Category: Personal Development

It is commonly understood that it takes 15 minutes to get into The Zone, the state of being where you can do no wrong and everything just flows. Getting interrupted for even a moment can disrupt that state, requiring another 15 minutes to enter again. Still, once you’re in The Zone, hours can go by before you even notice. Lunch, dinner, and bed times all fly by before you know it. It’s great. On the other hand, leaving code alone too long can really disrupt your work.

I came back to working on Oracle’s Eye after leaving the project alone for a month. Normally when I start up a session, I can check out a copy from my Subversion repository. This time, I find that what’s checked in and what is checked out is different. Apparently I made some changes but wasn’t finished with whatever task I had. I didn’t want to check in changes that would break my build, so I left them unchecked.

Coming back to them a month later, I have no idea what I was trying to do at the time. I think I was working on improving frame-rate independent movement, but where did I stop? How do I continue? Now I have to decide between throwing out the work I did before and work on the last known, good, and checked-in code or sludging through the new code and trying to remember what I was trying to do. If anything, it shows that I really need to be more disciplined about working on the project. Leaving it alone too long results in wasted effort trying to remember what I was doing and what I need to do.

It is the complete opposite of being in The Zone. When working on any non-trivial project, it is perfectly fine to focus on one aspect. You might forget about some details in one component of your engine, but you’ll know another component like the back of your hand. You have to get that intimate with your code when you work on it so closely and frequently, and it is perfectly normal to forget details about a part of the project that you haven’t looked at in some time. If you leave the entire project alone, however, the entire project slowly gets forgotten.

If I was working on game development full-time, I probably wouldn’t have the problem of leaving a project alone for a month. Since I am working part-time, I have to fit game development into my schedule that already has a full-time job plus all of the tasks of living a life: laundry, cooking, transportation, reading, gaming, paying bills, eating food, having a social life, etc. It is very easy to feel too tired and say, “I’ll work on the project another night.”

Too easy.

To help, I’ve started to think about the end results. What will it be like when the game is finished? When will I get the first sale? How many sales will I get within the first month? How many people will play MY game? How many will give me feedback to make it better? What kind of postmortem will I write?

Each time I think about it, it motivates me to work on the project. Each day I delay is one more day that I need to wait before I can let someone play the game. Each hour I waste is one more hour that’s needed before I could see my first sale. When I let go of an opportunity to work on the project, I also lose the results.

Just thinking about what it will be like when I am finished is inspiring. I will need to remember to do so if I ever get into a slump again.

From Workstyle (which unfortunately requires an account in order to post comments), The Pentachronic Time Scale talks about the five categories of time in which to do a task.

1. now
2. sooner
3. whenever
4. later
5. never

It’s a simple post, but it sure gets you thinking! How many tasks should be in the first category? How many Someday/Maybe projects are sticking around on your list of things to do that shouldn’t be there? And what should be put under the last category that you don’t currently have there?

Do you have a quick task that isn’t being done Now? Are you going to do it Sooner or Later?

Have you been worrying about an uncompleted task? Nothing can be more tiring, but maybe you can decide that it isn’t worth doing. Problem solved! No more stress! No more fatigue! If it is worth doing, then you should decide when to do it. Then do it!

Steve Pavlina’s Raise Your Standards complements my post from yesterday about changing your mindset. The idea is that if you can’t honestly say that you’ve done your best, you should make some changes. Raise your standards, and you can clarify what to do to improve your situation. Otherwise, you’ll simply accept it as normal, even though it is suboptimal. The enemy of the great is the good.

I know that my current situation is a huge improvement over just a few years ago. At that time I would coast through life and do the minimum necessary to get by: go to class, take the tests, read only the books required. I’d work in the part-time job that I’ve had for years because I didn’t have any compelling reason to work somewhere else. The work wasn’t challenging me anymore, but it wasn’t too hard either. I just had to put time in, and out came money. It wasn’t much money, but since I wasn’t doing anything that needed money, it was good enough. When I did take on something, I would do it well. I would get great grades in class, and other people would ask me for help at work. I had no problem doing quality work; I just had problems with motivating myself to do more than expected.

