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Funny signs and Making Time – the quollism version

18 to 24 December 2016 has zipped by. Things are very definitely getting summery here. We had a stupidly hot 42.4C day on Wednesday, there’s bushfires all over the place, and I’ve finished up at the day-job for the year as of yesterday afternoon. It’s been another fairly light week for AMITS activity.

I made that “do not bury” sign I was talking about last week and slapped it all over the bus stop. I’m liking it. As long as I can convey that the signs are specifically for Gronky, it has the making of a good ambient gag and it has merch potential too.

The new bus stop, complete with instructions for Gronky not to bury it.

Aside from tweaking the action in the bus stop scene, figuring out how to fix broken file references and a false start on building a pitchamatic, that’s about all I got up to this week. Lately I’ve been summer-tired and super distractable – learning the open-source stenography system Plover has been nifty but time-consuming, and the day job had an end of year ramp-up before booting me out of the office over Christmas for the first time ever. I’m hoping with the coming week away from the day job I can get some more planning work done and recover some momentum.

Jason van Gumster’s excellent Open Source Creative Podcast spent its latest episode talking about making time for personal projects and it’s well worth a listen. Much of what Jason talks about I’ve done myself over the last couple of years.

Making time to make a movie

The time to make A Moment In The Sun is very much consciously set aside. I don’t watch a lot of TV and when I do it’s half-hour episodes of light and fluffy stuff instead of something heavy and long like Westworld. I go months between gaming, then I binge on something hard for a week or two. (The most recent one was Grand Theft Auto V back in September.) Gaming or watching TV and the odd movie pass the time just fine, but actually making stuff is a more fulfilling use of my time and energy.

As a night owl I tend to work late into the night instead of waking up early. I also need more than five hours of sleep a night (unlike Jason) so if I work a few late nights, I make a point of catching up on sleep over the weekend. This is easier to get away with in summer because the days are so hot that I can do laundry later in the afternoon and it’ll be dry by dusk.

My working hours depend on the stage of production I’m at. If I’m writing and playing with ideas, the work is more nebulous so I’m less strict with myself. As soon as the tasks get more concrete and tangible, there’s spreadsheets and lists of things to do and that makes the path ahead much clearer.

On weeknights I try to start work on AMITS by nine o’clock and finish up by midnight. (If I’m really inspired and enthused, I may even get straight to work once I get home.) On Sundays, I like to have started by midday and I’ll keep going until late evening with a long meal break somewhere in the middle. I’m fairly militant with my family and friends about Sundays being my movie day, which means any shopping and laundry and other life maintenance gets squeezed into Friday night or Saturday.

Every day I log time spent and activities performed so that I have a record of what I did and when and how much of it I did. Among other things, it makes writing these little weekly updates much easier because there’s less to remember. 🙂

Enthusiasm is also a massive factor in getting work done, but that will get a blog post of its own. Bye for now!

By quollism

A creator of quollity stuff.

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