I'm not dead. Well, not yet anyway.
So I broke my posting streak. This was intentional. It was, in fact, self inflicted punishment. I had a horribly, HORRIBLY unproductive weekend, and come 11pm on Sunday I had not written a single blog post, let alone the podcast review that was promised. I wasn't about to shit out some nonsense little post about a podcast that I liked without doing any serious writing for it, so I imposed a punishment. For failing to meet my deadline, I allowed my streak to lapse. Now, you may think that's not a very good punishment, but I was really annoyed with myself since I was doing so well and keeping the streak up so well. My later posts had been much lower effort though, often it would be spur of the moment writing. To be fair, this is also spur of the moment writing, but I have a reason to be posting this small little post right now.
I downloaded this productivity app called Forest. Basically, it makes sure you stay focused by locking out your phone. There's a chrome app too that locks out specific websites. Ok, locking out may be a bit strongly worded. What happens is you open the app, select a pre determined amount of time, and press plant. This plants a little virtual seedling that will grow up to be a magnificent tree in your virtual forest. You can cancel out of the app at any time and use your phone like normal, but doing so kills the seedling and permanently places a dead tree or bush in your forest. This is undesirable.
It's not the most strict of lockout apps I looked at, but I like this one the best. It fills me with dread thinking about quitting early and having a little dead tree in my otherwise perfect forest. Plus it tracks all your data and gives you these nice little graphs and charts, which it keeps forever, so if you have a dead tree, you'll have that dead tree forever. I don't need that weighing down my soul.
I sat down to write tonight for the start of NaNoWriMo and got a whopping 2800 words on the page. This was partly through the help of the Forest app, which I set for two hours. I managed to storm through almost 3000 words in a little over an hour and a half though, so I had time to kill before I could use my phone or any social media apps on my laptop, so I thought I would write this little post explaining my absence and promising to try harder in the future. I'll be on shift for the next 8 days though, and it's shaping up to be a busy one, so expect lots of short posts or days with no posts at all. Sorry in advance!