Growing Pains

July 12th, 2024

Getting things going isn't as easy as I thought it would be. Part of it is that there's a lot on my plate. Not necessarily a stressful amount, nothing time-sensitive, but it's a lot to choose from, so it's hard not to think about the opportunity cost before starting anything.

A big chunk of the issue is probably time management. I mostly need to schedule a time in the day to do stuff. I recently started playing a game with some friends later in the day, which pretty much takes over my whole afternoon. I'd have to work either at night, which wouldn't be too long since I started sleeping earlier, or in the morning, before anything else happens.

It's probably more realistic to get used to working in the morning, classes tend to start around then. I did also buy a game (not the one from before) during the summer sale a few days ago, so that probably tanked my free time since then. I am keeping a rough estimate of how I spent my time each day, and two of the six days between the last post and now were spent productively. I'm more lenient with how I choose that, but some things did get done.

Got the references for the drawing I mentioned wanting to make last week. Got VSC to recognize the C++ stuff I already had installed. That took a lot more work than it should've. You need to open up a special developer version of CMD, but my search bar wasn't opening it, so I needed to figure out how to fix that which took a bit of time. The Windows search function choosing not to open random programs was a long time problem, but I usually knew where the file was and could open it through there. Not here. Had to remove as many files from the folder with the search function as I could until Windows noticed and replaced it. Then, it worked.

Anyways, there's something else I've been drawing that I'll probably need to at least partially restart and iterate on later, which is more of a pain. I'm procrastinating a bit since it's easy to not want to do that. That won't get posted here, but it's nice to have a place to complain in so I'm mentioning it anyways.

As a sort of psuedo to-do list, I'll note down some things I wanna get work done on by next week. For the website, I wanna shave down the template I've been using more, since I'm sure there's a lot of dead weight that I'm not using and getting rid of it will help me figure out how it works. Also want to get started on the sketch for the drawing I got references for. I don't know how hard it'll be, I'm moving a decent amount out of my comfort zone and honestly, it's been awhile since I've drawn anything. (Starting on that other thing was dipping my toes back in, as bad as it went.) Aside from those, there's an online programming course I wanted to get started on, and I mentioned the setbacks already so hopefully nothing else goes as wrong.

The goal isn't exactly to finish all of them, but to do as much as I can. I tend to be pretty easy on myself, so I'm not putting any limits on how much I work, but I want to go for at least an hour before I say that I got something done.