Success:
No more tech “work” outside of the job. No more side projects. (Which part of me regrets, since side projects are a key to staying sharp and up-to-date.)
Fail:
Must reduce Twitter, Facebook, and social networks so far – optimize, but not remove completely.
Reading non-tech books… still slow. Reading news/articles/blogs online is much more tempting, but isn’t that a junk diet?
Now I think I’ve been hard on myself in getting myself to write in this blog. Hard on myself, like I am on many other things. So I’lll relax a bit, and be happy even if some of the stuff I’m writing remains in drafts. I should be satisfied that I get to empty my head.
I saw my psychiatrist last Saturday. (It’s a “checkup” for most doctors, but a “talkup” for those like me who can’t be examined with physical evidence.) I told him about some recent problems with obsession. I was fanatically obsessed about being perfect in something. I was getting very angry with myself for falling short.
So in writing, I shall let go.
11 days into the new year, and I’m struggling. I need your help in getting my blog started again.
I know I have a lot of things to write about, but I need more convincing. Or encouragement.
If you know me, please suggest a topic that you know I could write about. Or ask a question.
Help me remove my self-censorship filters, too.
I’m not going to have a “summary of 2008″ post, as others do. While I’d love to, I don’t feel I could spare all the details here. Instead, I’ll just share the insights I’ve had through the past few weeks, as well as what I’ve been doing.
I’ve been a computer techie for a long time. I made it my course of study, and then my work. I made it my recreation as well. That is what I’m going to change.
A big part of 2008 was unhappiness. A big part of that unhappiness was having no time for other things – in my definition. Through the years I have had some tech-related goals which I didn’t achieve: master many programming languages/systems, become a successful/famous open source developer. My own work for the past few years was good, but these goals lay outside of work. So, what I wanted to do was work on tech for work, and even more tech after work.
That has to go. A number of events have shown to me that I was obsessing too much with things – an unhealthy form of perfectionism. Perfectionism that leads to unhappiness because the Perfect can’t be achieved. So now I’m recalibrating my goals and setting my life direction to have less tech overall.
Less tech overall means better work. I’ll put all my tech effort and study into work. Work is good and it challenges me. That reduces the need to find an outlet elsewhere. Work also gives me other people to work with, other people to teach. As they learn and do their own tech thing, I am happy that others get to do it. One of my frustrations has been, why don’t more people do this-and-that – as since they don’t, it’s my obligation to do it. If other people do it, then I feel I don’t have to.
“Writing more” is the first 2009 resolution I made. I’m now trying to live it up by blogging, again.
I have been writing in the past weeks, on paper notebooks. The idea is to refine and publish them online, but that hasn’t happened. This practice is effective in clearing my head, the only useful practice I picked from Allen’s Getting Things Done (which I’ve only read a month or so ago.)
I also thought my Twitter tweets would be useful as blog posts when expanded, but it hasn”t happened.
What to write: if I continue this blog, I feel that it will take a turn away from tech and towards more eclectic set of topics. I’m not comfortable with blogging personal stuff – not because I don’t like sharing (I do that on Twitter) but because I feel it’s a vain thing to do. If I overcome that handicap, personal posts willl appear here. Less tech because I feel I’m making a shift away from doing tech stuff in my personal/free time.
How to write: I find that being self-conscious has hampered my previous attempts at blogging. I had to make it live up some high standards I set for myself. No more. I shall let go.
I hope to keep this up!
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