Where do you make the time?

Authoring General Design Discussions
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I started working on a new Twine project in November, but my progress feels gruelingly slow. I’m only managing a couple of hours of time to write and program each weekend, and if something comes up like a trip, event obligation, or general veil of despair that makes it too overwhelming to write, my time that weekend gets dashed and I feel even slower. The game I’m working on is largely centered around dialogue with many different people, and every little conversation takes me hours to write. Wrapping my head around the way conversations may delineate around what is important to talk about or understand takes a lot of effort. I’m hoping it starts to become more natural after practice, but so far, it’s not.

I work from home as a software dev as a day job, and have lots of athletic hobbies I like to do in evening, so I’m often very tired and very disinterested in more computer time by the end of the day. I keep telling myself I should go to bed an hour earlier and get up an hour earlier to devote to writing, but so far haven’t had the willpower to do this, ha. I’ve also contemplated working on shorter projects just to feel like I’m doing something that feels meaningful and validating with my time, but I lose interest quickly and just want to get back to my bigger project.

Curious how other people find or make time to work on mentally demanding side projects? Or maybe, how do you give yourself the endurance and grace to get through slow-moving projects?

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For me, IF writing is (generally) my fun, relaxing break from work, so I do it in between important tasks or once I’ve finished something else and need to de-stress. It’s not always fun—the last couple weeks of getting tester feedback and trying to make it perfect right before launch is very stressful!—and I also have a pretty flexible schedule to accommodate this. But generally, if I’m dreading working on a project, I’ll just abandon it.

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I retired from work over 10 years ago and thought I would have plenty of time to do all the things I wanted. (My wife had other ideas though)

I find that the time to sit down to even play a game is very limited and often I lose interest after a half hour or so. Effectively there is no time to do anything big or demanding and other hobbies also demand their time.

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I have metaphorical brain worms which compel me to write an unhealthy amount of code each day, as I juggle multiple projects atop a software day job.

…

…I’m sorry I don’t think this is helpful to post, but maybe the perspective is worthwhile somehow.

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I used to have so much time, and now I have less but I still make time somehow, because it is very enjoyable to me. To be fair, I still probably get more time than most people here. (And yet I still haven’t released a game in so long…)

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It’s very difficult to find a hobby project you’re so excited about that you’re willing to prioritize it over a lot of other important things, but a wonderful feeling when you do.

Maybe the best thing to do is take a step away from it for a bit and replace it with some other writing project that might spill out of your pen more easily. Maybe keep a journal of your activities and observations during the day. I enjoy food writing, so I can usually overcome writers block by describing the last meal I ate (black beans on black rice, an unfortunate absence of color from an otherwise well seasoned bean stew.)

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I’m unemployed, single, and have no meat space social life and find it hard to just stay on top of daily posts on the forums I frequent, new chapters of on-going fanfics and web serials I’m following, new uploads to YouTube channels I have bookmarked, blog posts on blogs I follow, etc… Even finding time to produce a new bit of programmatic art is a challenge, and the longest source file for those is only 140-some lines of code, and the template.cpp I have as a skeleton for future pieces accounts for 66 lines…

Granted, it doesn’t help that I have slow fingers(my typing speed is about 50 wpm) and ears(I can’t stand to speed up most audio and stuggle to keep up with my screen reader at anything faster than the default speed).

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Scheduling time to write works for some people, but it’s just not in my constitution. I will do anything except write.

So I write on the bus or while waiting in line instead of scrolling on my phone, or I’ll stop and take down some notes while I’m walking to the store. I’ve written conversational games entirely in my notes app while walking around the neighborhood. Last week I outlined my next project while waiting for my partner to be done with something so we could watch a movie.

The little bits of time add up, and they prevent me from feeling like a whole day/weekend was wasted. Plus the ideas get stronger when they’re revisited frequently, even just for a few minutes.

I also use vacation days to write/code when I need to buckle down on a bigger project. I usually schedule one or two right before a comp deadline. That reminds me…

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I agree with Sarah a lot.

I can’t schedule particularly well. I find it intimidating to try to schedule a block of time, actually. But I do try to pull myself away from activities I know drain me without giving anything back & do try to snatch a moment here or there to let my mind drift.

And if I have a bad day where I slip into them too much, I use it a motivation to do better the next day.

I also think having a steady drip of ideas over the years helps. I have a weekly file where I drop stuff in, sorting ideas by type. Some are just thinking. But I can pull these ideas into a notes file for a long term project

I also use speech to text and google keep a lot to get ideas down quickly. I try to make time to sort them out later–again, instead of doomscrolling etc.

Come to think of it I need to go do that now.

