More on that Accomplishment Thing

Well, another two months, and so another update on how this is going.

DVDs and TV shows continue to be the stars of this. I’m almost finished Season 3 of Voyager (watch for comments on the first three seasons soon) after having finished Agents of SHIELD and Agent Carter. I also finished GI Joe, Star Trek the Animated Series, and Daria, and am on Season 3 of 2 Broke Girls. I’m on pace to finish both in the next couple of months which will let me move on to other things. I’ve also managed to watch some movies and get those off my plate. So it’s going quite well.

Reading is going all right as well. My pace is slower than I’d like — I’m currently reading a Thrawn book and have had a couple of recent days when I’ve read two pages maybe — but I’m still getting through things. That Thrawn book is the last thing I want to get through before turning to classic literature, and while I have a couple of history books that I was trying to get through first I’ve stopped because I really want to get started on those other works.

Video games went better but have now crashed out completely. I finished Sunrider Academy and started playing Knights of Pen and Paper, but work has gotten extremely busy which pretty much kills any time I had to play video games. I’ve poked around a bit with the retro games but in general have better things to do than play video games, and was having trouble deciding what game to play anyway. I’ll have to see if things change once work settles down.

And projects went terribly. I’ve made starts on a couple of things but haven’t started on the AI stuff I wanted to do. This is despite the fact that doing these things is officially in my schedule even when I’m busy. I’ve still spent more time playing video games despite that not being on my schedule. So this is something that I really need to work on.

However, I have kept up with the blog and am even settling into a better routine, and with the “Philosophy and Pop Culture” posts always have some philosophy in a week, which is good.

So, why is it that DVDs and reading work so well while everything else doesn’t? Well, it’s because I always watch TV to settle down before going to sleep. Thus, I always have some time carved out to watch DVDs. And since I read while watching TV, that gives me a set time to read as well. This time isn’t vulnerable to distractions because I’m not going to do anything else that evening and anything else that I want to do I can do while watching. So they’re the only things that get a set and consistent amount of time each week. And if things get a little busier or things take longer than I thought, I’ll still have some time set aside to watch something. So not only are they at convenient times in the schedule, they’re also more flexible.

With projects and video games, I not only need to set aside time to do them, in order to make any real progress I have to dedicate significant time to them. If I have an hour, I can watch three half-hour shows, but am not going to make any programming or writing progress. I might be able to squeeze a blog post in. If things take longer than I expected or I get distracted, then that will kill that session for those things. When I get busy, that only makes it worse as I have less time to do them in the first place, which only makes it easier for me to end up in a position where I don’t really have the time to do them when I was supposed to.

I’m going to try to make more of an effort with projects in the next couple of months, although I won’t for video games. We’ll see if this makes a difference.