I haven’t been blogging as much as I would like. It’s certainly not from lack of material but simply time-constraints. Such is the life of a working father. I do have a narrow bandwidth to work on personal projects (i.e. not work or family) and recently that has been consumed by my Fudge Reboot work and TDOMF. Blogging has come in a weak second to these projects.
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Ann from GreyGhost contacted me a few days back about Reboot. Reboot is a roleplaying adventure I’ve been working on with the hopes of getting it published as a PDF. Read the tag for more posts on it. She can’t dedicate enough time to the project… but she’s passing me along to the guys behind Now Playing another Fudge RPG system derivative. If you like the Fate system from SOTC, you should probably check out Now Playing. The two systems, Fate and Now Playing, are considered the best Fudge implementations.

It’ll be interesting to see where things go next. I was making progress finishing updates to Reboot, so I’ll probably continue doing that, finish it and use it as a baseline for moving it to Now Playing.

I think I’ve managed to beat my procrastinating. I’ve started doing the necessary work for Reboot over the last week. However my pace is a bit slow.

The problem is, I’m still itching to do some coding. TDOMF is crying out for me to jump right in, I want to do some work on MOC(my roleplaying group’s webpage), Game Crafters’ Guildand have a number of ideas for some cool plugins for Wordpress. The danger is, when I code, I get wrapped up in it and swallows all my creativity. Reboot would be lost.

Apparently this is a psychology state called the Flow.

From Wikipedia:

I do get into the flow when I write too however coding has some additional “hooks” that make it worse. Two of the qualities of the flow are:

When I’m coding, I find it flows so easily and “effortlessnessly”. Given enough time I feel I can complete any objective I set. And with a lot of my PHP projects, the rewards are fairly instant. Code a little, see the results. Code more, more results. It makes coding addictive. While with writing, I have to write a bit and then read and rewrite. The process doesn’t come off as effortless. It’s an uphill process. And I’m not a writer by trade. The task of writing seems more difficult than coding.

When I’m in the flow it’s hard for me to switch tasks, almost impossible. If I start coding and get into that state, forget writing. In fact, more than once, I’ve caught myself in the flow with a personal coding project in work and find it very difficult to break out of it. I tell myself, on the hour I’ll stop, at fifteen minutes after the hour I’ll stop, etc. Also the flow sucks for debugging non-linear problems. You get lost in one thread of investigation and it becomes hard to switch to another thread, even impossible to explore multiple threads at once, which is often what you need to do.

Also interesting, when I looked up the flow on Wikipedia, there was this link at the bottom.

The main point of Kevin Chiu’s article is that you should break up the task your procrastination about into multiple tasks that you can order by perceived difficulty (easiest first). This falls inline with the way the flow works.

And, unsurprisingly, this is how I conquered my procrastination over Reboot. I started by listing all the things I wanted to do, then started inserting the new headings I wanted to fill and then I started writing…

I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t sit down and do it. I’ve set aside time to do it. I’ve said to myself, finish this and then do that. That didn’t work. I’ve put time limits on it, though thats more for writer’s block and I certainly not out of ideas. In fact, it’s the opposite, I know what needs to be done. So now I’m at the writing-about-procrastinating in the hopes the writing momentum will carry me through it (another trick to fighting writer’s block).

I don’t know if there is any real “trick” to getting around it. You just got to do it, right? But even the lure of money isn’t enough. I think, perhaps, I’m not in the right mind-space to do it. I’m not getting enough sleep or even just plain chill-out time. All my energy goes to work, Alice and home. This project should be enjoyable. I know once I start, I’ll just keep at it. But it’s not even the first hurdle or opposition that’s stopping me.

Anyone have any suggestions about beating procrastinating?

I’ve just made a new release of my ever popular Wordpress plugin: TDO Mini Forms (v0.6). Mostly backend changes but it should be even more stable than before.

However I’ve got to take a break from working on it. I’ve made four releases of the plugin in March alone! Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed working it. But at a cost of my other projects. My non-work time is split between family, relaxation and these. I just don’t have enough time to be able to really spread it out.

Specifically my roleplaying adventure Reboot is suffering. On the publishing side momentum is building but I haven’t been support it as much as should. So I’m going concentrate on it for a while.

I’m not abandoning TDO Mini Forms and if there are any bugs I will attempt to fix them. But I am shifting my priorities around. At some undetermined point in the future I will dive back into developing the plugin.