John Hattan was dead on with his comment to the last entry; I have been making too many excuses with regard to my work. While it's fine to only work on hobbies when I feel like it, the whole point of this current project is to make the transition from a hobby towards a more professional approach to doing after-hours development. Using any old excuse such as a bad week to avoid putting in the effort is just lame. That comment seemed to be the trigger to identifing the problem, as I've been increasingly worried about how I was going this first week back (it was starting to affect my research too), when it was clear it was just a mental block to overcome.

Of course, mental blocks are some of the more tricky things to beat, so it's painfully obvious that I'm going to have to take a more conscious effort to stay motivated and to stop myself from procrastinating or daydreaming when I need to be working (this will take a while, as I suspect that that's a nasty habit that's firmly wedged into my personality.) So from now on, I'm going to be forcing myself to put in at least one hour a weekday on game development (and more on the weekend), where I'll try to achieve at least one thing on my checklist of tasks. I'll also try to avoid mindlessly scanning the forums here as well (except maybe on the occasions when I have a journal update to make [smile]).

At least now I've got a game idea which I think is appropriate as a test-run of building the personal management skills for development. I'll also be attempting to do most things in "Project Everest" myself, so I can trial what areas I'll need to find other team members for in a larger project. I've read through some chapters of my books on design techniques, so today I'll be working on the single item on my design check-list, which is "fill out the rest of this check-list". Hopefully once I've got a detailed list of stuff to do, if I have another week where my mind is clouded in fog I'll be able to find something appropriately uncreative to do.

From now on, journal entries will be much more game-oriented rather than about personal development. Next entry, I'll have a breakdown of the milestones in the project, as those journal based checklists I've seen seem to be a pretty motivational tool. I'll see if I can get some concept art decided on too; the pictures I've drawn so far are pretty terrible.