# mornings: mornings are my productive time

i had a terrible track record of finishing anything i've set out to do. however i changed four things recently and now i feel quite good about the progress on my little goals.

i often have an idea of a game or a tool that i'd like to see. sometimes i even start working on a demo for it. but once the initial motivation is gone, i just pretty much abandon the project. and then i feel bad about myself, and i wonder what's wrong with me. i usually explain it "ah surely work is draining my energy" and that "all i need to do is retire and then i'll have energy for all this". but then over time i started tweaking things and i've noticed some nice changes. in my case there are four components at play here:

# scope

i had a very simple solution to the scope problem. unless something is clearly trivial and finishable in very little time, i changed all the goals from "implement this" to "write a blog post about this". now all my plans are suddenly feasible without retirement. from past experience, writing down those ideas already give me the satisfaction that i'd get from implementing the stuff. this is also a parenting 101 trick: when the kid wants something that you don't want to give them, often giving them in fantasy calms them down more than enough. sometimes the fantasy satisfies even more than the actual reality since everything looks and feels better in imagination.

i know some people are afraid of writing down their ideas because they "fear" that other people steal them and then make all the money that would be "rightfully" theirs. for me there's nothing wrong with this. that's actually the best outcome! it means that the idea resonates with people and when some other person implements it all then it's like improving the world from an armchair without lifting a finger. as for the money making bit: i have a stable, good job, i don't care about the money bit. actually, i don't even want to care about the money bit. tbf, none of my queued up ideas are something that one could make money with. i just wanted to mention that i wouldn't mind sharing business ideas either. i wish other people would also be less secretive about their ideas. sometimes it's quite hard to talk with such secretive people.

anyways, the point is that my plan is now just to write down more ideas rather than actually try to implement them. i have this single "ideas" plain text file with lots of junk in it. with this approach i think it would be feasible for me to drain it. it always bothered me that this file just keeps growing and i never do anything about it. i'd totally want it to become an empty file. if i can do that, i'd feel like i reached the nirvana. and maybe when i'm old, retired and time millionaire, i can just look at my blog posts and select some idea from there so it's not like that the idea is lost after i got it out of my system.

however i still implement some ideas. but only if i know it won't take ages. ideally something that would only need a few hours, tops few days. i tried implementing fps games in the past but then i abandoned them. nowadays i'd try to implement a single gun, and just reuse the doom maps. so then i don't need to think about content at all, i just need to make the existing content work with my engine, which makes the project much smaller in scope. makes it more achievable if i ever decide to work on something like this. i even wrote about this idea in @/shooter.

# motivation

a problem with some of the longer projects is that i eventually run out of steam. i stop caring about the idea. for one, my little endeavours don't really have a target audience. there's nobody to please, there's nobody that would nag me to finish my goals. i'm aware of the idea of accountability partners, but i never tried that because i'm way too asocial to ask people to care about my silly things.

and besides, with bigger projects is often unclear when is it "done". if you work on a game and you are making everything, you could always add one more feature, weapon, map. or i once worked on a silly programming language but i gave up when i had to start working on its standard library. it felt just much work that nobody would care about anyways.

reducing the scope just enough that i can complete it in a few days helps. then i don't need to struggle with the motivation. however even small projects are often hard to finish especially if i take a longer break (e.g. a vacation) in the middle of it. when i come back, i see all the pending tasks needing completion, and i just can't decide where to start again anymore. it might be analysis paralysis.

i realized i need a rather softer way to get back into a project every time i sit down to work on it. i noticed that breaking down the tasks into trivial steps and writing those steps down really helps. i don't mean breaking down all the steps but just the immediate ones.

i started having a plain text file called "tasks" for my projects. each line in it is a "task". there are two types of tasks:

to keep the format simple, i just simply prefix the latter tasks with '!'. when i start out a project, i map out all the tasks i plan to do, generally in the form of large tasks. i then break the tasks down into smaller ones as i go. e.g. for this blog post i could for instance have the following tasks:

then i just go from top to the bottom and work on the tasks. if the topmost task is a large (!) task, then my task is to break it down and replace it with smaller tasks, that i'm actually capable of doing almost any time. as you can see in the above example, the topmost tasks are simple ones.

in the old times i tried to juggle the breakdown in my head. however being explicit about this really helps. especially being methodical about going from top to bottom, i no longer feel paralysed by the remaining work, since i can see the end right in front of me. and i don't really need to think hard about the next item to tackle at any given moment since that's given too. and it's quite satisfying to see the todo items disappearing as i'm committing my changes. all i need now is to give the project some dedicated time. if i do that, then i certainly make progress, and making progress is often quite motivating on its own.

