I’ve started the year with a new podcast which has been helping me get my mind back into the right state. The easiest way to look at my troubles would be procrastination. All of my delayed personal projects happen to fall into this pit of doom. If I didn’t have other things I can do, I would stop having excuses for why I don’t finish things.
In a shortened manner, they share the following in the second episode:
You’ve got to understand that in this room, there are two of you.
What’s Stopping You? | Imp And Skizz Podcast (Ep02)
…
One of them will tell you that you can’t do it. The other will say the first one isn’t welcome in this room. Let’s talk to the second one.
It isn’t only about the ‘nay saying‘ side of the mind, it’s also the fact that one becomes complacent. Yeah, a word from the mid 17 century, “you can’t afford to be complacent about what you want to achieve,” it is the act of showing smug, or uncritical, satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements. The issue is it’s too easy to stop putting in effort, and therefore never complete what you want to achieve.
That brings the first step:
Let’s do it.
I’ve been working with the mindset of ‘I will become a member of the work gym‘ for over a year, now. My personal exercises have been off, and on, over the last 8 months. For that reason, my exercise app work has been off and on. While I shared with colleagues, ages ago, I am making one, I’ve been too comfortable with an unusable incomplete project.
Sure, I should have moved it over to C# MAUI, and rather finished my original app Active e-Fitness, first. I became too comfortable with the incomplete app, so I gave up working on it. Since starting to listen to this podcast I have revived my efforts. I’ve moved it up to a C# 12 MAUI project so I can eventually also release on iOS devices and have a strict Kanboard (running on my RPi Zero 2 W) project I’m pushing myself to finish.
In episode 74, and episode 75, they talk about content creation for the most part, but the part which stuck to me the most was the 5-minute plan. It starts with ‘never skip more than 1 day in a row‘ then continues with ‘and even if you can’t do it all, start with 5 minutes.‘ Sure, I’m shortening what is shared a ton today, but it is a great podcast with super interesting ideas that come across. The problem always lies in the fact that you ‘don’t manage to do something‘ is always ‘because you somehow don’t want to.‘
It isn’t about forcing yourself to do anything, rather, it’s to try swap your mind to wanting to work towards what you already want. Make the goals small to start off, force yourself to stick to them, and slowly increase them. Even just with a simple task for that goal, like ‘do 10 push-ups a day for 3 of 7 days.‘ Then after 7 days you do the next 7-day small challenge of 11 a day for 4 days instead of 3. Increase it in a small manner over time, and you will build the habit of working towards your goal.
It isn’t the difficulty of the goal that stops you, it’s just that not working hard enough to organise achieving it for yourself always prevents you from achieving it.
After Thoughts
As a side note, the featured image above, was the Kanboard this morning as I started to finalise the project. I did tons of work in the previous few days, I just needed to finally ‘sprint to the finishing line.’ At the time of this post, it’s at the new state that looks like this:
Finally, I have a new way to see what I spend time on, and I’m loving it. You should checkout ActivityWatch for your own computer use. It can be cool to see where I focus my use of my computer.
The one thing I try my best to do is not spend too much time on the computer. At work it helps to walk around, a little, while I decide how to solve a problem. At home, with nobody to interact with, I used to get into a groove and lose too much time to programming so I wouldn’t get anything done. Since I started to track my use, I’m excited to say I started to take enough breaks so my project completion should become way quicker.