Hello again to everyone,

And thus ends the first (partial) quarter of my plan to rebuild my life. There was a lot of trial and error and quite a lot learned from these past 7 weeks. For those looking for the TLDR (too long didn’t read), I’ll give you the quick summary right here – but if you’re looking for where I bare my heart and spill the details of all my shortcomings, you’ll have to read the details for that.

Quick Summary

I spent a lot of time changing routines, creating tools and processes to help keep me on track, and found some areas where I need a little help building my discipline back up. I was able to get a few products done, get through some pretty major tutorials, and feel reasonably confident working with Python and C#. I’m still struggling to work with some tools and have rebuilt my plans now that I am more well-informed on what I believe to be the steps to proficiency. A big realization was that I need to give myself time to build up to the expectations I have for myself (rather than expecting to sprint right out of the gate – yes… I know) and being very intentional about where my priorities are and where my attention should be. It’s also for these reasons I’ve canceled my travel plans and will revisit them in the future as things progress.

This next quarter’s goals will be entirely focused on my top two priorities – Physical Health and Development Work. Physical health is focused on regaining confidence in my body’s health and ability (especially since I injured myself – more on that below). Development work will be focused on producing much smaller projects drawing inspirations from products that already exist to serve as a catalyst for learning new skills. I’ve brought down the expectation of hours to what I think to be much more achievable, but I will be actively working to beat this.

Review of Last Quarter

Last quarter, I created a sheet (shown below) of the goals I had broken down into different categories. Some also had a minimum I considered “acceptable” and a stretch goal that was a “would be nice”. Below are summaries covering what happened in the last 7 weeks, separated by category:

Physical Health overall was a roller-coaster this quarter - Sleep was generally pretty good, and I ended up sleeping 8h+ 34 (out of the 49) nights of the quarter but still had too many nights with less than 5 hours.
Diet was very up and down - There were some weeks where I wouldn't have plans of what to cook and spent too many hours working, so I would just eat fast food. Even still, I managed to do a lot of experimenting with my diet and about a week into March finally figured out a routine that was sustainable and ensured I was eating healthy (that routine is listed in the future section).
For my exercises, I abandoned calisthenics because the other workouts were plenty – and they ended up actually being too much... Too rapid an increase in my running led to shin splints, and shortly after, while stretching (incorrectly), I injured my knee – what feels like a cartilage or ligament injury.

Mental Health was a success across the board - there were still some tough days, but that’s a natural thing and to be expected. My journal continues to be one of my greatest assets where I dump all thoughts that run through my head, giving me time to process them.
I ended up reading 4 books in the past 7 weeks (if interested, you can see the books I've read/am reading here on Goodreads). It took some time, but I've found the best approach for me was to have a "learning book" and a "fun book.” The first I would read by the pool – productive, enjoyable, time outside, and just great for my mental well-being altogether. The "fun book" I would read at night before bed to help my mind unwind – also great to keep away the screens which tend to be a bottomless pit for me and regularly kept me up and scrolling for hours.
I'm still working on meditation - I've seen massive benefits from it in the past, so I still want to integrate it into my routines, but it felt like a hassle where it was in my schedule, and I never did it.

Financial - I met my minimum goal, but those weeks where I got fast food repeatedly added up fast. We came in around 110% of my budget plan, but I was able to prove that my current plan is maintainable so long as I can stick to my rules. And speaking of rules, I’ve employed some additional processes to take control of some things where I lack the “self-discipline.” These should help with sticking to my budget next quarter.

Relationships were kind of all over the place and difficult to track - the other difficulty with tracking success on these is they can be out of my control sometimes. I will go over what I think a better approach to this is later.

Other is the same as above ^

Game Dev – the quick summary is I didn't get as many hours in as I would have liked, but still felt like I made a significant amount of progress. However, I believe my pattern of work is to blame since it is unsustainable - I would operate at 150% for a week+ and then feel completely drained the next week, unable to motivate myself to make progress. I think pulling things back will help me operate at a much more sustainable and consistent pace. Details on the hours were:

Outputs/Products from Game Dev are talked about below, but first – the ones I didn’t get to:

The 3D Maze Runner was not released due to not putting in enough work in the last week of the quarter. I felt pretty defeated after my knee was injured and found it difficult to bring myself to get work done (things are better now).
I started the badges in Blender (3D modeling software) and then quickly became frustrated struggling to produce what I wanted with the limited knowledge I had. Definitely reasonable to expect myself to feel comfortable with a tool after going through a single step by step tutorial…… Right?... After spending some time thinking about this and coming to terms with the discomfort that is natural with learning new skills, I decided to approach 3D modeling differently and produced a new plan to build my skills gradually.
The Draft Concept for the “Game” has also been delayed at this point due to taking a drastically different approach.

Now for the show and tell – the things I did manage to get done:

I created a Python Platformer that you can see in a quick snippet below. The scope creep on this project was massive though… It was originally meant to be a proof of concept showing that I understood Python and the structure for building a game using free art and assets online – what happened in addition to that was I spent a large amount of time drawing all the assets myself and experimenting with different tools to utilize in this game. It’s very simple and a small proof of concept still, but I experimented with a lot of other concepts that yielded knowledge I think will be very valuable later.

