Day 35 - Weekly Eval.

This week has been a very interesting week indeed. I realized that there are limits to a lot of things, and I need to recognize how to work around them to achieve my goals. Unfortunately, I was not able to achieve a lot of the goals I set for myself.

Failures
The failures I have endured this week include the following:

• Not waking up in the morning -  I have not been able to wake up in the morning for the last 5 days or so because I was initially feeling sick, and then I let one thing lead to another and fell off the horse completely.
• Frustrating development progress - I was not able to finish and launch the website I had in mind within the 7 days I gave myself. I spent so many hours on it just to get it to a semi-working state. And I am not happy with it at all, not in the least bit.

These two things are my biggest worries and failures this week and they absolutely crushed my spirit. So today I decided to relax a bit and take a nice hike in the woods. Even though it was raining, I knew I needed it if I wanted to keep sane. After I came out of the woods, I felt a lot better and as a result I am now typing my weekly evaluation.

Realizations

I realized a few things:

• Not all is lost - I may not have been able to wake up in the morning for the last few days, but that's okay. Wake up tomorrow. You can't win all the time, you'll fail and see a lack of progress at least once in your journey to your goals. None of that matters, as they say "wins and losses are a dime a dozen", it's the effort and ability to dust yourself off and get back on the horse that matters. Never give up. The bigger mistake would be to look at the failure and pain and give up now. When you're at the bottom, when there's seemingly no way out, it's the ones who still persist and experiment that'll eventually discover a stronger self within them.
• Have a clear vision - I spent so much time trying to code haphazardly. I found out that I didn't even have a clear vision for what I want the final product to look like. So what ended up happening was that I would build a page, and then another, and then another simply based off of what I thought seemed to make sense. I was making stuff up as I go along, and that was not very productive. There's certainly something to be said for iterative design, but you need to have a vision going in, or else you're not really building anything at all. It's simply like to trying to build a sandcastle by flinging sand everywhere. You need to at least have an idea of what kinda buckets to use.

What I will do about it

It's not enough to simply recognize my failures and where I need improvement. I need to find a way to improve myself going forward. Next week is going to be quite busy because of my trip to San Francisco, but no matter. A plan is a plan is a plan is a plan. It's always better to have one than none at all. I can't try to shirk my responsibility just because something is out of the ordinary.

Plan Days 36 - 42

I'll still be in San Francisco by the time I get back, so most of my goals will likely be related to the trip itself.

• Complete the design of Weeklie
• Understand the situation and make a decision on whether or not to move to San Francisco

I'm trying to put more time into the creative vision for Weeklie. I am quite certain there is potential in it, I just need to make sure I am able to picture it in my head (or on paper). I know that if I can picture it, I can make it happen. But I need to picture it first.