Wow, if actually finishing this post a week behind schedule isn’t representative of the last year then I don’t know what is!
The end of the year is often used as a time for reflection, though its a little more difficult when there is significantly less to reflect on than I would have hoped. I have a tendency to focus on the negatives, but I’m not sure listing all the things I expected to accomplish and the litany of reasons for not being able to do so would be super productive. While I had a period during the year where I was able to return to a level of productivity that I am happy with, I don’t think the extreme conditions required to be able to ensure that level of focus are necessarily going to be reproducible, which leaves me in a bind because I would still like to work on many of the projects (libpkmn, Olympus Mons, usage stats, etc) I’ve been trying to finish for quite a while.
Having gone from basically limitless free time to pursue personal projects to feeling constantly overwhelmed by the amount of demands placed on my time is a pretty big shift, and I can only see it getting worse. However, given that I still get a lot of happiness out of thinking about and working on Pokémon projects my plan for the upcoming year is to be more deliberate about work on pkmn – setting aside a non-negotiable block of 4-8 hours each week to be able to make some progress, however incremental, on the project. I worry a lot of this time will be spent loading state back into memory and the actual forward progress to feel glacial, but I probably need to accept that and commit anyway, the alternative being zero progress whatsoever.
— pre