One Month, One Project
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I googled “laziness” and this sweet, fat dog came up. I think it speaks for itself, quite frankly.
I have a to-do list as long as my arm. That’s not even an exaggeration, or something that’s only true if you meet certain conditions, such as writing it in size 72-point font – there are just so many things that I’ve always meant to set aside time to work on, and then just… well, never done. They build up, and I salve my conscience by writing them down, tucking them into bed with a soothing “one day, sweet thing”, and then gently forgetting they ever existed. It’s a ridiculous process, and frankly I’m a bit sick of it.
So this year I decided to make a change. I started a one month, one project plan – each month, a new project, worked on for a minimum one hour per day. At the end of the month it’s tools down: evaluate, decide how much (if any) of it is useful, document the process, and move on. It follows in the footsteps of The Cult of Done, a slightly pretentious but ultimately well-meaning set of guidelines which appeal exactly to the core concept of my plan: get shit done.
Of course as you may have noticed, it’s the middle of March. Where are your first two projects then, Tim? You’re right: I started, got distracted, and promptly failed. This whole entire website was originally intended to be January’s project in and of itself, and here I am finally kicking it off in the middle of fucking March, a sluggish testament to my own ineptitude. But it matters not: One Month, One Project is finally underway, and I’m excited to see where it leads.
So let’s review the first project: this website. I took a WordPress theme that I found appealing, and edited the shit out of it until it met my specific needs. It now serves as exactly what I needed and what my older, limited portfolio could never achieve: a dynamic, flexible repository of online content, that the user can pull from as and when they require. It’s got a blog section, as well as areas for general projects sorted by category. It’s elegant, it’s functional, and displays what I want in a quick, highly-visual format. I like it.
It’s not all candy-canes and gravy. I could have made my own website from scratch rather than modifying an existing template, and the fact that I piggybacked on someone else’s work rather than doing my own eats away at me like a tiny self-loathing cancer. It shouldn’t of course, I’ve made so many WordPress templates in my time that I don’t need to prove myself to anybody, least of all myself. But it does. And that aside, it took me two and a half months when it was supposed to take one. Still, it’s done now, and I’ll continue to add to it in the future as more projects are created and completed, both projects that are commissioned by others, and those that spawn from my own to-do list.
The next project – which I’ll be starting tomorrow, and will run until the end of April due to my own terrible laziness in getting this one going – is to create a web-based D&D character builder which doesn’t totally suck, with an eye to porting it to iOS. The builder will be XML-based, so adding custom content will be as easy as learning the simple formula, writing your own XML file, and putting into the right place. It’ll be flavour-heavy, rules-light, and all published under the 3.5 OGL for maximum compatibility with Pathfinder. That’s the plan, anyway.
Stay tuned, internet. Excrement is about to get empirical.