In A Rut?

What happened to me? I’m still the same guy, Christian, geek, early adopter, rural America advocate, sports lover, but things changed. Habits. Creative mojo. Time allocation.

Some of these things are easy enough to change. Time allocation is always in flux, depending upon what projects I’m working on and how quickly they need to be completed. What is bothersome is how much of my time is now spent contemplating, rather than doing. In some regards, contemplation is great, but when you start over thinking things, some stuff needs to change. I need to get back to decision making from the gut, and living with it. Besides, if something isn’t working, it’s easy enough to change later. This is the beauty of CSS.

Creative mojo is tougher. I have come to learn that I work better in open spaces. Quality of work, inspiration, great ideas, efficiency, I just do better in areas I can spread out in a little. That died, a lot, when I moved. My work area is now a small fraction of what it once was. Ever so slowly, I am coming up with better ways to organize things, making it feel bigger than it is, but it’s still not the same. And a north facing window has no comparison to a south facing window. I miss the changing light throughout the day as the sun shifted across the sky.

Most disturbing of all though, are my habits. Before the move, and the blog database that tanked about the same time, I felt like I was finally developing a good groove amongst RSS feeds, Friendfeed, Twitter, and blogging. First off, the move really messed things up. Between not doing the things I was accustomed to before, particularly at Church and Youth Group, and adjusting into a different set of things I was doing (now at a different Church and Youth Group, though a large quantity of the stuff are basically the same tasks).

Twitter habits are particularly bothersome though. I once did a significant amount of link sharing on Twitter. While I still share a lot, much of it is different content, and not as much ‘look at the cool thing I found in my feed list!’ This can partially be traced back to not actively reading feeds like I used to. I find myself spending more and more time on the iPod marking things to read on the computer, and less time actually reading them. This also impacts my Friendfeed use, which has dropped off a cliff. I really like Friendfeed too.

But back to Twitter. I don’t know if it’s the rapid influx of less geeky people, or a lot of people spending different amounts of time on Twitter, at different times of day, or just that I’m tending to use it more earlier in the day than I used to, but the conversation is diminishing. I used to frequently be part of 50 tweet bursts amongst 15 different people, and learn something fantastic in the process. These days any conversation tends to be more in the 15-20 tweet range, and amongst 5 people at best. Definitely a lower value in Twitter this way.

Through it all, I’m realizing that several somethings need to change. Maybe I just need a catalyst to shake me out of a rut, as I type this, changing my Tweetdeck color scheme comes to mind. Maybe removing the Facebook column in Tweetdeck too (and killing most of my Facebook activity in the process).

Any thoughts? How do I get out of a rut?

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