2022 development recap: milestone 1


when 'officially' starting work on radiolaria, my goal was to work 20h a week.. well, i'm not sure that goal was there from the start, but i'm pretty sure it was from the start of 2022. tallying everything up, i fell pretty far short of that - about 12.3 hours per week. this was a bit demoralizing, but i've realized that i've been setting aside too much low quality time instead a smaller amount of high quality time.

looking at my most productive months, they were months that had a lot of variety in them with a high chance for some successes - if you want to include wormgrubber development time, i managed 85ish hours per month for june and july + 100 hours for the patreon launch month. i clearly *can* work my desired hours on radiolaria, but there are a couple problems.

the slumps - some of my worst weeks are the ones where i've been stuck on the same problem day after day. a frustrating month is helped by having SOME wins. rigging shoulders was the most miserable period of 2022 development... i need to get better at recognizing slumps and pivoting to new problems before they happen. december is a bit of an oddball in this theory but december has not been my best mental health month in addition to holiday stuff.

between dayjob and dev, i only have one day off a week. moving forward, i'm going to aim for 15+ a week over 3 days, giving myself two days off. i'll be experimenting with this til the end of february, to see if it works out. even if i only manage 15h/w avg, that's still almost +150 hours total to radiolaria more than i got done in 2022. i feel that "oh i'm close to 15, i can squeeze a few more hours out" is better than "i'll never make 20 for the week, i'm just going to call it quits."

i've been keeping track of dev time since 2021, but this is my first time adding all the hours up like this. i find that keeping track of my work time (not *too* tightly, in increments of 15 minutes at the smallest) has been super helpful in spotting patterns or trying to estimate what i can get done.

this was supposed to be a m1 summary, but since m1 basically took up all of 2022, it's hard to separate the two, so just take this as it is. next year's will probably be just as disorganized, lol.

breakdown: