, but every vacation I’ve had so far this year has been absolutely plagued by depression over getting nothing done and yet somehow failing to relax.

This will not be a trivial matter, as work, home obligations, and a commute leave me with almost solely the hours of 7:30PM to 10:30PM, Mon/Wed/Th/Fri to myself. That’s 12 hours a week plus whatever I can do on Saturday morning. That’s 48 hours a month at maximum efficiency, and probably rather optimistic, given I need to do domestic things like laundry and cleaning and taking care of people/creatures.

Is it really worth spending the little time I’ve got making games instead of cultivating a skill like making art or practicing music? I’m not sure. 12 hours a week feels like so little time for all the things I want to do, but this is the reality of the situation, so I guess the only option is to make the most of it.

So many resolutions revolve around suddenly having discipline never before demonstrated in one’s life, and this isn’t much different. Perhaps I can simply make do with building up a habit.