Having chosen to use Inform 7, I found that it was different enough from regular programming that it didn’t feel like work, so I’d write in the evenings. Then I unexpectedly joined the ranks of the burned out and unemployed, took a few months off and spent as much time outdoors as possible, and came back to writing in the fall as a way to ease myself back into hopefully being able to write regular code again.
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Having deadlines helps, and the major comps handily provide them. I find it means IF/writing takes priority as one approaches but doesn’t eat my whole year and risk becoming a chore.
The other nice thing about using comps as motivation is if you blow the deadline on one, you can take some time off and hit the next one in six months! (Or a year tops, if you’re aiming for a specific one.)
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I heartily recommend doing this! It’s always been my policy, and the one time I didn’t do it I suffered terrible burn-out!
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I recall reading an article many years ago, by Jason Pargin/David Wong of Cracked.com fame, pointing out that with the limited amount of time you have in a day, every single thing you spend time on is an infinite number of other things you can’t spend time on. And if you want to spend a bunch of time and a lot of your life dedicating yourself to training and mastering a specific art or craft, you’ll need to sacrifice something in exchange, whether that’s time you use to relax, to cook, to exercise, to make money, to socialize, to read, to browse social media, to pursue other hobbies, to spend with your family, or anything else.
Obviously you don’t need to give up all those things, but if you want to dedicate a large chunk of your free time to making IF, or any other hobby, you’ll have to trade away something else. I can’t find the article for the life of me, but one thing it said stuck out to the point I still remember it years later: “If you want to run a marathon, you don’t think ‘in exchange for training to run a marathon, I’m going to spend less time with my girlfriend’, but you’re making that kind of tradeoff.”
An exception applies if your hypothetical girlfriend also wants to run a marathon and is fine training with you, but most people working on IF games, and writing in general, work alone. It’s especially hard, with creative pursuits, to find someone who shares your vision and can actually help with it that you also want to work with. I don’t consider making games to be a social hobby.
It doesn’t help that gamedev is so time-consuming. You can spend hours on something most people will barely notice. With writing, too, you can spend hours on something most people will finish reading in a few minutes.
Personally, when I’m locked into a specific project, I spend almost all my free time on it and do nothing else. It helps the project go faster, but comes with a lot of costs like not having a social life. Hyperfocusing on one specific project of your own also means you have less time to check out other things and write reviews. Such is life.
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There’s a book about exactly that: MacKeown “Essentialismus - The disciplined pursuit of less”. I love that book.
And someone else said “You don’t HAVE time, you TAKE time.
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I’ve joked before about the life hack of getting your SO to write IF with you so that they can’t complain about how much time you’re spending on IF, but in reality that just means the tradeoff is something else, like for example now your laundry and dishes aren’t getting done because you’re both spending your free time on your big IF project.
(The first thing to go for me is generally relaxation time, which I tend to see as more expendable than anything else, but that’s not always good for my mental health, and as Lurker mentions, that’s also the time I would be using to engage with other people’s games, so I do feel a little bad about that.)
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While this is entirely true, I try to frame it differently. Instead of “everything you do is an infinite number of other things you don’t do,” I prefer to think of it as: the time will pass anyway.
There’s an old advice column from 1994 that was sent to me a few years ago, and it stuck with me:
Dear Abby: I am a 36-year-old college dropout whose lifelong ambition was to be a physician. I have a very good job selling pharmaceutical supplies, but my heart is still in the practice of medicine. I do volunteer work at the local hospital on my time off, and people tell me I would have been a wonderful doctor.
If I go back to college and get my degree, then go to medical school, do my internship, and finally get into the practice of medicine - it will take me seven years. But Abby, in seven years, I will be 43 years old! What do you think?
- Unfulfilled in PhillyDear Unfulfilled: And how old will you be in seven years if you don’t go back to college?
Thinking about how much time something will cost often tends to paralyze me, but even if I spend the time paralyzed by indecision, it will pass all the same. Better to spend it on something I’ll find satisfying and fulfilling afterward, like writing something I can put out into the world for others to read, even if it’s not the most optimal use.
There’s a seminal work in cognitive linguistics[1], Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson, which proposes that we use metaphors to structure our thinking around abstract things. One of the main examples they use is that we, in the Western world, tend to think of time in terms of money: we spend it, we save it, we give it to people, we have it or run out of it. But time isn’t money. The wisest thing to do with money is often to hoard it, to accumulate as much as you can so it builds up over time and you can fall back on it in case of emergencies, to weigh any given purchase against the alternative of saving it up instead. But you can’t do that with time. If you try to save it up for really important things and never spend it on anything less, it will just disappear.
