As promised, another MoHM for another night. I will even give you a lesson that I learned drawing this. Like the rest of my Hack Mars character sketches, I drew it in the autumn of 2003, scanned it and vectorized it during the winter. This image was one that I liked pretty well. Now I can clearly see it's flaws, but that is another lesson.

I remember drawing a circle for the head, horizontal and vertical line to align things. I added eyes, jaw, nose, mouth, hair, and body. All went fairly simply. It wasn't forced, it wasn't a masterpiece, and it wasn't dogmeat. It was middle in a string of sketches. This is the goal of my work: something that is consistently decent, fixable, and simple. I try to keep things boundaried by month. I start on a tangent which produces very good content or programming. Then I attempt to create more which produces seven days of this type of work. Then the next week I do five days of good work. The next week, I start into a slump which affords me time to play video games and watch anime. I get worried about bills and freak out a bit. I do a bit more work, I have a bit of trouble. I work on new projects which leads me back full circle where I'm off on another tangent for the next month.

Today's lesson is letting inspiration come in its own time. Putting deadlines on things, scheduling work for everday, and over-estimating by 200-400% is normal for work projects. It assumes that work will not get done if it is left up to people, but it also assumes that work will not get done even if it is enforced. I wish to argue that this system of double-think is useless. First, I want to say that double-think is the correct word for this. In 1984 double-think is defined as holding two contradictory statements as true. Of course, the only other options are for a person to be a slacker or a perfectionist, neither of which are acceptable in our society. An acceptable alternative is the double-think of project management. I have found in my experience that I can drive myself at a certain natural rhythm to achieve best results without scheduling. That is what I was talking about in the previous paragraph. Any schedule I write is worthless. It makes much more sense to work hard when I am inspired and rest when I am not. It works out to the same result as the schedule anyway: long past deadline. So to make the schedule work, simply don't use deadlines. Things will get done when they get done. If a person is motivated by a deadline, s/he will produce poor work in high volume which is useful only if the project requires voluminous amounts of poor work. When was the last time I did something like that? Hmmm, MoJF anyone? ^_^