Summer 2020: Four tips that helped me get back to work

If you’ve been following our Dev Blog, you might have noticed that we’ve missed a couple months — and that’s because depression put me down for the count for most of June and July. Even though our team is scattered across the continent and we’re quite used to working from our homes and meeting with video chat, after about three months of pandemic living, and with rising summer temperatures, things started to give and I sank into a black hole of non-productivity.

With every week that passed, the weight of the work I didn’t finish the previous week sank my spirits even further, and it took me until the last days of July to set myself to rights, and I figured it would be worth sharing what helped me pull out of the spiral. Obviously, as with all advice like this, your mileage may very, but I’m hoping it reaches someone who it might help.

Tip One: Remember the true way of things

“ She'd strayed from the true way of things. First you set yourself to rights. And then your house. And then your corner of the sky.”

― Patrick Rothfuss, The Slow Regard of Silent Things

It sounds like an oversimplification, but it’s true: as game developers — as creators of any stripe — we have a corner of the sky to tend to. And, trying to catch up to our development calendar, I was putting that corner of the sky on the forefront, letting things in my home and things in myself slip.

Setting things right might not be an easy task — in my case, setting my home to rights was an undertaking that took me weeks to build up towards. And it might not seem like particularly actionable advice. But, against all conditioning we might have built up about measuring our productivity, we’ve got to start looking that as an investment into our ability to tend to our corners of the sky, not as a chore that detracts from our sky-tending.

Tip Two: Store things on a page, not in your brain

Speaking of “setting yourself to rights,” most of us are keeping track of a lot of things that we haven’t been in the habit of tracking. Contact logging, meal planning, video call schedules… trying to juggle these things in your head means you’re going to have less room in your brain to get work done.

I can almost pinpoint the exact moment that I started to turn things around to the moment I cracked open a journal and started to collect my thoughts onto a page.

I’d show you one of the more fleshed-out pages instead, but there’s quite a bit of personal info there…

It’s a simple tool, but I really can’t overstate how much it’s helped me out.

Beyond just serving as an organizer, you can use your journal to keep track of small victories. As it just so happened, right as I was falling into my downward spiral, I was scheduled to start on a project that was going to take a lot of somewhat tedious work before bearing fruit — and having a space to record the small victories and arbitrary milestones along the way helped to serve as motivation.

Tip Three: Pay Attention to Secondary Cues

If you are able to knock out a good, solid hour or two of work, pay attention to what else was going on at the time. Were you listening to music? Did you have a podcast on in the background? Had you just taken a shower? Were you sipping a fresh cup of tea? Every one of those cues can help you build a a habit of getting into a good groove the next time you sit down to work. Also, try to save those cues for when it’s working time.

Conversely, if you’re not able to knock out some good work, try mixing things up. Move your laptop to a different room, or a different spot in the room, if you’re able to — ideally, a room you don’t already use for goofing off. Set a different playlist on. Try taking a short walk, and then sitting down to work afterwards. It might take multiple attempts, but it can help you find your groove.

Tip Four: Anything worth doing is worth doing half-assed

This very blog post is an example of this tip in action. After missing the June dev blog and with July shrinking before my eyes, rather than burn myself out trying to squeeze a half-baked dev blog entry into the waning days of the month for the sake of not missing a second month’s post, I made the call to wait until August and call it the “Summer” dev blog. I’ve been giving myself permission to not beat myself up over tweeting a little less, and some of our internal recap e-mails have gotten a bit less frequent as well.

Sometimes it’s not about beating yourself up over what you weren’t able to do, but celebrating what you were able to do.

Hopefully something in this list helps people. Stay safe and healthy, folks.