And while money is fungible (one dollar bill plus one dollar bill is always two dollars), time isn’t; studying something for an hour each day is usually worth more than studying it for a full day every two weeks. So my philosophy at this point is: if I can’t hoard time, or take it with me, I should make sure I’m putting it toward things that I’ll feel good looking back on. That may or may not be the best choice, but “nothing” is always the worst choice.
Which for me, is often my creative projects. I don’t know if this is the wisest philosophy, or if it’ll be helpful to anyone except me, and it’s definitely led to burning the candle at both ends through grad school. But there are a few years of the pandemic that I can only look back on now as a vague blur; the main thing I remember is just the time passing, with nothing really standing out. I took some uneventful classes; my relationships stagnated; nothing much was achieved. So that’s now the thing I try to avoid at all costs.
Though it’s almost 50 years old, so the state of the art has moved on a lot since then. ↩︎
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I feel like I should add, I do think most people have more not-really-doing-anything downtime than they need, and taking some of the time you would otherwise spend, e.g., idly scrolling social media or half-watching TV shows you don’t really care about and putting it towards creative projects can be really positive in that case. But like Meri, I also have another really big time-and-energy-sink of a creative hobby (mine is theatre), and as I’m (probably a little too) reluctant to put theatre on hold for IF, IF project time has to come out of what little not-doing-anything downtime I have left or out of household tasks.
So I guess in the context of the thread having been posted by someone else with an exhausting performing arts hobby, I wanted to warn about being too ready to consider relaxation time as something you can replace with project time if you already don’t have that much of it, but reading back over it I feel like I came off too negative on the concept of spending time on projects at all, which, obviously I do think it’s worthwhile or I wouldn’t still do it. But I haven’t really figured out how to balance stuff in a healthy way, so I’m not a great person to give advice on this topic, probably.
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Both are valuable perspectives depending on the position you’re in. If you’re beating yourself up for not making headway on your IF project, but you practiced your musical instrument for 10 hours this week, your top priority, it’s nice to remind yourself that this was your intentional choice.
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I really appreciate all the perspectives here. I think I’ve managed to learn/do a lot right over the years. But I still need that lightbulb moment that helps me get rid of downtime I don’t enjoy any more.
It may not just be making the time but keeping the time. When I started seriously writing, I was just happy to get one good idea. I should be grateful, right? Not ask too much? Then I’d go do something draining and unproductive.
I have a small thing which works: when I do something cool, I think (ironically) “Good! The tough stuff’s done, now I can go relax and (doomscroll Twitter/read pointless Facebook arguments) which is what I REALLY want to do with my life.”
It’s seeped into the second activities. I catch myself joking “Boy, this is more productive and easier than (project I want to do.)” Which it isn’t.
This sort of irony doesn’t work for everyone and you may need to find your own but maybe it will tip off something for you. And it works better than looking back on a day and ruing the time lost.
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Really enjoying what everyone has shared so far. Thanks and keep it coming if you have more to say.
Pondering on it more, I do not have an issue with time management or motivation. I actually think I am very good at those things. I have an issue with identity and anxiety. Resisting the urge to overshare, I’ll just say that it has become a habit of mine to build my self esteem on the things I produce. I know how challenging it is to finish creative projects, and even moreso ones you are happy with, but when I do, I feel they come to define me. And then if I don’t keep pursuing it, I will waste away into the tedium of daily life as a human. Unfortunately, every hobby I accumulate and do well at feels like one I must continue. Partially because I like the process of doing those things, but also because I believe it is what defines me as a fun and cool person and I don’t want to let go of that. So when it’s not moving along, I become worried.
I suppose I try to remind myself that all good things take time and care, and being awesome at many things takes even more time and care and I can’t give up sleep either, so what else is there to do but chip away at it?
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Yeah, I should emphasize that this is just what works for me personally, to get over my particular issues with starting and finishing projects—no guarantees it will work for anyone else! But someone sending me that advice column a few years back helped me a lot, so I’m hoping I can pass it on to someone else.
No! What defines you as a fun and cool person is that you are a fun and cool person! I fell into this same trap, and that way madness lies. Your value is not in what you produce as an artist, it is that you have intrinsic value as a human being. People will not love you or respect you any the less if you get stuck creatively and cannot finish a project. I sometimes go years without releasing anything, but I don’t beat myself up about it anymore. Relax, don’t worry and eventually the creative gears will start moving again. Creative people are sensitive, and we can’t play when we place too much pressure on ourselves.
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Oh yeah, this is 100% what’s behind my “can’t balance all my hobbies in a healthy way” problem too. I don’t have advice for dealing with it, but I can commiserate, for whatever that’s worth.
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I’m currently stuck in a creative block, compounded with RL issues, and I’m thinking that I’ll miss not few deadlines I set myself…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
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