Distractions
12 January 2025
I've noticed that I'm generally pretty distracted lately, at least in my free time when I know I should be working on personal projects (and I have plenty to work on).
Steam is a big one. I spend probably more than half my time on Steam browsing the various pages than actually playing games: Activity page (why do I care what everyone else is playing?), my own profile (like I'm so special?), store page (like I don't have enough games), and even my own written reviews (did I forget what I wrote or something?).
GitHub "home" feed is another one. Not sure what I'm looking for here. Mostly I think I'm looking to see if anyone has interacted with my repositories, but perhaps I should actually do more work on those projects instead of religiously checking their activity.
Lately, the YouTube creator dashboard is a big one too. I've been making some videos about my Pokémon romhack, so I've been subconsciously aware of the fact that I could get some new comments to read. I'm not used to getting attention on videos, so I guess I need to learn how to not obsessively check the dashboard all the time.
I'm particularly ashamed of this next one: my own website and blog. I mean… I don't know what I expect to be different. Those don't change unless I make changes to them. But I think what's happening here (and perhaps this applies to most of these distractions) is that I'm doing too much admiration of my previous works. I dunno — I think it's part of my perfectionism. I like to review all the little details on my website and profiles, like the way things are written, how they're organized, and so forth. But at the same time, if I'm "happy" with something I've done, I like to… keep looking at it. For some reason.
I also browse my notes app in my phone far too often for it to be a useful practice. Really, I should be looking at those ideas once I've pursued some other ones first. That is to say: I should actually work on my projects!
But maybe it is the case that I have too many in-progress projects. I really should keep only one going at a time, if possible (but that might be difficult — maybe two or three is more realistic).
The point is that I need to make an effort to stop yielding to distractions. So, I'll try to do that.
— Derek Andersen