Failure

This is a kind of mash-up failure of my most recent failure and an older failure where I pushed out my writing deadline to try to get a prototype done. I think I would normally have seen that coming, but the ongoing catch-up efforts after I ended up so behind recently made the whole situation more complex.

In this case, I had a prototype I was trying to finish for a post I wanted to write before my prototype wrapup for the week. However, it wasn't clear how the prototype deadline would interact with my post deadline (which is normally pretty static, but is all over the place while I'm catching up with my posts). In the end, the prototype got way more complicated than I thought, and it ended up pushing all my posts back by several days.

The whole thing has got me thinking about these deadline-relaxing problems as they relate to my recent ideas about truth as something you should try to represent and some earlier thoughts on goalpost optimisation, where it can be easier to change your goals than achieve them. There's a post waiting to be written on the idea, but it seems like a lot of problems come back to trying to alter these deadlines to meet my immediate needs rather than letting them simply reflect the truth.

Which is to say that I should have just abandoned the idea once it became clear I wouldn't meet the prototype deadline and just done something else as a prototype, or made a prototype wrapup post with no prototypes in it and just copped that on the chin.

To my credit, I kept writing posts (but not posting them) even as I was blocked on this prototype, so I'm not actually as far behind as it seems. Having now come to terms with the prototype not being ready, I can post that backlog which should leave me pretty close to caught up.

As predicted, the problems and difficulty of having to catch up on my posts after falling so far behind is acting as a powerful incentive to not do it again. I'll be glad when things are back to normal.