re: How do I pick something and stick with it?

Posted Mon 27 Dec, 2021.

This is a response (kind of?) to:

How do I pick something and stick with it?

This may or may not work for Jeffrey, that seems to be trying to do many things at the same time:

> Basically, within a span of thirty minutes, it's like: I'll work on the course on A Cloud Guru. But my Golang project, though. Perl, Raku. C++ problems on Exercism. Reading about init systems and why Systemd is bad. Perusing the runit documentation. Oh, I should probably update my VPS. I should write a gemlog post about my current thoughts on Systemd and my new computing setup with Void Linux musl, and why I enjoy using Void Linux. But I should really just focus on the A Cloud Guru course. I should scroll my Facebook feed and see what's happening. I'm going to respond to that comment. I'm going to comment on that other post. Now on to Twitter. Oh this Very Cool Person on Twitter posted a C++ tutorial, I should read that and then work on C++ problems on Exercism.

>

> What the literal fuck.

Which is impressive on itself. My problem may be different because it also includes a big part of procrastination but, if don't pay attention, I also tend to spread myself way too thin and that sounds similar to what Jeffrey is describing.

I guess it also depends on what you want to accomplish. In my early 20s my lack of focus meant I knew a bit of a lot of things, and that helped to present myself as a generalist on some fields (e.g. system administration); but now I appreciate more going further and being expert on a limited number of things.

Currently, with a job, a young family to take care of, and life in general; I can only do one thing in the little time I have left for myself. Getting to that conclusion wasn't easy.

I got a first gist of what works for me doing the "One game a month" challenge. I was an amateur gamedev never finishing any of my games. So I was reading about it and mentioned to my wife how crazy that challenge was, and she suggested I should do it: either you accept defeat and stop making games, or you get to the other side finishing 12 games on a year. And I did it, and I finished the games; and it was a struggle, but I learnt a few things about making games and about myself.

Thinking about it, it finally clicked when we were expecting our first son. My wife suggested that, because my free time was likely to disappear for a while, I should do that electronics project I had written down in my "some day" list. I re-learnt electronics and went from zero to build a reasonable complex project -an AVR based 8-bit microcomputer; you can search for it on GitHub: Dan64-, all in 3 months. That ultra focus on finishing something, that's what I have been chasing since then.

First of all, you may have noticed that my wife is smart (and I love her!), and secondly you may be asking: what about all those interesting things you would like to do as well? That's the hard part: say no. Focus on one thing, with a plan, a finishing line, and ideally a deadline -can be a soft one-. Keep at it until you cross that finish line. For me the hard part is getting things moving, but then is just keeping the inertia.

That is how I have managed to release a few games and learnt a few new skills for my job, by not doing a lot of other things.

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