I’ve been spending most of today figuring out a list of all of the movies I’ve watched, and all of the games I’ve played. I’ve also been trying to get a sense of the passage of time since I was born, in terms of current affairs – looking at the wikipedia pages for each year. I want to keep doing this. There’s something cathartic about this. I want to process my Facebook and Instagram feeds. Twitter would be nice too, though that seems a little crazy since I have over 47,000 tweets to go through. I suppose rather than read every single tweet, what I should do is get a sense of what I’ve been talking about by searching through my feed for select keywords. I also need to process my Things todo list, my Evernote, my Google Keep, my bookmarks and my blogposts… and that also includes these word vomits.
At face value, this sounds like a daunting, near-infinite project that will take up an endless amount of time without any super-obvious tangible benefits. But somehow I still feel compelled to do it. I’m looking to improve my sense of taste, and part of how I want to do that is by processing everything I’ve consumed.
I want to do blogposts about the places I’ve travelled to. I don’t remember a lot, which is unfortunate, but I think I can piece together something from contextual clues, from pictures, from talking with my wife, etc.
Somebody suggested doing a timeline of my “conceptual development” – ie how I have changed the way I think and see the world over time. I think this is a great idea and something I should definitely get to.
I’m feeling quite tired and exhausted right now, so once I’m done with this word vomit I should call it a night, shower and go to bed. Tomorrow is a new day and I can continue on this project.
Someone else suggested that I write my autobiography. That is something that I’ve been thinking about doing, and I think I’ll do it right here in these word vomits. The challenge for that one is figuring out how to frame and chunk things. Having made a list of all of the movies I’ve watched and games I’ve played, I’m tempted to update the review pages for those. A part of me is tempted to do twitter threads for each but that sounds a little overwhelming and exhausting. I need to prioritize actions that are achievable, doable.
I’ve been low-key worried lately that I’ve been spending all of my free time playing video games, bumming around, staying up late, and generally not being very productive. I’ve just gotten myself a macbook. I haven’t been checking my email and I feel guilty about that. I’ve only started writing again for a couple of days – I want to kick this engine into high gear and really start shipping content.
The hardest part is managing your psychology, everything else is pushing buttons and cranking widgets. I want to make sure that I’m writing every day. Writing word vomits will be a good way to ensure that. I’m feeling a bit self-conscious at the moment because, having not written for a while, I feel a little backed up – like the stuff that’s coming out of my fingers lacks finesse. But this is normal, it’s like going back to the gym after a long break. I trust my subconscious, I know that there’s quality stuff in there – stuff that even I haven’t seen yet, because I’ve been too busy and too tired for too long to apply my own skills and learnings to my own interests. I want to say “all of that is going to change”, but the important thing is really to focus on the daily writing. There is a lot of content in my history spreadsheet!
At this point I switched over and started scanning through my old Facebook. Newsflash – I’ve done it before! And yet… I suppose each time I do it, I’m a different person. But I want to make progress on this. What does progress mean? It means separating signal from noise. I definitely have notes and links from past attempts lying around somewhere, in one of my note-taking apps. That means I should stop scrolling through Facebook, and go through all of my notes first instead.
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In closing… let’s take a minute to circle around what we’re trying to do here. First, get rid of everything that we can get rid of. But that’s “not everything”, because there are things that we believe have value. So what are those things that we believe have value? How do we define that? Value towards what end? I should prioritize whatever is going to lead to me producing creative output. Yeah. I need to produce things that people want to read and share. I shouldn’t obsess TOO hard about that – it should be things that I’m personally excited about writing, too.
What am I excited about? Well, to find that out I’m going to have to clean out my Things and eliminate everything that’s not exciting. Then whatever’s left that’s exciting, I gotta start doing the reading and research. Basically I have a lot of research and reading ahead of me. I think I’ll do a tweetstorm about how I’m looking forward to catching Paramore. What else do I feel like doing? What else am I eager and excited to do? I think what’s happening right now is… I’m starting to feel scared, I’m starting to feel anxious, I’m starting to feel pressure. These are things that keep me from doing my best work. So what should I do? I should exercise and I should meditate. I should go on long walks. I should have conversations with friends. When I’m in a muck inside my own head, I know I can get into a pretty decent state – at least temporarily, in a small way – by focusing on being helpful to others. I have a Facebook status from a while ago where I asked a bunch of people to ask me questions. I should answer those!
Going to bed now.