Recently, however, I decided to raise my standards and change my mindset. I started asking myself why I was doing certain things. I wanted to know I had good reasons. If I didn’t, I would stop those actions. Why was I going to graduate school? I didn’t have a good enough reason, so I stopped going. If I did have good reasons, I would ask follow-up questions, such as “Can I do something better to accomplish the same tasks?” and “Can I improve what I am doing to get better results?”

I started programming on my own again. Until then, I was only coding in class. I figured that I would have enough practice in my computer science courses, but I was woefully underestimating the importance of practice as well as the amount of practical experience my classes would provide.

I started reading a lot more books. I’ve always loved reading, but I would usually stick to game development books and the occasional piece of fiction. In the past year, I read a wider variety of books. Besides programming and game development books, I read about personal productivity, grammar, history, marketing, health, and business. I read some classic fiction, science-fiction, and mystery books as well. Add magazines, RSS feeds, and newsletters, and I have been reading a lot more than I have in the past. Reading so much allows me to think better, and if the brain is the most important part of my body, I’ll keep reading.

I started keeping track of what I was doing at any given point in time. In the past, I never had a schedule or an agenda outside of class and work, so it was very easy for me to drop whatever I was doing to do something else. Now, I have certain afternoons dedicated to game development that only get pushed off my calendar if I consciously push them myself.

I started eating better. I started exercising again..mostly. I started to write a lot more, specifically writing posts for this blog. I started to regularly attend meetings with different groups.

The best part? I know that even with all of these improvements, I can do better. Much better. I just need to raise my standards.

Perhaps your peers will tell you you’re doing just fine. But I’m not going to let you off so easily. I say that if you aren’t doing your best, then you’re a loser. I have more respect for the homeless drug addict that’s doing the very best he can to pull his life back together than for the yuppy prince who settles for socially acceptable, above-average results without breaking a sweat.

In a way, it kind of reminds me of a story in the Bible in which Jesus notices that most people donate to the Temple from their abundance while the poor woman donated what was probably all she had. What she gave was a huge sacrifice for her while the rich, even though they gave much more money, were not sacrificing at all.

While I may struggle with my current standards from time to time, overall I can say that I’ve met them. I’ve improved my life significantly in the past year. Now I need to raise them again. It is part of the reason I joined The Thousander Club. Rather than just try to do more of the same, I want to aim higher. Even if I don’t make it, I’ll definitely see an improvement over last year. I don’t want to see too many small, incremental improvements that take no effort, although will probably make a number of those throughout the coming year. I want to push against what I think are my limits. I want to get to my best faster, and taking baby steps to get there seems too slow.

Over at GameProducer.net, 1-Minute Solution to Getting Things Done gives the advice that if you have something to do that can be completed within a minute, then do it. David Allen would use two minutes as the time limit.

The point, of course, is that there is no reason why such a small task should remain uncompleted for too long. Maybe you need to put it off to handle something more important, but you must have some moments during your day when you could take care of a small task.

It won’t take me more than a couple of minutes to pay off a parking ticket, but I’ve been putting it off. Two days have come and gone, and I still have an unpaid parking ticket in my bag. I could pay it online easily, but I decided not to do so. Maybe the idea of taking out my wallet and getting my credit card number is too painful, especially right after Christmas? I don’t know.

What I do know is that it is easy to find other things to do instead, but at the end of two days, I had plenty of time to handle this task. So what did I do with that time? I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you. Essentially, I’ve lost that time. Otherwise, I would be able to say, “See? At this time I was busy doing something more important.”

I’ll handle that parking ticket now. Or maybe when I get home…

It is definitely too easy to put things off. Quick tasks can be done now. Who knows? It might even give you momentum. B-)

Newton’s first law of motion is also called the Law of Intertia:

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

Everyone’s heard it before as it applies to physics, but it applies to your personal life as well.

