Journey before Destination

In the last few weeks, I have been living in the future. It was miserable.

For more than seven weeks I've written one post a day. That doesn't sound like much, but it's almost 15% of the year. And I'm only just halfway through the project. The point of it was to finish things. I think I demonstrated I'm able to do this. While I was posting each day, I didn't work on any other creative projects. And I feel it's time to move on to something new. The problem is that I'm not willing to abort this project. I think you will see the contradiction in not finishing a project about finishing things because I think I'm able to finish things by now. So I will continue to do this for another seven weeks. But in the last few weeks, my mind already moved on to other projects.

My first instinct to handle this is to just get the daily blogging over with. Write about anything and accept it as dead time, just like I'm accepting my job as dead time. It's not that I dislike either of them (quite the contrary), but they are not what I'm doing for my creative fulfilment. I even created the message for my last post in my mind. "It was useful, but 100 days was too much. I'm going to do something else now." Knowing that the next seven weeks would only be dead time, suffocated me.

Another thing I tried is to optimise how I spend my remaining time. Each day has 24 hours. After writing my blog, working, sleeping, and eating, I still have at least five hours per day. I tried to use them as effectively as possible. Some people say you need some downtime, but that's not really true. Working on things that energise you is better than any conventional downtime activity you can think of. What you really need are different activities throughout the day.

While this approach makes sense on the surface, it takes a long time to do correctly. If you want to form a new habit, don't focus on the things you can do on a perfect day in theory. Instead, think about what you can do consistently even on bad days. I know from experience that writing a post and working full time is very close to my current limit. And in any case, this approach doesn't address the core issue. If I want to eliminate low-value activities, the low hanging fruit is to figure out how I can make writing my daily blog fun again. I already wrote about how to do this, but I didn't listen to my own advice. The key is to embrace my own constraints.

The post from this project I'm most proud of is my explanation of finite state machines. I had had the idea for this post for a long time. But I wanted to spend 10-15 hours on it, take time to polish it. Until one day, I just said "fuck it," and wrote it in four. It might not be perfect, but given the time I had for it, I'm happy with the result.

There are other examples like this. One is from this Tuesday. Whenever I don't know how to start a post, I write a paragraph that explains what I want to write about. This paragraph is always the first thing I delete when I start editing, but it's a great way to get started. In the post from Tuesday, I used this paragraph to question whether I wanted to write about a story idea I had had for over eighteen months. My first reaction was that no, it was too complicated and I needed more time to work on it. This as the same fear-based reaction I had with the post about finite state machines. So I just wrote it.

One of the things I'd like to do right now is to write the manuscript for a novel in a month. So what if I'm breaking it down into one scene per day and publish it on my blog? Writing a manuscript for a novel does contain much less editing that I'm doing for my blog, so I don't think this would work. But what if I start with a smaller project? Write a five-part story, publish one part every day. I have no idea how to do this, and I'm scared shitless of trying it. That's the best reason to do it.