I accomplished more in two weeks than I had in five years
How you set a goal can change everything
Years ago, my partner and I decided to make a video game. We were both fresh out of college then, with dreams to make a beautiful and ambitious indie RPG.
We dove into planning immediately, and recruited some people to help. Mostly artists, since we are both developers.
From the beginning, we treated it like a business, and formed an LLC to take the venture seriously.
We were all working full-time jobs to pay the bills, and doing work on The Game in our “free time”. As we took on more adult responsibilities, that free time was becoming more and more scarce.
Despite our frantic schedules, we met twice a week to check in, plan new work, and make decisions about our company. We hired contractors with cash from our own pockets to make 3D assets, art for the user-interface, and even had a few voice lines recorded for dialogue.
For years, we had weekly meetings and ran our company as legitimately as we knew how, but at the end of it we didn’t have a game. We didn’t even have the bare-bones alpha version that we planned from the beginning.
I’ll give us some credit: we did the best with what we had. We were young developers with a lot of ideas and passion, but without the experience of driving a project from start to finish. Once we had the chance to work on professional teams and learn the ropes, progress picked up. Yet, we slowed again the moment our day jobs got busy.
After burning through more money than I care to admit to, progress slowed to a halt and we were left with pieces of a half-made game that didn’t quite fit together.
Spreading development out over several years meant the features we built at the beginning of the project were in desperate need of a refactor, and the art assets were mismatched as technologies and our “vision” changed. The project was too ambitious, too drawn out, and we lost steam.
Five years later
Skip ahead to 2020, when employers and employees alike are embracing remote work like never before. Cutting out my commute gave me back TWO HOURS of every work day and a hell of a lot of energy, since I no longer had to deal with the stressors of crowded public transit.
Then, freeing my time in a more permanent way, I was laid off from my job in late May.
In fact, I wrote about it here on Medium.
After a few days of consideration and deep thought about my situation, I made a commitment.
Specifically, I made a public commitment to do work on a game project every day for a month and livestream my progress on Twitch. I didn’t set a time limit when I started, but I ended up falling into a routine of streaming for about 2 hours around lunch time.
In the past two weeks since that commitment, I have:
- Sculpted a terrain for my game world
- Written a tri-planar shader for that terrain, with hand-painted grass and stone textures
- Created 3D models for plants, bushes, a building, an animal, and a few small props
- Modeled, textured, rigged, skinned, and animated a humanoid character
- Implemented random NPC generation to apply colors and shapes to different parts of the character models at runtime
- Implemented a simple character navigation system, so characters can find paths through the game world without hitting obstacles
- Written a shader that will add snow to the tops of objects
- Built most of an inventory system, including code to manage items and a user interface for the inventory
Each day, I wake up and prepare the work I’ll do on stream. Then, I just do it.
I do the code, the design, the art, the UX, and I do most of it live. I wake up every day and I get to work, and in two weeks I have produced more usable work than our little dev team did in years.
It’s a long shot from a finished game, but it feels tangible. It feels possible.
So, what’s different?
To get at the answer to this question, I want to talk about a book that I have heard about many times before, but only got around to reading this week: The 4-Hour Workweek* by Tim Ferriss.
Let me preface with this: I don’t really like the book, as a whole (sorry, Tim). I may get into the specific reasons why in another post, but the short version is that I think Tim Ferriss views work and its purpose very differently than I do, to the point that I don’t resonate with most of the book.
There are some things I do like about the book, however, such as his concept of a dreamline. A dreamline is, essentially, the process I went through after my layoff: calculating how much money and time you need to make a dream into a reality.
I described this in my other post as measuring the ‘runway’, how long do I have to enact my dream with this much capital?, whereas Ferriss frames it in reverse: how much capital do I need to in order to put my dream into action.
They are similar ideas, and I like the thoughtfulness behind them both. I like taking ethereal things like hopes and dreams, and turning them into numbers. I can work with numbers.
Building up the ‘dreamline’, or the runway, leads into another concept that Ferriss talks about: Parkinson’s law.
Work expands to fill the time available, and shorter deadlines do, miraculously, bring projects to completion faster. As long as the deadlines are, in fact, possible. Since I worked my dreamline in reverse, it imposed its own deadline.
In time, the money that I have saved will run out. The project needs to be done by then, or life will finish the project for me.
I think that simple idea is the driving force behind most of my progress.
Every day, when I wake up and think about what I will do that day, I know that the two months I started with is one day shorter. The deadline is approaching, and it’s not negotiable.
But wait, there’s more
If deadlines could drive crazy productivity like this, everyone would just set a deadline and be done with it, right?
I think there’s another mechanism at work here, moving in tandem with the deadline to drive productivity.
I think the answer lies in how I made a distinct, measurable commitment. Gretchen Rubin, one of my favorite writers on happiness and psychology, has an entire book about how we respond to inner and outer expectations (read: commitments), called The Four Tendencies. *
Most people are “Obligers”, meaning they find it more natural to keep commitments when other people are expecting them to. They instinctively prioritize these commitments as more important.
I’ve been categorized as an Upholder by Gretchen’s online test, meaning I naturally meet internal and external commitments, but it’s still important to frame the commitments effectively.
If you’re familiar with the Four Tendencies*, you might interpret my situation as more of an Obliger: I announced a daily live stream and kept that commitment because others were expecting it of me.
Having an audience helps, for sure, but I think there’s more to it. Publicizing it made it real to others, but, most importantly, voicing my commitment aloud made it real to me.
If you’re a Questioner, you might have to take a step further and give yourself a why. “This is my commitment, and here is the value I will get from completing it by this date.”
If you’re a Rebel, well, I’m not really sure how they tick. I never quite ‘got’ rebels, but there are a lot of strategies tailored to each tendency in Gretchen’s book, so I would recommend it if you think you need some help keeping commitments.
Her podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin, is also freely available and packed with all kinds of tips and advice, some specific to her Four Tendencies framework, and some for general happiness.
Setting goals is easy, but reaching goals is considerably harder. I don’t think there is any one answer to personal productivity, but by identifying when things work (and, more importantly, when they don’t), we can tailor our processes in response.
I’ve always known I work better when the work is framed as a challenge.
That’s why I settled on thirty days of streaming in the first place. I’m drawn to things like National Novel Writing Month, the 100-Day project, Inktober, so I knew a 30-day challenge would be compelling for me.
Now, experimenting with different formats for these challenges, I’ve unlocked another key to my own productivity: make the challenge official. Announce it somewhere, write it down. Make it a solid commitment, non-negotiable. Build up accountability, even if the accountability is just with yourself.
All I have to do now is finish up the month strong and tackle obstacles as they come.
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If you want to follow along with my dev journey (or join in on some fun game streams in the evenings), you can find me at twitch.tv/savallion EVERY DAY through the end of June. In July I’ll reevaluate my goals, but I expect to maintain some streaming schedule for the foreseeable future.
I’m also making weekly dev vlogs detailing my progress over on YouTube, if a quick recap is more your style.
*Amazon links in this post may be affiliate links, meaning I may earn from qualifying purchases.