ETA: I’ve also come to have faith I’ll have one good idea per day. This doesn’t sound like much but they eventually add up, and one eventually breaks the dam to where I see they connect. I know looking at a bunch of ideas I wrote over the past few months lets me make connections I wouldn’t have right away.

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Yeah, I don’t know how one can add a demand to an already full plate (yours sounds very full) without subtracting something. At least in the long term. I think a lot of us can manage that crunch in the short term.

I don’t schedule either, but every morning I get up, what I want to do is work on my WIP. So you could say it’s tentatively scheduled in for every morning. It’s just that sometimes it doesn’t pan out. I’m a night person. Some mornings my brain’s at half-speed. If I get something in the morning, yay, otherwise I know I can get something in the afternoon or night, if something doesn’t happen like I go to a movie or my nephew comes over etc.

Maybe my little suggestion for the OP is try moving your blob of time around and see if you discover a time or circumstance that works better for you. It might happen by accident.

-Wade

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My situation is similar to that of Draconis, except different. I tend to have one computer-adjacent hobby at a time, which is my fun, relaxing break from work while I’m still in the same chair I use for work. Most of the time, it’s my blog, but every now and then I get really into something else (twice now it has been making IF) and then the blog suffers for a while as I rush to complete a game before I lose interest in it again.

When I finished up my previous game, I was hoping I’d be able to tackle a larger IF game in small pieces over these next few months, but that way of progressing on things doesn’t seem to be compatible with me. Unless I’m really into it and live and breathe it, I won’t do it. So I’m waiting for the next time inspiration strikes, and I’ll try to do it then.

I don’t like that I work that way, but I’m learning to accept it.

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I’m a self-employed motion graphic designer, or, as I sometimes joke, self-unemployed. Oversaturation in the market, the madness unfolding on the world stage and the AI “revolution” have seen to it that I no longer have enough work to cover my outgoings. At 55, after 30 years in the business, I am attempting a “career pivot”.

So I have all the time in the world, yet I am doing virtually nothing. The sad fact is that I can only be creative when I feel secure. When there’s no money coming in, I apply for freelance jobs in the morning (though none of the recruiters ever reply to my emails) so that I feel like I’m doing something positive. Occasionally, one of my two, steadfast clients will send something my way, but they’re in much the same position I’m in.

Ironically, I do most of my IF writing when I’m busy with other things. After 30 years I can do my job in my sleep, and since I work from home and don’t have anyone looking over my shoulder, I write and work at the same time. When a job is rendering, when I’m waiting for client feedback, when I’m waiting for inspiration to strike, I’ll minimise After Effects and do a bit of writing.

I’m actually one of those people who can’t not multitask. The busier I am, the more I get done. If I have nothing to do, I do nothing. I think this stems from my childhood. I was brought up to feel that being creative was a bit odd, and was often told by my parents I should do something less “way out”. I stopped showing my creative work to my parents and kept it to myself. It became something I did when I was supposed to be doing something else, something illicit. I wrote silly gamebooks at school when I was in lessons I could afford to fail. I drew cartoons when I was meant to be revising for my ‘A’ Levels.

And so it continues to this day. I wish it were otherwise. I really think creative writing (and IF in particular) is what I should be doing for a living, it’s my passion. But I think I’m afraid to try it in case I fail, and if I fail I won’t have the dream anymore. So I tell myself it’s not a realistic dream, and then I don’t have to try and fail.

I had better get back to applying for motion graphics jobs to appease my conscience, and maybe one of them will come in and I’ll feel secure enough to do some writing. Fingers crossed.

Edit: I apologise if I have become a moaning Minnie these days. I have good days and bad days. Today, being a Monday, is a bad day.

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I can only be creative when I feel secure

This resonates with me. I remember graduating university and taking a few months off to be a traveling dance teacher before starting my big-kid career and feeling absolutely dead in the water on a creative front.

You have me thinking I can maybe write a passage every time I’m waiting for my CI tests to pass, maybe I’ll give it a try today.

I hope you find some stability soon :folded_hands:

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I’ve been blessed and/or cursed with the inability to have more than one serious interest at a time. The 5-6 years when I was regularly livestreaming are the same 5-6 years that elapsed between ZILF 0.9 and ZILF 0.10. So, I make time by taking it away from everything else. Even while I’m in a coding phase, once in a while a fey mood will strike me (“let’s figure out how to recreate the Stranger Things opening titles in DaVinci Resolve!”) and I’ll forget about coding for a few days. Lately, being unemployed has increased the amount of time I can devote to an interest, but not the number of interests I can juggle at once.

As for getting through slow-moving projects, if it’s not something I can see tangible progress on every few hours, generally it doesn’t get done. I had a couple huge refactors on the ZILF backlog that went nowhere for years, until I decided to give Copilot a try and it managed to get them half finished in a day.

