I'm currently on day five since I decided to stop watching YouTube. I was addicted; the withdrawal is real, and so are the upsides. Without even thinking about it, I find myself pressing ctrl + t > You... the moment I find myself bored, distracted, or overwhelmed. So far, I have avoided the urge to press enter. Today has been easier than yesterday and the day before that. I also realized YouTube was where I consumed all my information: programming, business topics, and current events in technology. Since then, I've found myself with a lot of free time, especially during the weekends. A few strange things have happened since then. I'm finding it easier to get shit done—even things I'm not sure how to do or that are seemingly hard. Usually, it's some programming task. The other strange thing is that I'm spending more time outside—wild stuff, I know. If I need to be at a place at 0100, I leave the house at 0900, even if it's only ten minutes away. I know myself; the fifty minutes in between will be spent fighting the urge to watch something.
On to the point of less information. Turns out, the less I know about something, the less I know how difficult it is. Plus, there is room for uninformed optimism to get me far enough that I can't really turn back. For all my flaws, once I decide I want to do something or get going, there is no going back. Not knowing how much effort something will take is a benefit, and also an opportunity to discover other ways something could be done. I'm kind of enjoying this naive approach to doing things. Last weekend, I got the notification feature done on my product—something I'd been putting off because I thought it would be quite difficult. It was a little bit, but nothing I could not handle.
Not all sunshine and rainbows
Turns out, there was a reason why I've been distracting myself. I'm not sure why I am surprised. I have these moments of anxiety when I just sit down and do nothing, which is probably why I have a whole new motivation to get shit done. I've been trying to spend a minute or two longer in the pool of that anxiety than I normally would, and I hope to understand why it happens in the first place. Not all my hours have been converted to productive hours, but I'm liking the trajectory that it's taking. Exciting and scary times.
Something I should probably not build
Currently, I need a video editor, and I'm not sure if I can afford one right now. So, I'm thinking of building a tool to edit my videos after I'm done streaming and then upload them right back to a second YouTube channel. I have an idea on how I will approach it, but I'm not sure if I should get into the weeds of that. Wouldn't that be poetic, though? Taking all the time I get back from YouTube to build a video editor that makes more content. That would be full circle. I've tried some of the editing tools currently available, and they are quite bad. I think I can do a better job. It'd be nice to use my own tools to solve a problem for myself. I guess I'm going to do it. I'll wait for this video editor to come back to me with a price. If I can't afford it, I'm going to just build one.