Procrastinator.

I think that I’ve learned something about myself this week: I am never more productive overall then when I’m procrastinating on a specific task. There are at least a half dozen blog posts I’ve been meaning to write and probably twice as many songs that have been bouncing around in my head and sneaking out of me anytime I wander past my guitar with a minute or two to spare. So of course in the last week INSTEAD of writing those blog posts or songs I have accomplished the following:

• decided to migrate my site to a new static generator jekyll
  • this involved uninstalling, reinstalling (requiring much investigation and searching online) ruby and rubygems in order to get it working on my server (particularly frustrating since it was ALREADY working until I tried to mess with it)
• went through and cleaned up my entire Instapaper account, including everything I had previously archived
• researched Pinboard and came within a submission button click on the payment screen of quitting Instapaper and switching
• went through and cleaned up all my Amazon wishlists
• of course kept up with all the RSS feeds I subscribe to
• managed to finish getting every regular Cookie Clicker achievement, several of the shadow achievements, and all but ONE of the upgrades
• managed to LOSE my Cookie Clicker save (or rather managed to hit a bug of some sort where it quit saving, and then refreshed my browser, losing the saved game I have been playing since the week we came home with Kaitlyn at the end of August)
• cleaned off the desk in my home office
• put a new slip cover on the futon in the office

and probably some other stuff, which while useful in the long run (or maybe not…) was not the kind of productivity that I really should’ve been aiming for.

While keeping up with my RSS feeds however I did come across an interesting article. One which has been the catalyst for at the very least writing this post and I hope writing several more¹ and several songs. It’s called “The Song Game”² and its an invite only email list of songwriter’s (including some very famous ones) who write and share a new song with each other each week. The goal is to force productivity by being accountable to each other. While I don’t really have a group that I can initiate a weekly song (yet) I can use this website and my social networks in an attempt to stay accountable. It would probably be crazy to say that I’m going to write a new song EVERY week, thats too likely to set myself up for failure and excuses, since obviously I’ll someday fail. With that said - I am committing to posting a new song here next friday by 7:00 PM Pacific. It may be a youtube link, it may be an embedded soundcloud recording, it may be acoustic based, possibly electric, it may be just guitars, but it will be new and it will have lyrics/vocals.

Now, I’ve already begun thinking of all the excuses I may make (and answers for them), so I want to get them out of the way now:

• I couldn’t get it recorded: at a bare minimum it will be a youtube video recorded using my macbook air’s buil-in webcam - I don’t need cd master quality
• It was a bad week for my 3 month old daughter: it very well may be (but that could be the case for the forseeable future)
• Lindsey needed and deserved my help with said 3 month old daughter: almost definitely, but there are downtimes, and if need be I can write music in the garage
• Work was absolutely CRAZY, Call Center Operations the week after Black Friday???: guaranteed - but I don’t work 24/7

I’m sure I’ll have other excuses, but for now there shouldn’t be any reason why I can’t create at least one new song this week. And if I succeed, maybe then I can tackle the week after.