The thing about my whole ‘throw things at the wall and see what sticks’ approach to improving my productivity is, you have to take time to see what’s sticking and what’s not. And I think I’ve just realized something here isn’t as sticky as I thought.

* * *

My pet project management thingie has, just within the last week or so, gotten into a mostly usable state. It still needs a lot of work, but I can reliably use it to manage my projects.

It’s basically just a tree. You can add things to the tree, change the order of things, move things up or down in the tree, and select whether individual nodes will open in a new pane or just expand like, you know, a regular tree control.

I was keeping all this information in a simple text file, but a couple months ago I decided it would be a good idea to ditch the text file and start using my still-buggy homemade software. I figured if I forced myself to use it, I would then be more motivated to fix the bugs.

I was wrong.

Instead of using my software and trying to fix it, I just abandoned project management entirely. And there was a massive hit to my productivity because of that.

It’s a little too easy to abandon my pet projects, even though I know that doing so is bad for my mental health. You can have all the motivation in the world, but sometimes it’s not about motivation. For something like this, sometimes you have to look at the other end of things and reduce the friction that’s stopping you from moving.

So I dropped everything and got this app usable, and that’s a big part of why I’m now getting everything back on track.

* * *

My Adobe Creative Suite software — Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash; that sort of stuff — is a couple versions and a few years out of date.

Adobe has moved to a subscription based service for their software, and I’m finding it hard to justify the cost, given that I don’t do any freelancing anymore. In fact, it’s entirely possible that I will never get a new version of Photoshop the same way I will never buy a new desktop computer. It just doesn’t seem to make sense anymore.

* * *

I’d like to get moving on that comic with Marie, and haven’t decided yet if I’m going to do it in Illustrator or my own custom paint program that I write a while ago, just for this sort of thing.

Illustrator is a known quantity, but it has trouble with files with lots of filters, which I use extensively. Getting a new computer won’t help; the problem is that, because it’s old software, it can’t take advantage of all the memory present in new machines.

On the other hand, my custom paint thing has some potential, but is also very buggy and needs to be updated quite a bit before I’d really say it’s usable.

I’d say I should just go ahead and declare that I’m going to use my own program and that will motivate me to clean it up… but I’m coming to the conclusion that that strategy is never going to work. Which is not to say I’ll never get the paint program usable. I think I just have to do it for its own sake.

I can’t think of it as a quick fix for the hole left by an outdated Creative Suite; it will never get done that way… I have to think of it as worth the investment instead.