2024-W06 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• Did not write fiction at all. Instead, when I had Wednesday morning and Thursday free, I dug through my Four Thousand Weeks notes again, along with a follow-up in early 2023. I write more about this below in the, unironically, Four Thousand Weeks section of this EOW report. I’m slightly curious if this is detoxification or “clearing the decks”, but it’s most likely a mixture of both.
• But a bigger reason is probably a client project from December that’s hung on and I keep picking at when it should’ve been done back in, well, December. Of course, the moment I wrote that, I also realize I have had unrealistic expectations of how much I can do and how much I can push myself to do for almost a decade now. Aside from the intense energy I had back in 2008-2012… I don’t think I’ve completed a project with good energy in a while. Hit deadlines? Yes. But even that fell by the wayside by 2018 when I was on mostly retainers. AM told me once last year that I probably need to take a whole year off. I don’t disagree. But I’m not rich.
• No third point. Really, the detoxification is probably the most interesting and useful insight this week.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹.

Very few changes this week. Aside from editing on ROBOT last Sunday, didn’t do much else.

Daily Tracking

This will be the future space for tracking either daily time spent, or daily word count.

EOW Time Tracking

The following is based on logged productive hours using Timeular. Parameters and definitions in footnote².

In Summary:

• F = 5%
• X = 24% <– includes the journaling this week moving forward
• C = 53%
• P = 8%

Four Thousand Weeks

This past week, my son toured the university where his mother and father met. Not a field trip. Not a special event. A tour of consideration. So yeah, there’s that. But as I mentioned above, a lot of the non-actual-fiction-writing activities came about because on Thursday, I spent a great deal of energy reviewing my notes from Four Thousand Weeks.

A thought occurred to me this past weekend. I’m wondering if I’m choosing journaling over actual-fiction-writing because I’m detoxifying. And by detoxifying, I mean this: Several epiphanies-in-combination over the past month has occurred to me.

1. I’ve been blessed with excessive energy my entire life. It’s how I’ve taken on so much and so many extracurriculars. This includes hobbies. However…
2. As I got older (and busier), that energy and time has shrunk significantly. And looking back at the past several years (and in relation to my rereading of my Four Thousand Week notes), I’ve realized I don’t actually spend time on my hobbies, so much as “circle” around them.
3. HOWEVER – this didn’t stop me from doing the above said “circling”. And that constant consumption (the shopping, ranking, listing, reading reviews, browsing forums, collecting, filling head with, organizing said lists, engaging on Discord, Mastodon, Twitter, subreddits of said hobbies, making friends in those same hobbies, backing on Kickstarter/Backerkit of cool indie projects, etc. etc.) still took up a lot of my mental bandwidth.
4. This is mental bandwidth that could be freed up to allow actual boredom and creativity to flourish… instead of constantly filling it with distraction and curiosity of the above.

Hence the detoxification. By cutting out the “hobbies-that-aren’t-actual-hobbies”… I am now giving myself psychic space to breathe again, and because of that, I am confronting my Four Thousand Weeks more directly. The thing with “hobbies-that-aren’t-actual-hobbies” is they are distractions in the vein Burkeman talks about. I am no longer circling around the “hobbies-that-aren’t-actual-hobbies” as much now. I am hyper-aware when I do circle my “hobbies-that-aren’t-actual-hobbies” and recognize when I’m tempted to buy another RPG, board game, or book, or shop for something new/different or old/nostalgic. I continue to be disgusted by the things I have backed and are only just shipping now. For example, Games Workshop and Fedex has informed me my copy of Rick Priestley’s original Warhammer rules from 1987 has shipped. Why did I buy this? Why? I have never played or bought a single 40k miniature in my life. I have no intention of buying or painting or playing 40k. And yet, here we are. I have a copy of the 1987 ruleset that started it all arriving this coming week. Why?

Of course – I also recognize that detoxification could ALSO be an elaborate ruse for “clearing the decks” too. I don’t know. We’ll see how the creativity productivity goes this coming week.

Book Reading

• Finished The Vietnam War: An Intimate History (2017) and Invisible Man (1952). See live commentary on Invisible Man here
• I’ve pledged my first crowdfunded project of 2024: DCC’s Purple Planet module. It won’t be charged until early March. If I can keep up this “spending fast” for 2024, it will have been a little over two months. It’s a silly metric to track, but the awareness of it prevents me from hoarding books, games, collectibles, RPGs, etc. It’s a forcing function for consumption if you will.
• Started Pride and Prejudice (1813) and also We’ve Always Lived in the Castle (1952)

Archive of all EOW reports here