Working on an open-source project makes it easier to deal with not making progress, because I can always tell myself that I don’t owe anyone anything: they have the code, so if they have an urgent need, they can implement it themselves.

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This was my problem as well, but I found a way around it by writing my game’s non-code longhand which helped productivity a lot, and I was also able to make some notes on how I wanted the code to work which helped later implementing it. And the best thing about longhand is you can write almost anywhere. A change of scenery really helps.

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I cycle through different task/reward cycles. My most normal thing is that I do one unit of ‘work’ (either coding a room or two in a game, or writing 300 words, or doing a piece of art) and then I play a game until I fight a boss or beat a level, then repeat. It gives me some motivation since the work makes the play more fun and the play makes the work more fun.

You said that you lose interest in other projects and come back to your main work; it’s possible that you’re just doing the hardest part of the game, and once this part is done, everything will fall into place. That’s happened to me before; I had a project I avoided for years because I just couldn’t figure out how to implement a twist, but once I figured it out the rest of the game came out super fast.

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I certainly know that feeling! One of my big IFComp entries currently needs me to figure out a fun topology for the map to make certain puzzles work, and the other one requires frontend JS/CSS work, so I’m avoiding them both and working on TALJ instead…

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A lot of the time, the answer is “I don’t.” The time I spend on IF tends to be very streaky, with a month or so of furious activity followed by months away from it.

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Another problem I have is that I struggle to shift gears mentally without a physical change of location. Back in highschool, attending a school for the blind and visually impaired where I lived in a dorm during the week and went home on the weekends, I couldn’t force myself to do school work of any kind while at home and I was the kid in my year who actually liked school. Even while at school, I struggled to do homework in my dorm room of on the computer in the dorm’s student lounge and needed to go to the school’s homework lab in order to get into the right mindset… admittedly, it probably helped that I could carry what I needed for that night’s homework and whatever CD I’d play on the lab computer to drown out distractions whereas in the dorm, I’d have my Gameboy color/Advance and whatever recreational reading I was doing as distractions even if someone else was on the dorm computer(the Dorm had 1 Win XP machine shared by 5 teen boys)… and in college, whether I was at an out of town uni living in a dorm or uni apartment or at a hometown school and living at home, I hated online classes… even if I hated an instructor’s lecturing style, physically going to class and reading the textbook while listening to the lecture was more productive than trying to read the textbook on my own time, and I loved whenever assignments could be completed in-class instead of having to go home/back to my dorm and trying to do them on my personal computer, even when that meant dealing with Windows PCs in class(I made the switch to Linux in my freshman year of college).

Before the morgage company decided to triple the monthly payments and force my family out of my childhood home, I had the second floor of the house, setup like a “mother in law’s apartment” all to myself thanks to it being disconnected from the central heating and being the only member of the family with a cold tolerance high enough to endure winters up there, I had it setup with at least five distinct areas… I turned the kitchenette-like area into my workshop, had my entertainment center and computer on opposite walls of the main room for distinct living room and office areas, the second of the two main rooms was setup as my personal library/ reading room, and then the third largest room was my bedroom and primarily for sleeping, though I sometimes did handheld gaming binges there… After being forced out of my childhood home, The library, living room, and bedroom had to be consolidated due to moving into a smaller rental, I got a small loft for my office that I eventually abandoned because my slob of a niece had the loft on the opposite side of the stairs from my office and refused to keep her filth contained and the pikpom my dad had at the time would attack my ankles whenever he sensed me trying to go up stairs or come down from the loft, and for workshop, I had to use the kitchen table or go out to the shed, the latter rendered untenable over time as it became increasingly used for storage space… and then, after my dad died and me and his other survivers were forced out of the rental my family was in and into a trailer park… I now find myself living in a sliding block puzzle where some of my things are a hassle to get to, the same pile of blankets, salvaged sofa car box springs, folding foam camping mattress, and sofa chair back rest serves as both bed and desk chair as my desktop sits on the floor next to me(good thing I have no use for a monitor or printer, because I don’t have a desk to put them on or floor space for them, and the only available worksurface in the trailer outside of my cramped bedroom is the stove top in the kitchen, and it isn’t a completely flat surface, I have to stand the whole time I’m doing any work on it, and it gets occupied whenever I use my rice cookers, my housemates use the hot plate or air fryer, or if there are clean dishes in need of air drying, and the microwave is positioned such that it’s door swings out right above the stove top, If me and my housemates are ever in a position to escape this trailer park, my biggest ask is going to be the new place has 4 bedrooms so I can at least have a separate office/workshop area.

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Jeffery, that sounds unimaginably tough. I feel for you, and I hope you can escape the trailer park and find a better environment soon.

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