Tech Blog 2013 Supporting tagline
One of my biggest flaws in my life is an inability to finish projects.
I’m sure this isn’t unique to me, but it is something I personally struggle with. I lose motivation. I lack discipline occasionally, especially away from work.
When no one is there to push me, I sometimes struggle to push myself into trying the things I know I want to try. I would like to stop doing this.
It is with that in mind that I have decided to begin writing (publicly) about
My Goals
- What I want to accomplish
- Why I’d like to accomplish it, and
- How I plan to accomplish it
Today, I wanted to start off the new year by sharing some of my ‘How I will accomplish things’ thoughts
Maybe a month ago, I was reading a blog linked from Hacker News about how someone who sounded somewhat like myself was able to push himself to his goals.
His blog post was about how he turned his personal projects into a game of sorts, doing game design tasks like:
- assigning goals in achievable pieces
- with clear paths to success
- and giving small extrinsic rewards in the hopes of learning to intrinsically motivate yourself
This process of turning my own self-improvement into a game appeals to me
Time Kills
One of the biggest detriments to my progress on improving myself, though, is my inability to set aside and commit time to doing anything.
I play games with friends in the time I’m not working, cooking, or generally being the ‘custodian’ of my life.
Its difficult to think about doing work on your computer after you spend all day doing work on your computer. Your brain shuts down.
So, in the moments before sleep where its occasionally hard to quiet my mind, I had a few ideas about how I might both ‘make a game’ of learning new things and also properly fit it into my busy life.
The Plan
I’ve tried the Seinfeld “Don’t break the chain” method before, and while I think it could be very effective, I think I took it on a bit too ambitiously, and burned myself out of it.
I attempted to do 3 activities each day, 15-20 minutes per activity (so about an hour total): Cleaning the apartment, learning to speak Russian, and reading / doing exercises with a GIMP image editing book.
These are all things I strive to be better at, but its pulling myself in a lot of directions (its unfocused) and its a fair bit of time to commit to each and every day. Its also slow to get to results, which any gamer (or person in general really) can tell you is quite frustrating.
So, I thought it might be good to make a game around months. Progress can be seen doing something for a month, right? I hope to find out in 2013, at least :)
January’s focus will be on:
- Learning this blogging software
- Styling the blog to my liking
- Taking the opportunity to try out my front-end skills (Github Pages presents a great opportunity to really restrict yourself to fun things w/ HTML, CSS, and JS)
- Putting up an organized HTML resume ^^
Here’s to a new year where, hopefully, I’ll continue on my path towards becoming skilled in web, design, game design, and all my talents I hope to improve XD