Friday, February 8, 2002

Maintaining a schedule is hard.

It’s hard in a lot of ways. It’s hard to give up those things that you want to accomplish or learn but clearly don’t have time for. It’s hard to accept that some of those things that you want to accomplish or learn will require a significant amount of your time. It’s hard to change your schedule when you realize that part of it is imbalanced, because that always affects some other part that’s operating smoothly. It’s hard to find ways to remind yourself of every little item on your schedule. It’s hard to keep up with your schedule, doing all those things that you plan.

That last difficulty is the one that’s causing me the most trouble at the moment. I just returned home from an excellent three-hour session of playing Redemption, I’m pleasantly tired, and now I realize that I haven’t practiced sketching at all today. I try to sketch at least something every weekday.

I can’t double up, because that option opens up a path that I refuse to take. At some point I’ll have to double up several times, and then I’ll have so much to do to get back on track that it will be too daunting.

I won’t let it slip, either. Saalon is building slip-time into his schedule: he’ll allow himself to skip one day of his schedule. I don’t think that that will work for me, though. If I have a way out, I think I’ll abuse it, though I certainly won’t slavishly follow the schedule even if I’m on my deathbed or extremely busy.

So, I’m going to go draw something. It may not be great art, but it will be practice, and I need practice more than I need to create great art.

In other news, I released Juggler, my AtheOS IDE, yesterday. It’s quiet stable and reasonably full-featured. I’m proud of it.

I also posted a review of Panda! Go Panda! — a charming little movie for preschoolers — to Points of View today.