I completed a tutorial in Blender to create the Donut gif you see below. This was a step-by-step guide on how to construct this from scratch so definitely not spawned from my own imagination – but it was a lot of work and introduces the capabilities of the software. Transferring this knowledge and these skills to my own projects is much more difficult and will take a significant amount of time to get comfortable with, but this tutorial opens a world of possibilities for creating assets for future games I’ll be developing.

I completed a Unity and C# tutorial to create the game below. This had all the assets and art provided and again, was a step-by-step guide – but it took 25 hours to get through and yielded a substantial amount of learning. Thanks to the videos, I’ve got a good understanding of C# and how it operates, it taught and reinforced good coding practices that resemble the expectations of professional developers, and I feel much more comfortable with the Unity platform. I’m confident (with some reference back to the videos) that I could reproduce something of this quality on my own. The gentlemen teaching also provided a wealth of information and contributed to my decision to change my long-term approach.

Lastly, I completed a series of 3D modeled objects through something I’m calling “The Daily Blender.” I found a forum randomly generates a new “subject” every day, and I spent 1 hour creating that object from scratch in Blender. This process will continue throughout the entirety of the next quarter, but the one’s I have created so far are below.

PMAI – this project, or rather its greater concept, is on hold for now. There are other Program Management tools I have in the pipeline that I will be working on soon, but they are primarily to serve the immediate needs that I have. For example – Google Calendar is lacking some capabilities that I need. I could likely find these in other software, but many of those are lacking in the ability to integrate with other tools that I’m using to manage projects. Fortunately, a lot of these tools and ideas I have in the pipeline could be turned into functional products to sell, so the work I’m putting in to support my own projects could yield some additional benefits.

Travel Plans – Upon reviewing what I’ve learned from this last quarter I decided to cancel the plans I had to travel. I have specific goals for travel as well and they center around being able to connect with people and learn about life in other parts of the world. For me, this means spending time learning the language and engrossing myself in the culture – and this itself is a massive commitment. When leaving my job, I had always known that my priorities were 1-physical health, 2-building my dream career, and 3-travel. And sometimes, to give something the attention we think it deserves, that means we have to make sacrifices. But just because I’ve canceled plans now doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future – part of the dream career is to build to a point where I can work from anywhere in the world, and once the threat of running out of money is a little less absolute, I’ll have the time I want to prioritize travel and give it the attention I desire.

Q2 2024 Plan

So now the plan for this quarter… My approach to creating goals this quarter has changed. I believe last quarter I blurred the line between a “goal” and hobbies/activities I enjoy. When adding most things to the list, the purpose was to serve as a reminder of the things I get enjoyment from (because I’m notorious for putting the blinders on and forgetting) – but having them as a “goal” warped my view of them negatively. For this quarter, I have a separate list of things to do for enjoyment that I can reference when I have free time or I’m looking for an escape, and the goals are focused on my top two priorities for the quarter – Physical Well-Being & Dev Work. The Physical goals are actually much more specific and focus on the work needed to rehab my knee, build back strength, and eat healthy. The Dev goals are still based on hours spent working but have been drastically reduced to resemble the minimum amount of work I expect to put in on a weekly basis. Below I’ll go into some specifics--

First is the grid I’ll be using to track my success with my rehab plan (the plan may change after consulting a doctor). At the bottom, I’m also tracking the number of times I eat out and my calories deficit. I know calorie tracking doesn’t work for a lot of people, but it works for me, primarily because my diet is simple, and I can stand to eat the same thing every day. It allows me to track the calories I eat with almost no effort and ensures I get enough nutrients from a variety of foods. That diet plan is below the grid.

The plan for Dev work has drastically changed. After doing some research and seeing what others have found success with, I think planning one large game or a single larger program management software release, spending years working on it, and then counting on success leaves myself open to many months/years spent for potentially no financial gain. Therefore, I’m going to focus on much smaller releasable projects, each focused on implementing a small subset of new skills. These smaller projects will draw inspiration from games and software that already exist, and I will work to implement some unique mechanics and features to make them my own. Most of these, I’ll release and market for cheap to start building a foundation I can build my name upon. The range of what I’ll be working on will be pretty wide (from small games to calendar apps) but I’ll focus on keeping the timeline for production anywhere between a few weeks to a month or two. An additional benefit of keeping these projects small is that they can build upon one another, serving as a starting point for the next project. Each starting point will be using code that is a released and functional piece of software, meaning it has been tested and iterated upon, and therefore less prone to a massive swarm of bugs at the end of a larger project.
With that, the goals are as follows--

I also manage all my Dev work through Scrum which means for each quarter I plan out the next three months of projects (Epics), each with its own set of requirements and a timeline. Those projects are shown and described below:

Well that pretty much wraps up the quarterly letter. Though it’s possible in the future I may not find “success” with any of these projects, I try to remind myself that I have already captured a different version of success. I think it’s easy to overlook the experiences and wisdom we gain from our journey when we are so focused on our destination. Writing this letter helps me take a moment to stop and consider the steps I have taken to get to where I am. I appreciate all of you for your support and hopefully three months from now, I have some pretty awesome things to show.

Thank you all – see you again next quarter.

-Zack