I recently created a small list of things that I fear. Under each topic, I listed the things about it that might make me afraid of it. It was a great exercise that helped me identify my fears as well as why they scare me. I’ve found that most of the time, fear is the result of not knowing. Getting a new job. Moving out of my parents’ home into an apartment. Starting a business. They’re all scary because they all involve unknowns.

Getting a new job is scary because I don’t know what it will be like or what it will entail. What if I find I can’t do what is expected of me? What if I end up working a lot of overtime? Staying in my current job is easier. Moving out is scary because I don’t know how much money I’ll need for certain expenses. I’ll need to actually start doing my own laundry and cooking my own meals and shopping for my own groceries and paying my own utilities. All of these take up money and time I didn’t need to worry about before. Staying at home is easier. Starting a business is scary because I could be entering into a world of legal trouble. I don’t know what legal obligations I have. Maybe there is an obscure tax I missed? I could get into a lot of trouble. Not going to into business is just easier.

So fear really is the “little death that brings total obliteration”. Fear makes it more appealing to stick with the familiar. After all, you are already there, so why change? Change seems difficult. Deal with the devil you know rather than the one you don’t.

Of course, if I let fear get the better of me, I’d never do anything. I’d stay at home, stay in a boring and unfullfilling job, and never start my business. I’d be stuck in a rut. Once I started to analyze what it is that makes these things scary, I found that it was just due to my lack of questions. That is, I had vague reasons for why something was causing me fear, and those reasons would have been vanquished easily had I asked the correct question.

For example, while I might not know what a new job would entail, I also have to remember that I didn’t know exactly what my current job would entail before I applied for it. Besides, if the new job turns out to be wrong for me, I can always just stop. I can put in my two weeks’ notice, and find a new job. Until I consciously thought about it, I had some vague idea that a new job would be overwhelming. Focusing on those vague thoughts helped me to clarify them, and I found that it was mostly just fear of something different that I didn’t know well at all.

What does it all have to do with the first law of motion? One of the things I noticed was that it is very easy to stick with what you know. Fear makes the choice easier for you. I can stay in my current job or at least until the company fires me. To change jobs, it would involve updating my resume, sending it in to companies, going in for interviews, sending cover letters and thank you letters, and it all seems like a lot of work. Until I do something different, my intertia keeps me where I am. I continue on the path that I’m on.

The other part of the law of intertia? Once I submitted my resume and made a call, I found that I was being called in for an interview. Now what? Well, it’s a lot easier to keep going once I’m going. It isn’t a huge ordeal to get my suit cleaned and go in for the interview. If there is a second interview, I can easily go to that one too. My path would be on the way to a new job, and once I start, it is a lot easier to keep going.

Finding an apartment was a vague idea a month ago. Then one day I went in to an apartment hunting service, and shortly after looking at a couple of places I had put down the deposit. Within the week, the first month’s rent was due. At the end of this week, I’ll be moving in. I wasn’t getting an apartment, and then all of a sudden I had one.

I’ll be forming GBGames into an LLC this month. I’ve been talking about it for a few months, and I was vaguely thinking about starting a business for a couple of years. If the law of intertia holds, I’m sure that I’ll be surprised by the quickness of progress I’ll be making…which by definition means that it shouldn’t be surprising, so I’m not sure how that makes sense.

Anyway, the point is that there are two important aspects of the law of intertia. One, you should check to see if you are doing anything just because it is what you have always been doing. “It’s what we’ve always done” isn’t a good enough excuse. You should know that what you are doing is exactly what you want to be doing. Two, you should make sure to start doing what you aren’t doing yet. If you think you should be moving along a certain path and aren’t, then start moving down that path. The sooner you do, the sooner you’ll make progress. Once you make some progress, it will be easier to make more progress. One foot in front of the other eventually completes the 1,000 mile journey.

Happy New Year!

I’ve never taken New Year’s resolutions seriously before, but since I’ve been making more conscious decisions this past year, I think it might be appropriate to do so this time.

What I would like to see accomplished in 2006:

• The improvement of the Chicago Indie Game Developers Club (details to follow)
• The formation of GBGames, LLC by the end of the second week of January
• The completion of Oracle’s Eye by the end of March
• The creation of an actual web storefront for GBGames.

