I’m not “traditionally” goal motivated. What do I mean by that? I mean if I tried to set a goal for a year from now that looked something like this: “in one year I want to have written a book,” that would not, on its own, result in any of the behaviors that lead to a book being written.
At the end of the year there would be no book, and also I would not feel bad. I do not experience any intrinsic desire to accomplish those kinds of goals, whether they’re set by me or for me, and I do not feel any sense of loss, guilt, or shame for it.
So what does motivate me? Checking boxes on a todo list. Concrete accomplishment. A list of tasks to do, and the doing of them. It scratches something primal in my brain.
Put me in a video game where I can do anything I want but which provides no structure or list of tasks, and I’ll be bored in less than fifteen minutes. (Sorry Morrowind and Oblivion, this is why we never got along.) But, ah, Skyrim! The first Elder Scrolls game to reliably produce a quest log that would direct me towards the interesting places? I sank easily a hundred hours into Skyrim.
So why mention it? I have a “problem” I’m trying to “solve” and I think without this context it wouldn’t make any sense at all why I see it as a problem, or why I feel like the solution needs to work in certain ways.
I have a truly fantastic collection of old TTRPG source books. Originally I started collecting the first edition of Exalted because it lives rent-free in my head and I had, at one point, owned almost all of them but sold them off at a time where I desperately needed the money. I could talk at length about Exalted and I probably should at some point, but for various reasons it was an also-ran in the early-2000s RPG zeitgeist. You’re forgiven if you’ve never heard of it, most people haven’t.
At one point a few years back I was trying to figure out what my “next thing” would be. I was successful and comfortable in a stagnant job with no growth opportunities and less challenge. At that time I thought one of the options could be to write my own TTRPG supplements, or to become a creator in that space. I thought maybe one opportunity would be to take all these old RPGs that mostly nobody remembers and try to resurface their best ideas.
Which brings me to my “problem.”
It would be really, really cool to read these books. I used to read TTRPG handbooks like they were novels when I was a teenager with a potato computer and dial-up internet and very little else to do but read. Now I’m a busy adult with many important things to do and it’s hard to find the time even for the things I know I love.
Given what I said at the top of the post, I think the likelihood that I actually do that improves a lot if I turn it into a list of tasks. A todo. Which, yes, I could probably do in Omnifocus where I keep all of my other structural tasks. But I think “read an entire 300 page book” is probably too large of an ask for the kinds of things I usually keep in my routine todo list. I still use something that looks an awful lot like a version of Getting Things Done. I strive to decompose big tasks into lots of little tasks so that it’s easier to build momentum. I guess that’d be possible with a book, but I think odds are I’d spend more time managing that system than reading.
The answer to this that I’ve imagined is to create the “task” structure for this project on my blog. To have a list of the books I need to read, broken down by system, always visible in a side bar. Books that haven’t been read shouldn’t be links, books that have been read should link to the blog post about them, where I would like to review their content, provide interesting context, and ideally surface whatever the best ideas of that book were.
And, if at all possible, I would like to avoid tedious hand maintenance of that list. Ideally I would be able to mark the posts somehow to link them to their record in the “todo” list, and then have the rest “just work.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because I stole this idea from someone smarter than me. Like pretty much all of my best ideas. Sadly, I don’t remember the name of the blog that did this, but I have a very clear picture in my mind of the format it used. List of links on the right. Every book for every TTRPG system they had, some linked to the review page and others just placeholders for the books yet to be reviewed. Probably they were doing the hard part by hand, because I think a sane person probably would.
Here are the options I’ve currently thought of:
- Do it by hand.
- Use a category.
- Use a blogroll or similar plugin.
- Use a datasource.
- Create a second, related blog and put it there.
I’m unhappy with all of them. Why?
Do it by hand: mainly, I’ll forget. But also it’s tedious. Also this is the year of our Opry 2024, and it seems like something that software should be able to solve for me.
Use a category: I think this would work well for publishing, but I lose the ability to have a list of unpublished posts. There’s no good way to placeholder out what remains to be done.
Use a blogroll: also seems to lose the ability to have a list of unpublished posts. Most of the plugins that are designed to do this really want to link to pages that exist.
Use a datasource: actually seems to get the closest to what I think I’d want, but requires me to hand-maintain a CSV or JSON file which is only marginally better than doing it as HTML directly in the template.
Create a second blog: is, first and foremost, probably too much work. I’ve got some experience with hugo, and two previous blogs that used it. There’s a reason I now gladly pay for micro.blog instead. If I upgraded my plan, I could get a second micro.blog, but I think that then has all the same technical limitations AND now I’ve bifurcated my online presence, defeating the purpose of trying to centralize on thewizardly.com in the first place.
So what do I do? At the moment, get stalled in analysis paralysis. But I think the play might be to do it by hand just to get started. If I limit the scope to just one TTRPG system (say, for example, Exalted,) then it’s not actually that much to maintain. And once I get something up and visible and people can see what it is I’m trying to do, I might be able to get someone who knows hugo/micro.blog better than I to suggest an even better way to achieve the result.
Plus, then I’m actually doing the thing I want to do: reading and posting about these books. Not tinkering with a website that I would mostly prefer not to spend a lot of time tinkering with.