Motivation and Accountability
Motivation is hard, especially when external pressures are lacking.
I’ve never been particularly good at incentivizing myself to
get shit done. Self-deprivation and reward are wasted on
me. I’m an adult, dammit! If I want to eat an entire party-sized bag of
salt & vinegar chips right before dinner, you better believe I will.
And you better believe I will suffer in mouth-burning, gassy dehydration
for the rest of the day. As is my gods-given right as a warm-blooded
mammal.
Anywho, all this is to say that I’ve learned that I need external
motivation if I ever expect to get shit done. One thing
that I’ve found is a spectacular motivator is money! Alas, I am one of
over 110,000 software industry employees who’ve been laid off just this
year alone. I’ll save my opinions on the cancer of generative AI for
another time, as that’s not the point of this post. While I search for
gainful employment that doesn’t iron all of the beautiful wrinkles out
of my brain, I decided to reassert my dominance on objective reality and
defeat my motivation demons. Which brings us to the big question.
Okay, but how though?
Great question, I’m so glad I asked! Give me a minute while I think
of a good excuse answer.
I can summarize my grand plan in one word: Accountability! This
website will be a public-facing demonstration of my get’ing
of shit done. And you, dear reader, are the kind but stern
force that will hold my feet to the fire. By building a nice, clean
website that is fast, efficient, and can render on a potato, I will have
a space where I can be proud to talk about the what, why, and how of my
various projects.
So, what can you expect?
I’ve already set up a little ../about page that will eventually summarize me as a person and a professional computer toucher. I will talk about my experiences and interests. Like an informal CV or a portfolio.
There is also a ../projects page where I will post blurbs about my active projects that I’m working on. You will also be able to follow project-specific tags for progress updates via RSS. Projects that have either been shelved or completed will be put in their own little silos, archived, or otherwise labelled appropriately. I haven’t decided yet.
Where to start
We covered the why, how, and what of this website. Now let’s delve into the future.
The first project in terms of priority is this website. It will likely change in small ways over the short term as I unpack all my boxes, decorate the shelves, and move the all of my furniture around, but once it’s stable then I can start to focus on other, arguably, more interesting things.
You are of course welcome and encouraged to pop in semi-regularly, or subscribe to the site or tag-specific RSS feeds to keep up-to-date. Share it with your grandma, as long as she doesn’t mind the occasional casual swear. I’m hoping to weasel my way into a little supportive community of creative weirdos who are all accountable to each other. If that sounds interesting to you, maybe we can share links!
That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading this far. I’m anxious and excited to actually make something. So I’ma gonna do that now.