everydays
A concept that has stuck in my mind recently is the concept of "everydays" where one commits to an act of creation every day. I came across this idea from the visual artist beeple, who as of this writing has completed 4824 consecutive days of creating a piece from scratch every day. Another form is "100 Days of Code" which is a challenge to complete 100 days of coding without missing two consecutive days.
The rules for people's everydays differ, but the main goal is skill building, and committing to this publically provides accountability. In beeple's case his rules are to create something, anything no matter if it is 5 minutes or 5 hours of work, as long as it is submitted to the internet before midnight. For 100 Days of Code their rules are an hour of coding before you go to sleep that night, and missing a day is ok.
My goal for everydays primarily skill building and working on personal interests. Also I want to break a bad habit that I have of working on a personal project using all of my spare time, then burning out so that I take a long break from working on personal projects. I am very bad at spending "an hour a night" on something until it is done. Leaving something unfinished until tomorrow. My problem is not that I will cheat and pump out 5 minutes of crap and call it my everyday, but that I will spend 4 hours polishing that turd every night for weeks, on top of my normal programming job, until I don't want to see an IDE for a month. So not only do I want to continue to create and learn, but I want to learn how to do it sustainably.
My rules:
- Work on a personal project every day
- Make a blog entry about it
- Between waking and sleeping
- No minimum time duration
- Learning tools counts
- Streaks are neato, but not the goal
Everyday #1: Yesterday I explored my tilde.club account. I decided I did not care for PuTTY so I worked out a better toolchain for SSH on windows, using Windows Terminal, Powershell, and OpenSSH. I learned the basics of weechat. I created a git repo of my home dir and pushed it to github here.
Everyday #2: Today I figured out how to create a blog using bashblog and created two posts, an introduction and the post you are reading now (I am actually going to be really surprised if someone reads this). I developed my personal rules for my everydays and committed to them live on the internet.
tags: everydays