F.O.F.F.O.
Today I write this post in a way I never have before: standing up. That's right! I finally set up a standing/sitting hybrid desk situation, which is a deceptively exciting development. You see I have a tendency to get a mental block about these things. I've been talking about the need for a standing desk situation for years now, and I've simply never done it until now.
My mental blocks regarding certain actions are a thing of legend.
In fact I didn't even purchase this standing desk. It was given to me freely as a hand-me-down. It's been sitting on my desk for over a month and I simply let it rest there without even bothering to set it up until now.
To be honest I had convinced myself this setup wasn't going to work to the point of being leveraged as an excuse to not even test it. The self-sabotage is real! I had it in my mind that I was going to need to buy an entirely new monitor, mouse, and keyboard to make something like this happen, but this particular device has one of those hydraulic hand-lifts that allows for the hybrid situation.
To be fair I definitely should still buy a second monitor, and it's actually kind of embarrassing that someone like me doesn't have two monitors. I'm a hardcore gamer and a programming hobbyist. How does that even happen? Again, this is a mental block situation I'm sure. Having two monitors seems redundant and wasteful, and spending money during the bear market is often too cringe for me to pull the trigger on something like that at this time, despite the relatively low cost.
As I stand here writing this I notice something very important:
My feet are starting to hurt instead of my chronic back injury. That's a damn good improvement considering the alternative. Just took my shoes off; barefoot might be the way to go here. I might even get some kind of standing pad eventually, but I doubt it. It's more likely I just need to work a tiny bit on improving posture and simply giving my feet time to get used to this new paradigm. Such things were always the plan anyway: as I was 100% sure that standing for 8-12 hours a day wasn't going to work out too well. Thus the need for a hybrid setup.
Other mental blocks to vanquish:
As I've said before a couple times I vowed that once my Factorio game was completed I'd use that momentum to transition back into my programming projects. It's been a long time. The hardest part is simply starting up and committing to the grind. Once that phase is over I can usually keep the momentum going for months on end.
There seems to be a pattern here.
And it's certainly good to know oneself and what kind of patterns we can fall into. In 2018 I made a lot of good progress learning the Steem API and I even managed to make a (barely) working CAH game using Java. The crazy thing is that a lot of the scripts I wrote back then still magically work on Hive; I just have to connect to a different node, which equates to changing less than one line of code. I definitely need to take a refresher course on the Hive API and perhaps even look at the other versions of it that I have thus far avoided.
In summer 2021 I also made some good progress on my "Magitek" project. Looking at it right now on MySQL workbench. A lot of time went into this and it feels like a bit of a waste that I never seem to follow through and actually deliver an actual product (no matter how small). Of course then again crypto is already quite burned out on DEFI and the whole yield farming fad that often leads to the token crashing to zero. I believe my solution is a good one, but is it really? One really never knows until it gets unleashed into the Jungle of the Internet. In any case I did learn quite a bit about integrating Hive with a relational database (and a relational database to Node.JS) and that's something that will help me with any and every other project I work on here. Experience like that can be pretty valuable.
I also have to mention that I'm still pretty salty that when I was in school for computer science the vast majority of classes focused on Java and not a single one that I took used JavaScript... which is literally the native language of websites & HTML. Seriously though why would they not teach it in school? Maybe I'm just too old and that was simply too long ago.
What often ends up happening with my programming projects is that I grind away at them for quite a while: then I hit a huge hurdle in development that I did not anticipate and get frustrated and quit after spending hours trying to solve some problem to no avail. These things happen.
Of course now that AI is making leaps and bounds across multiple sectors I think that a paid-subscription to a bot could help me smooth out a lot of these hurdles into more bite-sized chunks that won't lead to systemic burnout. Again I seem to have a mental block about this as well, as adding a monthly expense to my budget is something I try to avoid like the plague. I should be framing such expenses as investments that could easily pay for themselves a hundred times over, but I rarely do. Seems like another 'me' problem. Perhaps I just need to become more comfortable with investing in myself. Easier said than done I suppose.
Conclusion
And I've done it!
I've written an entire post standing up.
Such an accomplishment.
Very cool.
For a long time I've been blaming ADHD for my inability to focus and subsequent executive disfunction issues. However I've come to the realization that there is something much worse than ADHD, and that's chronic pain. It's funny because I often forget it's even there: simply lurking in the background and assaulting the subconscious; whispering to get up out of my chair every five minutes and take a walk around.
In fact you might say that both of these issues seem to enhance the other. ADHD makes my chronic pain worse because I'm prone to procrastinating what needs to be done to manage it, while chronic pain makes the ADHD and focus issues exponentially more unmanageable. A vicious cycle to be sure: let's just ignore all that and play video games! Unfortunately such addictive coping mechanisms have woefully diminishing returns, as you might imagine.
At the end of the day I know what needs to be done but often ignore the reality of the situation to my own detriment. I need to stop sitting down so much. I need to work on physical therapy for both my hip flexors and rotator cuffs. I've been ignoring these needs for far too long, and I feel like I may be on the cusp of a new chapter in which I create much more sustainable coping mechanisms for my own personal issues. One can hope.
Chronic procrastination can be a serious issue for people such as myself. It's always quite easy to put things off and come up with an excuse for why it can be done tomorrow. This is a slippery slope that often leads to things never getting done, even if the task at hand is a relatively trivial one. Like many before me, I have learned this the hard way through decades of experience. When these tasks actually do end up getting completed we're left wondering why it was put off for so long in the first place.
For bigger projects that are much harder to complete: the strategy is largely the same. We have to break up the big monumental task into more manageable portions that can be completed with relatively the mindset. Never underestimate the power of baby steps.
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