2023-09-02

I didn’t do what I planned to do today. Email redirects can wait. I spent nearly 4 hours getting this animation to work with cute loading text.

So it probably tracks that I’ve been thinking about productivity today. Not long after waking up, to an empty house today, I felt a guilt I haven’t in a while. I felt like I was at school and had homework to do. Like I had something to procrastinate from, and every video I watched on my youtube and every tweet (x) I read I felt a dread that I had to get up and do something. But there wasn’t anything. I was free to do what I wanted. I’ve been thinking about productivity in the context of capitalism. How we all strive to be productive. To produce more. To do more faster. Uncapped work output that we believe will help us achieve whatever it is we must achieve. Coming home after burning out at work, and feeling bad for scrolling on a phone mindlessly, only to wake and repeat it again. It’s a miserable existence and it’s no wonder that people feel like they aren’t doing enough; everything people are doing is work for someone else. I saw a video on this. And it made me reflect on my own productivity stint that this diary and everything I’m doing is part of. I think that my philosophy of productivity and work aligns with the solution. Naturally after learning about something called REST which is just doing nothing for extend periods of time, I tried and failed for the first hour of my day. I spent it thinking about what I’m trying to achieve with my move towards doing more. I want to do more by doing less. That book everyone is reading ‘Atomic Habits’ apparently says that we overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. I thought that was very potent, and for me solves the productivity paradox. I want to do more but I’m learning to do it over a longer period of time. A little bit everyday. It’s ok to spend 4 hours making loading text fly in to the screen. People like to say ‘you need to gloss over details’, ‘move fast and iterate’. It’s all productivity talk. Create as much value as possible as quickly as possible. Allow your expectations to rise on what you can achieve, in a given amount of time, and push harder and harder until you burn out. I don’t think it works. At the very least there is a balance, and maybe today I went the wrong way a bit, but it’s the statement: “Here is a great looking animation that I made in 4 hours, and I didn’t release my product today and I won’t tomorrow but I learned a lot”. The details add up. The 1%‘s add up quicker than the 80%s with burnouts. Slow and steady, tortoise and hare.

Anyway that’s that.

I’ve also been playing with the astro view transition api today. Very cool stuff. Made a friends music website with it today.

I should do some painting tomorrow.