YouTube Purge Reflection
It’s Sunday evening as I’m starting this, and, well, there’s actually quite a lot to reflect on from this YouTube purging challenge. I have kept YouTube out of my intellectual diet since my impromptu post, and the benefits have been pretty big.
First, I achieved my main goal of this and I wrote a whole lot more. I managed my 2,000 words per day goal except last Sunday and yesterday when I took some time off for the weekend and to spend time with my family.
Second, I read a lot. I didn’t fully track it, but I read several books over the last week and it was wonderful.
Third, when the entertainment that you turn to when you’re bored is reading, it is much easier to regulate your sleep. I have managed to force my sleep into a normal routine, and though it is still taking a lot of conscious effort to maintain that it has been very helpful.
Fourth, I can feel my addiction to YouTube slipping. When I look for things to do I no longer jump straight to YouTube and see what’s new, I now actually sort through my options and pick something that sounds fun.
Fifth, I spent a lot more time woodworking, and that time was what I needed to get my shop in order to prepare me for the fun projects I actually want to work on. I determined from this that woodworking is something that is more important to me than I had previously thought, and I want to commit the time to actually get good at it so that I can make the things I want to make.
Sixth, and most important, I spent a lot more time with my family. My wife took some time off work and we went on a bunch of hikes with our son and it was awesome. It was something that I definitely couldn’t have managed had I not intentionally focused on my sleep like I have been this week.
Now, where do I go from here? I’m not going to give up YouTube forever, there are people whose videos I very much want to watch, and though it wouldn’t be the end of the world to miss their videos I think that it’s worth finding a system that works so I can still catch Sanderson’s weekly updates and Eoin Reardon’s occasional uploads.
What I’ve decided is that I’m going to use the Unhook extension for YouTube where it only shows you your notifications, but it forces everything else to be blank on the site so you can’t follow the recommendations rabbit hole. That way I can highlight my favorite people, and ignore the rest until I’m in the garage doing some woodworking. I think that this balance is a good place for me to start because I can still get out of YouTube what I want, and with some care I can avoid falling back into the mess that I had before.
So, that’s what I’m going to do, but for the rest of this post I want to give a bit of an update on my current projects, and potentially re-evaluate some things.
This week while I was spending tons of time reading books about writing and worldbuilding I had an epiphany about The Right Hero that’s going to involve some huge revisions and is basically setting me back to the drafting stage on the project. I’m excited about these changes, but I’m not 100% sure that they’re what’s best for the story, but I can’t decide without at least trying to make it work, so scope creep has officially hit the project and I’m now devoting most of my writing time to that.
Because of that I’ve been spending less time on everything else and I don’t know how much I can commit to keeping up these weekly posts, especially the ones with short stories because those take a huge amount of time and I’m just not that eager to work on them right now. I’m still going to try, but maybe at some point soon I’ll run through my small backlog of stories and have to reduce my posts to once every other week. I think that that would be the best option, because I don’t want to take away time from my big projects while I’m inspired to work on them, because ultimately they’re the most important to me.
