2025-08-08

Is it Friday already? This week has seen a fair few zoom meetings, precious little progress on the novel, the beginning of a re-write on a movie I'm putting together, and some progress on a new script I'm writing. Seeing as everyone else seems to be on holiday, I am not kicking myself too hard over the lack of useful progress.

In fact, I'm resolving not to kick myself too hard generally. There have been a couple of days this week where inspiration largely refused to strike and I beat myself up about that a bit. But that is obviously pointless. Sometimes the ideas or the motivation won't come and you're better off going and doing something else. I choose to think that my brain needs to work on the problem in the background and motivation will return when it has figure out the answer. I don't think that's always true, sometimes I'm just tired of lazy, but there's not a lot of point in beating myself up about that either.

Oliver Burkeman's "Imperfectionist" newsletter yesterday talked about digital hoarding, and the impossibility of actually getting to the thousands of web pages you've set to "read later". He's right, clearly, and yet I find that storing those pages in such a way that they are searchable and might resurface serendipitously at the right moment has paid dividends in the past. I guess the difference is that I don't set them aside with the specific intent of reading them later, so I don't feel any pressure to get to them.

The other thing Burkeman warned against hoarding was task lists, and on that he is absolutely right. One of the things I have really liked about bullet journaling is that re-writing the same task on several successive days really causes you to question if you're ever going to get to it. I have cheerfully abandoned quite a lot of chores this way, to no ill effect.

Today feels like a day where I might actually get some things done, so I'm going to get to that. Enjoy Friday.