# time

i believe that the time aspect was one of the most crucial aspects for me. i tried to work on my hobby projects either on the weekends or the evenings after work. but the time available for me was very spotty. the weekend usually didn't work out since i had to tend my family. in fact tending my family even frustrated me a bit since i couldn't use that time for my own stuff. the evenings didn't really work out reliably either. my kid goes to bed at somewhat random time which means some days i have more time, some days i have less, and that was frustrating. especially if i have less time remaining, i don't feel like starting anything since i feel that i won't be able to achieve anything. and besides, by the end of the day i was tired, i was at the lowest "energy levels", least motivated.

when my motivation was very high, i did manage to make some progress in the evenings and on some lucky weekends, but i did not make steady progress, it was just sporadic progress. i thought that my official work is my primary blocker here, and that if i retired, i'd be able to work on these things. all i need is just struggle through my work years. i was wrong.

earlier this year i decided to track my myopia progression. this entails me regularly measuring my focus reach with a measuring tape. later i'll write a post about this but for now the point is that i had a developed a regular habit. initially, while the motivation was high. i measured multiple times a day. then once i got the technique and the logging mechanics down, i wanted to minimize the time i spend on this, so i decided that i'd measure myself once daily.

i've set up a little daily reminder for myself (see the reminder file in my @/task post for my reminder mechanics). so basically this reminder was the first thing i've seen each morning, which meant it was the first thing i did whenever i first sat down in front of my machine. i've noticed that doing this little thing each morning wasn't a big effort.

later this year i got a new keyboard with a new layout (see my @/kbd post). i decided to track my typing speed once a day in the morning too. so each morning i measured my eyes and my typing speed. those were my "dailies". i found it actually quite nice to have something "done" each day. and i could do this even on the weekend mornings if i decided to wake up before everyone else. so i decided to wake up around 6am every day or a bit sooner if i could manage. in the summer times it's easier for me to wake up earlier thanks to the sun. but this meant i couldn't stay up too late, so i started having a "go to bed alarm" too and i went to bed at 10pm every day.

so there i was, up early in the morning and i could see from my apartment window that all the other people were still sleeping. it was quite a nice feeling being awake alone in the world. it felt like the right "me time". it felt like this is the time i should be doing something productive. so i decided to use these mornings to make progress on my personal projects.

it worked out great. it turns out i'm a morning person, mornings is when i have to most energy, morning is when my motivation is at the highest levels. and in the mornings i have more time flexibility too. if i need a few more minutes to finish something, i just start my work a bit later. in the time of the work from home this is quite easy to achieve.

# routine

i started doing this morning ritual for my todo items when i was setting up a new raspberry pi for my new eink screen. this contained lot of tasks, including tweaking xterm source so that it completely ignores colors on this machine. delving into a foreign codebase is a bit scary for me, but breaking down the tasks into very manageable pieces like "download the source", "build it", "make it work", "grep for color", etc really helped to maintain momentum. and i did all this before checking my emails or todo items for the day. avoiding the reality in the morning helped me to focus on my tasks, i wouldn't start obsessing about the daily churn that i have in front of me.

once i was done with the setup, i decided to use my mornings to finish @/peckmania. that worked out great too. then i decided to make a tool for myself to better manage my issues at work. it worked greatly, i managed to finish what i've set to. working on small little projects in the mornings became a routine. i'm writing this post in the mornings too.

and it was a good routine: it meant that every morning i achieved something, even if a little thing. it also lightened my mood, i felt a bit more productive at work too. i no longer had "zero days" where i achieved absolutely nothing which usually led to feeling a bit sad afterwards. if i missed a morning, i felt an uneasiness until i did my dailies.

there's another thing that really helped to not break the routine so far: not trying to do large things in parallel. if i want to read a book, watch through a tv show, play a video game, now i queue it up as "project". i just consume such things after i finished my current project. and i do them primarily in the morning. this way i have much fewer regretful thoughts about what i should be doing instead while binge watching a new anime. i know that i can enjoy that show or game without regret, since i'm between little projects, so it's like a mini holiday that i earned for myself.

eventually i picked up a few more routine habits over time. since i'm in switzerland, i feel like i should have some german comprehension. therefore i'm reading a page or two of german text every morning and then look up and write down all the unknown words i encounter in it. i use the online linguee site for this and with my eink screen it's quite nice that i still don't actually have to look at some bright screen in the morning. my computer time in the morning is almost like reading a book. hopefully over time this will improve my german vocabulary and i'll be able to navigate this german world a little bit better. actually this became the first routine i do in the morning, since some slow reading and writing is a very nice way to wake up.

in the old times, while i lived in dublin, i used to walk a lot every day. that's no longer true in zürich, especially now with all the work from home. so i decided to reinstate some morning walks in the nearby small forest. the fresh morning air is very nice. i just wish the forest was bigger so that i could walk more.

i also changed my evening structure. in the old days i just used to watch youtube or read the internet until i got bored and went to bed. for one, i now go to bed at 22:00 quite punctually. but before that i try to avoid the computer from 20:00 or so. i just take my notebook and freeform write into it about anything that comes to my mind, basically reflecting. i just really like the feeling of freewriting. this usually involves thinking about future plans and what i should be doing. a lot of good things have come out of this. i decided to do that german reading practice after hours of thinking what easy and fun thing i could do to learn some german. even deciding to start walking again was thanks to a lot of reflecting. without all this reflecting i feel like i'm on autopilot and never really consider trying new things, so i really need it. another benefit of just simply writing rather than consuming something is that it helps me start feeling tired sooner which in turn helps fall asleep.

though i'd add that this doesn't mean that i never procrastinate. sure, i do that when at work and i'm unsure what to do. however i don't procrastinate in the mornings, and that's the important point here.

# effect

when i add together all the things i mentioned above, they do magic for me. i think if i were to take to away any component, my system would fall apart. but thanks to them, i feel quite good about my days, i no longer feel that "only if i'd retire, could i really achieve my goals". progress towards one's goals can be made anytime with the right habits. one just need to find them with lots of reflection.

published on 2020-11-25

posting a comment requires javascript.

to the frontpage