Failure

I think I got a bit burned out over the last little while. I'd been putting a particular effort into getting my prototypes and small projects in order, which was going fairly well. Unfortunately, my writing fell behind for various reasons and it was difficult to muster the extra effort necessary to fix that while keeping everything else on track. By the time I realised what was going on I think it was too late for my normal failure system to really help and I just fell behind.

Based on my previous thoughts about two-phase burnout, I gave it a little while of not pushing too hard before trying to get back on the horse. I think that was the right thing to do under the circumstances, but I've unfortunately ended up a week behind. Normally I'd think about changing my posting system to mitigate the effects, but I'm not really sure that anything can deal with an outright loss of motivation. Instead, I spent some time reflecting on what I could do differently to avoid burning out in the first place. Some thoughts on that are coming in future posts.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping to learn from my earlier extended lapse last time and avoid making any grandiose gestures to atone for the posts I missed. Again, though, I can't help but feel like the unbroken line of posts stretching back is a powerful motivator to keep going, even if that line is, uh, decidedly non-euclidean at times. I'd hate to get in the habit of missing big chunks of posts and having this line lose its meaning. So a balance must be struck.

What I've decided is that a steady cadence of one regular post and one birdpost per day is achievable. Depending on how I'm going I might forego the pictures I'd normally put up on the regular posts. I'm confident that this will put me back up to date on a predictable timeline without risking the burst-and-bust cycle that I ran into before. Wish me luck!