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Join me on a journey exploring the ups and downs of being a creator. I make things across many mediums including apps, games, and podcasts. Along the way, I take the side roads to motivation and inspiration. Navigating the winding paths that try to stop us from achieving our dreams and goals.
What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the PW Podcast. I am your host, Peter Whitham, and you can find me on this podcast of PeterWitham.com. This episode, I am sharing some thoughts on where I'm at as far as all of my projects and the amount of time I have. So this is a soft, self-imposed rules kind of thing that I gotta do here because.
The simple fact is we reach a certain point in life. Doesn't matter who you are, what your background is, or anything where you have a certain level of commitments, and those commitments will prevent you from doing some of the things you want to do. And there's just no way around that. It's just the way life goes, right?
It doesn't matter whether you own a house. Don't own a house. You got kids, you don't have kids, whatever. We all have commitments that have to take priority over other things, and I've been thinking about that a lot recently.
In particular, with regards to all of my projects, and that's also why it's been a little while since I've done a podcast episode here, because I wanted to make some progress on some of my projects. But at the same time, you have to balance it with life, right? And life's gonna throw you curve balls even when you make the best plans you can and everything else.
Something comes up, right? And I say that as I'm sitting here in Texas on January 22nd and we were about to get a nice storm. That probably means I'm gonna lose internet for a couple of days maybe, or power or something based on what they're saying. Or maybe I won't. But either way, it's gonna impact me somehow.
Working from home, for example, gonna be doing that, which you would think is a plus. It is. Unless you don't have internet or you don't have power or there's something happens, maybe a tree's gonna come down in the backyard. I don't know. Anyway, these are all just examples of things that you just have to deal with.
It's as simple as that, right? And they have to take priority over other things, but at the same time, I do like to find a balance. So I wanna share some of my thoughts on that here. And my plan now. The first obvious thing is you say, okay, gotta stop doing some of these projects. Pick the ones to kill off.
And I hate doing that because that's like saying pick your favorite child, right? Impossible. And I don't like killing off projects. But I feel like towards the end of last year, for example, again, one of the podcasts, but I've made some choices already and killed some things, and I don't really want to kill anymore.
So simple as that. I love doing them ball. So the other option is you say to yourself, okay. Then you're gonna have to do a little bit of planning and a little bit of discipline. And I'll be honest when it comes to my own projects and that my discipline is terrible for the most part, because, you wake up on a given day and you don't feel like working on whatever that game, that app, that blog post, that picture, that whatever it may be, and then other days you just, that's all you want to do. And you want to do it for hours and end, and it means you can't do something else. So what I'm gonna do is I'm saying to myself at the moment, okay, what we're gonna do, Peter, is we're gonna say, today it's gonna be a day, right? Do the day job, and then in the evening gonna work on.
Some kind of game development project that I've got on the go or some kind of learning something like that, and then won't touch anything else, and then on another day say, okay, today I'm recording a podcast. Today I am. Working on an app today, I'm doing some marketing, app marketing research, which is something I heavily want to research this year and get better at and understand.
That's gonna require a lot of time, and that's a crossover between learning and technically working on apps or games. So that's what I'm gonna try. I'm gonna say to myself, all right, force yourself. To do this thing today and force yourself to not do any of the other things. Don't get distracted.
Which is actually pretty hard for me that's always been a problem because psychologically my brain says these are all your own projects and. You can pick and choose when to do these or not do them and, life will go on, right? I've got a full-time day job, I'll still get paid, and I don't have to necessarily do any of these projects and my brain is terrible at telling me that.
So maybe you are in this situation or maybe you have this problem, and if you do and you want me to talk about that kind of aspect of. Being your own worst enemy for these kind of things let me know, right? Reach out to me, PeterWitham.com, and I'll be happy to talk about this some more.
Or if you have questions or suggestions or whatever. Now, I think what I'm gonna do is try this approach of every other day, right? So I'll give you an example. Monday night might be game dev night. Then Wednesday night might be podcast night, right? And then Friday night is app dev the important part there is the break in between because it takes the pressure off and if I feel like doing something great, maybe I'll do that, but it lays out a pattern that I can try and make it a habit.
And try and stick with it, which like I say is the problem unto itself right there. So I am curious how folks deal with this especially when it's things that you, again, you know that, hey, if I don't do this, it's not the end of the world. But sometimes you say to yourself, oh my gosh, I'm never gonna quit X if I don't do this.
And so you make it the end of the world. A whole other struggle, brain struggle right there, so that's what I'm gonna do. And I'm also very conscious of the fact I'm gonna have to do a lot more documenting than I do now. I have, for example, on my project hack game this is the first one I've ever done with an actual game development document that I keep updated.
So it's been great because I can sit down, work on the game, open up the document. I know the bugs, I know the features I'll implement and all that kind of thing, and. If at any time I'm not working on the game and I think of something, I write down a note and it just gets thrown in the folder with everything else to be reviewed and groomed.
When I next sit down to work on the game, it's working out really good for me. I'm virtually convinced myself now that, yeah, okay, I understand why people do this, so I need to start doing more of that for other things. Because the problem is, as we all know, and as I've said before, if you don't work on something for a little while.
You lose that focus in your brain of remembering where you are at or the whatever it was that you were working on. And no amount of like code documentation is necessarily gonna help you with that. We are talking essentially of. Very lightly treating something like a project without having a full on project plan, which, unless you love that kind of stuff, I just don't wanna do it.
But I need enough that I can come back and not spend the first hour of every session trying to remind myself what the hell I was doing last time. That is time wasted when I'm taking this kind of approach. So I wanted to share this in this episode because if I tell you, I feel like somehow I've made a better commitment to it because you, the listener out there.
Even though we're probably never gonna meet, probably never gonna speak to each other I've somehow made a commitment out there in the public space and I know that at least one other person knows about it. And that puts a little bit of pressure to deliver on it. And maybe I can give better regular updates to you all on this podcast.
But I do want to talk about my research that I have been doing with APP and gain marketing. Like I've said before, I'm not an expert, but I need to become better at it. And I've been doing a lot of research, jotting down a lot of ideas, and I think I've got some things that I'd like to share with you all in some episodes about that.
So you can look forward to that coming up soon. And if again, open invitation here. If this is something you know about and I'm not talking about, spam me because, oh, I'm the greatest ad marketer ever and dah, and I can do this for you for X amount of money, don't even bother.
I'm not gonna reply. But if you genuinely want to talk about it, and this is something that you do for your own apps, and I am talking more about indie devs here than anything, I'd love to have a conversation about that. And share some thoughts, but you probably should hear my thoughts on it first is what I will say.
So I'll be sharing that in some upcoming episodes along with some other things. But I've made my commitment today to get this podcast episode done and out and I can check that box. Happy checking boxes, people. I will check in with you next time. Reach out to me, follow all of my thoughts and brain.
You can reach out to me at PeterWitham.com where you can follow all of my craziness and links to everything else. That's it folks. I'll speak you in the next episode. I.