Entropy and the mad scientist
I like to think of myself as a fairly organized person. I keep all my books organized by genre and also sometimes by height. I have a very minimal desktop setup despite using windows 11 (achieving this was no easy feat). And I also regularly clear out my storage, both physical and digital and update them to the best of my abilities.
But all of the above goes straight out the window any time I become invested in a project.
I usually don't even notice this happening; I'll start by making a simple plan and then gathering the proper tools, but as time goes on, my work space, whether digital or physical, will get incrementally more and more chaotic. A quickly downloaded program file there and a throw away folder here.
All of this adds up to the point where midway through my project it gets physically impossible to continue without cleaning up around me. If its in the real world this means I have to organize papers and pens and maybe a few cups of coffee.
If I was working digitally, however, things are much less straightforward. I'd have to get rid of some programs that didn't work, files that I no longer need, and sift through dozens of open tabs. And this process is especially tedious on a bloated OS such as windows.
Often times this hurdle will be what kills my projects... which is silly to think about in hind sight. I never give up on projects just because its hard or complicated, I give up because I'm disorganized.
Now there are a lot of things that one might do to solve this issue; maybe be more prepared before hand, or work in a more dedicated, easier to clean up, area. Or heck I could even make use of a productivity hack from one of the dozens of books and posts about this exact issue.
But the problem is all of these solutions work directly against my momentum.
I am the type of person that spends every breathing second obsessed over a project till either I'm done with it (a rarity in my experience) or, more like, until I'm bored of it. And so its crucial for me to keep up my flow, as any interruptions my lead to me abandoning the project.
A very obvious solution (or at least I think it will be one) that I didn't mention above is switching from windows to linux. I'd like to talk a lot more in depth about my reasoning for staying on windows, so if you're interested visit back another time and I might just have written another brain-numbingly long rant about it.
I am aware that I'm cutting off this rant very... un-satisfyingly... but I have no solution to my dilemma currently. And honestly? If I had already solved the issue I wouldn't be here writing about it; so in a way we are ending this on a good note.
This one turned out quite long, though, neither I or you, dear reader, have a scale to compare this to yet. Who knows? Maybe I will keep on churning out these long rants in the future as well. But hopefully you enjoy these or whatever other silly things I put out! - Cakes