Catching Up On Life

20 February, 2020

I haven’t played much of any games in the last month, because I’ve been busy dealing with a lot of overdue tasks that I’ve been putting off for so long that they’ve gone from Merely Unpleasant to A Huge Overwhelming Insurmountable Problem. It’s mostly “administrative” tasks-household and personal and money and insurance stuff. All the things I hate dealing with and put off as long as possible, in other words.

Last month I had an idea to try recording a “vlog” every day to help plan and execute all these tiny little annoying tasks I struggle to deal with. The idea was to take my smart phone and record a daily plan each morning while I make my coffee, thus making a permanent record, and making it much more difficult to ignore. It turned out to be a miraculous tool that has more-or-less completely changed my life. I’ve gotten more done in the last month than I did all last year.

I started putting the videos up on a new “personal” YouTube channel, not so much because I think they’re particularly entertaining, but as an example of the process in case anyone out there is looking for ideas on how to hold themselves accountable while digging themselves out of an overwhelming hole.

I didn’t realize it at first, but my new vlogging strategy is pretty similar to the process of writing a book, or writing software: If you break what looks like a very large impossible goal into very tiny daily incremental steps, you make a lot of progress on it. If you write 100 words a day, for example, it might not feel like you’re doing very much, but eventually you’ll end up with a book. Keeping a video record of my days helps me a lot because I can look back and see exactly how much progress I’ve been making. It’s probably not for everyone, but it’s working fantastically for me.

At some point this year I wanted to try to move more of my Internet presence to more of a personal “brand,” so this new channel will probably be the first step of that. (Consolidating my Internet stuff is also an overwhelming task that I’ve been putting off forever.) I won’t make a big deal out of it, but eventually I’ll do a whole post about this consolidation. Or maybe not. I don’t know.

P. S. I’m not planning to change anything about this site, except maybe the web host and the layout.

This page is a static archival copy of what was originally a WordPress post. It was generated from Markdown files with Hugo, a static web site generator. There may be formatting problems that I haven't addressed yet. There may be problems with missing or mangled images that I haven't fixed yet. There may have been comments on the original post, which I have archived, but I haven't quite worked out how to add them to the new site.