What I would like to improve about myself:

• I would like to improve my ability to focus on the task at hand. I find that I am too easily distracted and will waste time that I can’t afford to lose. When you work in your spare time, you have to be able to guard it.
• I would like to be able to play more video games. I have talked about the importance of playing more games in order to improve my game making abilities, but last year didn’t see much of an improvement. I intend to schedule regular “game research” times during the week/month. I’ll also track the games I’ve played since it is much harder to measure change without knowing what I needed to improve.
• I want to read more. I almost made my books reading goal last year, but this year I am focused on reading one book per week from the start.
• I would like to live a bit more consciously. This past year I realized that while I am taking more control of my own life away from blind circumstance and random influences, I still perform actions that were on a whim rather than purposeful.
• I intend to take a more active role in the Association of Shareware Professionals. The more I put in, the more helpful it becomes as a resource, and the more contacts I can make.

I’ll think of these resolutions as my personal goals. I’ll also create a plan to accompany them. Of course, the great thing about plans is that they can change. If this plan turns out to be too ambitious, I can update it. I think I will check over this plan again at the end of March to see how I’m doing.

What are you resolving to do this coming year?

Gary Preston at Figment Games wrote about The Muse, that inspiration which creates a fury of activity at the start of a project. But what happens when the Muse leaves you? What keeps you going?

Self-discipline. It’s what keeps you going even when you don’t feel like going anymore. It’s what allows you to finish a game when the rest of the world would have gotten bored. It’s the master key to riches when applied toward helping you take control of your own mind, according to Napolean Hill. Successful people do the task that needs doing even when they don’t feel like doing it. They don’t let their feelings control their actions. Being in charge of your actions involves being in charge of your mind, and self-discipline is what helps you to do so.

Either way, there is one problem I’ve encountered more than any other this year. Its just too tempting to check your email every two minutes, read through the development forums to find better ways to code something, or read up on new development techniques. On going research and keeping up with technology is certainly a valid part of development, but doing too much can do more harm than good, especially when it eats into the time you’ve set aside for programming.

Only every two minutes?!? Gary is amazingly productive compared to me. B-)

Jay Barnson wrote about the importance of lists and mentioned his experience with a lack of productivity that made me think he was watching me at home the night before…what a creep!

I had most of an evening dedicated to working on Oracle’s Eye. The next thing I know, it is 11PM and I haven’t done much to improve the game at all. Maybe I changed some code, but I didn’t really have a good direction or focus. And even after I’ve posted about planning my next steps!

I also noticed that my Next Actions list isn’t strictly a list of next actions. I already knew that it wasn’t perfect, but a number of items have been sticking around for longer than I thought they would. I put a new entry: “Analyze/Update this list” for when I had time to do so.

When I read through the items, I realized that the problem was that many of the items weren’t next actions at all. A lot of them were objectives or goals. I wrote down what results I wanted, but I didn’t write down the actionable steps needed to get there. For example, my entry “Create level loader for Oracle’s Eye” isn’t a next action. It is too vague for me to do anything with, requires me to try to remember what I need to do, and so it is really easy to gloss over it and try to find something else to do. Next action items on a list are supposed to be effortless at reminding me what I need to do. I should not need to question what my actual action is; it’s right there on the page!

I haven’t been happy with only getting an hour to work on the game project during a session. It doesn’t seem right that I can sit down at the computer for two to five hours and only get minutes of actual work completed. By not having specific and clear lists, I’m sabotaging my productivity and making it a lot easier to procrastinate, and as Barnson says, “managing yourself can be a trick”.

As for my list, I think that rather than fixing it so that they are all Next Actions, I should recognize that the list has Projects. I could then create a few Project pages in my notebook (or at least get a good excuse for buying a new notebook for each Project) and list Next Actions under each one. It will force me to write down actual Next Actions, which will make it easier for me to work on my tasks when I do get a chance.

The next time I sit down for project development, I shall be awesomes.