Last week, I asked for donations to go toward my projects. I plan on sticking to those donations, but as many of you noticed, it didn’t quite happen last week. I feel I owe it to you to explain, so here you go:

When I was planning this, I thought to myself – “hey, I have time, I should spend it doing productive things like writing”. The “like writing” bit got in there because I actually do enjoy writing, but it’s something that I’ve never made time to do before. This seemed like a good way to get that to happen. However, I failed to realize two things, and I want to admit those now:

First, writing is hard. At the outset, I thought that writing was something one simply had to make time to do, and it happened. One reason I thought that was that writing always came pretty easy to me – when I got around to sitting down, I just wrote. What I missed was the fact that there is a lot of thinking that happened behind the scenes. Before, when I wrote, I had spent quite a lot of time thinking about what I was going to write before hand, and then I just sat down and words appeared on the page. Not unlike what is happening right now.

Unfortunately, in my drive to write more, I was unwittingly cutting all this thinking out of the picture. Suddenly, I went from thinking about writing most of the week, to making time to write most of the week, and having nothing to write about. Of course, that was the main reason that I said, “I’ll be working on other projects too!”, but, that had the same problem as writing – I needed to not only make time to work on those projects, but have thought about them and prepared myself mentally.

Which sort of leads into the second failure of realization – Making time to work requires you to want to work. I’ll admit that, sometimes, I’m just plain lazy – I would rather play a game or watch a bit of X-Files (something that allows me to relax), than do work (something that excludes relaxing). Other times however, like on Saturday, I ended up sitting in my office at my job actually working. While I had initially planned on working on my projects during this time, I ended up working on work stuff to prepare for the following week. On the one hand, I like my job, so this didn’t bother me, but on the other hand, I found that in my office at work, I felt better doing my job than working on personal projects (probably not a bad thing).

So, I’m going to do a couple of things to combat this (I hope). First, I’m going to pare down the minimum and maximum time I’m going to dedicate to doing projects. This is going to scale depending on how many weeknights I have available (i.e. this week, that is 2 weeknights, so min 2 hours, max 4 hours). Second, I’m going to decide how much I work based on a maximum rather than additive policy (i.e. on a normal week I’m going to work the maximum of 5 hours or however much I’ve been donated).

Ok, now that I’ve outlined my new plan, what am I going to do with the donations I’ve already gotten? Well, I’m going to work them as intended. I’m not taking donations this week (if you haven’t noticed), and instead I’m going to get those hours that I’ve already got backlogged worked. I put in six hours last week on projects, and I’m going to put in an additional six this week to finish up those already donated. One of those blogs is this one – only four hours left.

Thanks so much for your support on this one – I realized that my first week was a complete failure on my part, but it was a much bigger success on yours than I would have expected. The fact that I got donations at all was particularly touching, and I hope that I keep some of you coming back when I get this rolling for real!

Thanks