I’ve been “unemployed” for 2 1/2 days, officially. I’m already seeing issues with my self-motivation in the face of distraction and multiple tasks.
We built up our new house to be a place we felt like we’d never need to leave. In anticipation of a significant drop in income, we filled our house with toys while we still had the money to do so. We were already gamers, so we had the PS3’s (yeah, multiple). My wife and I both have 3DS’s, and I have a PSVita. We’ve got iPads and Kindles. We have four classic arcade cabinets in the house, and a pool table. We’ve got shelves full D&D books and a giant bookshelf loaded with board and card games, and a beautiful Geek Chic gaming table to go along with it. There are comic books and regular books. There’s even a poker room.
This house is one giant fucking distraction.
Couple that with the sudden lack of external motivation, and I’ve got a bit of a problem on my hands. I have a book to finish. A blog to maintain. Two podcasts to produce. A comic book script, two short stories, and a couple of game designs in the works.
And yet, Ni No Kuni caaaaalllllsss toooooo meeeeeeee…
This is an interesting shift in mentality that I haven’t really dealt with before, at least not to this extreme. I’ve spent most of my life with external stimuli from school or work setting me on task. Sitting in a cubicle with the looming threat of being fired over your head is a simple way to make sure you stay focused (most of the time). Without that motivation, I’m forced to pull from inside to make shit happen.
Some people might think that’s easy enough. I mean, my wife may very well strangle me in my sleep if I quit my job just to fuck off on the internet all day, right? I wish it were that simple.
See, my brain is still in “WOOHOO!!” mode. I wake up in the morning and FUCK YEAH I DON’T HAVE TO GO TO WORK AND I CAN PLAY ALL THE SLY COOPER 4 I WANT AND THEN READ COMICS AND SURF TWITTER AND shut the hell up, brain. I’m still trying to figure out what kind of stimulus I need to bury that thought process and get back into wake-up-sit-at-desk-do-work mode, because damn I have a lot of work to do.
And yeah, it is definitely work. Sitting at a computer for several hours writing isn’t an easy task, especially writing fiction. These blog posts are straightforward because they’re my stream of consciousness; my thought process pushed to the keyboard in real time. Fiction requires invention. I’m creating a world from whole cloth and populating it with people that no one but me has ever met, and after a few hours of writing I’m actually pretty drained.
Trying to finish this book is one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to accomplish. Although I loved my job, it wasn’t very challenging. I knew the tasks at hand by rote and was very good at what I did. All of that knowledge is useless to me now, though, and I need to push it aside and make room in my mind for the stories I want to tell. I need to convince the subconscious part of me that has held onto all of that “work knowledge” for so long that it’s no longer important, and that there’s a new sheriff in town.
Amongst all of that, Persona 4 Golden is singing it’s sweet, lilting siren song from the table in the other room, and the new issue of Colder is waiting for me at my comic shop. Never in my life have I needed to kill the procrastinator in me more than I do right now.
