Heya friendos! It’s the 20th edition of this newsletter, isn’t that crazy? For the past week, I was obsessed with map making. It has not been great for productivity and the plans I made regarding all the other projects I was working on. So I want to talk about how I use hyperfixation as a tool and what the drawbacks are.

How Am I Doing?

I’m doing well, but this week started with some stress. For the first time, I’m doubting the viability of my own work process. You see, I’m someone who rides the waves of motivation that come with hyperfixation.

Usually, a subject will come by and I latch onto it. In that state, I hardly think about anything else for 2 to 3 weeks. Naturally, that obsession drives me to make leaps and bounds regarding the subject. The flip side is that I lose interest completely in anything else. There is also a timer to my fixation, and it’s not precise enough to do any planning around.

So if it’s a feature I’m programming and excited about, it gets done fast. It has to be completely wrapped up by the time my interest starts to wane, otherwise we’re left with an unfinished feature with broken code. That’s equivalent to a feature that needs to be redone completely when it becomes important again. Bigger projects, don’t fair so well. I start a new project every other week and many of them don’t make it through the first few days.

When I started New to Narrative, I believed those sprints of fixation to be in my advantage. New to Narrative is by design, a lot of different things I’m interested in: game design, narrative design, blog posts, YouTube, a newsletter, educational materials, and making games, of course. I made a bet on myself. Can I control my impulses enough to have a steady output?

What Am I Doing?

Sometimes, something unrelated comes along and takes the winds out of the sails of anything else I was working on. This time, it’s map making. I really enjoy chipping away at my Heroes of Might and Magic V map. It’s extremely time-consuming, however, and has since halted any production I was doing on YouTube videos.

I’ve not been editing the things I wanted to finish in February. I have not filmed any new material I planned for March and April. I’ve not been finishing any blog post drafts either. Truth is, I lost interest in those things before I even started making maps. Blog posts, I’m not worried about. I will frequently have a new subject to explore and write about. It complements the fixation cycles very well.

For YouTube, I wonder if it is sustainable with my current workflow. Editing a single video takes so much time that it goes through multiple fixation cycles. There is no way I can ever maintain interest long enough to thoroughly enjoy getting a video from camera to publishing. I think I would have to hire an editor to make it viable, and I very much do not have the funds for that right now.

Thankfully I’m not losing interest in Clysmoids. To be completely honest, I believed that at some point I would want to drop the project. This is not the case yet, and it’s well on track to hit the first milestone: a complete game loop by the end of March. I’m super excited about that.

I think I’m at the tail end of the map making fixation now, so video production will resume shortly. Here’s the catch though, I’m leaving on a big trip to Korea and Japan in May. I will not be able (or willing) to work on anything serious then. So here’s the new game plan. In March, I will hit the Clysmoids milestone. I can then leave it in a good state and return to it after the trip. In April, I’m going to finish the videos that are still in production: Narrative for Systemic Design and Narrative Nibbles, the short-form videos.

Then, I only have to publish them while on my trip and manage some socials surrounding it. It fixes the gap of output I was about to have then, and gives me a deadline to work on the videos. Sounds good?

Why Am I Doing? (this)

So, can I control my impulses enough to have a steady output? Well, I definitely can’t control my impulses. I’ve tried many times. It usually ends up with me staring at whatever I don’t want to work on and thinking about the new thing I want to work on instead.

But in many ways, the newsletter is my output at the moment. Even if I start a new project whose flame extinguishes before its time, at least I get to talk about it here. And about the thought process that accompanies it. The newsletter in turn, gives me excerpts to post on social media. I’m very satisfied with the role that the newsletter fulfills in my week. It compliments my hyperfixation very well.