Not Enough Hours In A Day

It’s been some time since I’ve gotten inspiration to write, so I’ve been holding off on any sort of nonsensical rambling. However, in the spirit of continuing to develop my craft, I really do have to write every day. So here comes some nonsensical rambling. I’m listening to Jacques Brel singing some crazy French folk music. It’s the vastest library of French music I’ve ever had. It’s such a rough language; I wonder sometimes why it’s so popular. I’ve been considering putting some kind of language learning tool on this laptop so that I can take some time away from writing to learn a foreign language. Speaking of rough languages, perhaps I might learn German.

Another option I’m considering is putting DirectX on this laptop and doing some graphics research. The difficult part is the fact that I’d need a ton of material installed on the laptop since I don’t have the internet to look anything up. Another issue is the fact that this is a netbook and not an actual computer that can compute things. I’ll be able to do some lighting and things, but anything that requires intensive algorithms will chug like crazy. It’ll probably be fine for what I want to do at first and then once I get far enough along I’ll just do something else for a while and move the research onto a computer.

There really aren’t enough hours in a day. I’ve been saying that like crazy lately. I just have no time to be bored. I always have something that I should be doing or working on. I’ve got a plan for the project that I’ve been having trouble finishing, so at least now I have the goal completely laid out. I’m hoping many of the things in my estimates will be shorter than what I’ve figured they’d take. There are just a number of things that I am afraid of, and those things get massive estimates so that I remind myself to be wary of it before saying how soon I can get something done.

Estimates are a very important part of a production process. There are people who might shrug it off as something that you can just pull out of nowhere and move on and never look back. The point of it is to establish that you are going to do something within a period of time and you are bound to this estimate so that you push yourself to get it done within your estimate. You can also see how productive you are being if you make your estimates or miss them. This allows you to assess the issues as to why you missed your estimate. Some questions you might ask are, “Did something get in my way? Was I distracted and not being as productive as I could be? Was this task simply more complex than I originally anticipated? What happened to make me miss my mark?” Ask these questions and reassess so that the next project’s estimate is closer to being spot on. Eventually you won’t make any of those mistakes and you will be able to really nail down a project timeline.