Thursday, December 04, 2008

Please sir, can I have some more...

So, it's crunch time for the next.. oh.. two years. Not the cap'n crunch kind of crunch time either, although I do have some crunch berries, my son picked them out. But no, I'm talking nose to the grind stone, eating, sleeping, pooping work.

I now have taken on three full time jobs. Lottery, Game Engine Developement/ Personal Website Development, and GoG Tournament system development. So what does this mean. It means that I've got to really get organized. My plate is full to the brim and if I'm going to be that orphan who gets that next bowl of gruel, I'm going to have to scarf down that first bowl, no matter how hot and tasteless it may be.

Luckily my metaphorical gruel doesn't taste bad, but that first bowl seems like it's a never ending amount to shovel. This just means that I have to get really organized.
In order to do this, I'm simply going to focus on the tasks that I lay out for myself each week, as well as limit the time that I spend on the internet (huge time killer) to 45 minutes a day, unless related to the Lottery, which doesn't count, 15 minute segments broken up throughout the day. The limitation includes research also, meaning that I'm going to have to use books for the vast majority of my reference hunting and if there is something that I need to look up, I better damn well have a good idea of what I'm looking for before I get on the net. This of course hasn't started today, but will start in the morning.

I'm also going to have to limit my gaming to no more then an hour a day (which I don't normally play every day anyways), which kind of sucks, because normally I'd just play for 3 to 5 hours twice a week or something, but this sucks those days away, which I'm going to need.

Before the new year, I need to :

Have Game States, G.U.I system, and the next version of the Editor started for the game engine.

Have a good start on the tournament system.

27 days after this one. Time to get this show on the road.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're going to burn yourself out and end up hating development if you do that, you know. You need to leave at least some time to yourself.

I think the most sensible thing I heard on this topic was ravuya's '10 minute rule' - make absolutely sure you do 10 minutes of work on your personal projects every day. Sometimes you won't be in the zone, but at least you'll have gotten 10 minutes of work done. Sometimes you'll get really into it and will get loads done. It's all about the regularity and the low level of commitment though.

Will C said...

I'm not really worried about getting burned out. I actually tend to work better when focusing the majority of my time on constructive things.

You have to realize that I want to do this, these things aren't something that I feel any stress from. I don't have any real deadlines (except from the paying job :P), and at most I can only get in six hours of additional work a day on projects. Which will probably, on average, end up being more like two.

I'm just setting goals for myself. Even if it may seem like a lot. It's really no more then a full time college student having a full time job.