Momentum

Momentum is a great thing. I have a bit of an eclectic taste, so I start a lot of projects and let the ones that are important to me or that catch on and become fun and easy float to the top of the list. I guess that means I leave a lot of things unfinished and abandoned, but in the long run I'm ok with that. As promised, I've joined a gym and have actually been going pretty regularly. I'm certainly getting my $10 worth. Then today I forced myself to get up early — begrudgingly setting the alarm last night to 50 minutes earlier than normal so that I could make it to work an hour early, leave work early, and head to the gym — but left my packed gym bag on the floor next to my dresser, where I couldn't possibly forget it. Oh well, I'll still be just as squishy on Monday when I go back. Last night I started picking up momentum working on one of my programming projects, cfmenucal. I won't get into all of the nerdy details, but it was one of those times that I was on a roll and I got around to making dinner a little later than usual. I just couldn't force myself to call it a night and go cook. Even when I did start cooking, I got really mad at the macaroni for being so needy — taking me away from the computer every 4 minutes or so when the water would boil over or the pasta needed to be checked. Stupid macaroni. Hopefully posting every day has helped me start up some momentum here. Sure, there have been some duds, but for the most part I have put effort and thought into posting every day. If I can take the same mentality, maybe even write the same amount of material, and then just cull it down and only publish three times a week, then there will be less junk posts and more quality. Fussy, who started this whole National Blog Posting Month thing, wrote something earlier this month that I really connected with:

Alice recently pointed me toward the book Art and Fear, which I bought but haven't read yet, so I'm going to paraphrase a section Alice told me about where the authors talked about a pottery class, I believe, that broke into two groups: one group would produce a piece every day, and the other group would produce a piece when they felt inspired to. At the end of the experiment it turned out that the group who had to turn out something every day, despite having made a fair amount of crap, also produced more good work than the group who only produced when they felt ready to. The point being that when you have to do something whether you feel like it or not, you may be more open to taking more risks and to easing your perfectionist tendencies, allowing more happy accidents to crop up.

That is, more or less, what I'm attempting to do here. Except the days when I make myself write something and it turns out to be drivel? I'll just toss it in the waste bin and pray that something better comes to mind in the next 24 hours. Here's hoping the momentum hangs around.