Jayden Journal Public Access: Winter 2025

Published: 2024-12-26

Blog isn’t dead!

It’s been about 4 months since the last blog post. After careful end of year reflection and going over my daily journal entries, I can say fairly confidently that these last 4 months were the worst 4 months of my life!

Now that sounds very extreme, but it wasn’t something suddenly awful befalling me, just a lot of things not going the way I wanted them to despite me trying my hardest to get them to work out. I felt like my efforts weren’t relevant in the outcome of things which lead to me not trying, which lead to a bad outcome, wasn’t a good cycle.

Part of me is quite privileged and lucky that these last 4 months have been the worst my life has ever gotten, as it wasn’t that bad. But regardless of the severity of badness which I won’t get into (consider it a exercise for the reader’s imagination), I survived, and am better off for it.

It wasn’t all bad though, being back at school let me hang out with my friends, I learned that a friend I thought I lost contact with was keeping up with me through reading my blog (it still is surprising whenever I’m reminded of the people who actually read this blog. Thank you friend, thank you all). And I did a lot of game development! I simply tried to do a little bit of development every day and it compounded to my biggest and stupidest project yet! It’ll be out soon, taking a little break for the holidays.

I’ve also been reflecting on productivity and goal setting. I think I struggle from what I like to call the personality test problem, the idea that the person who you think you are and the person who you actually are are generally different to varying degrees. This is why personality tests aren’t always accurate, as you’re describing the person you think you are, not the person you actually are.

I wanted to be someone who was organized and productive and who accomplished a lot, I thought my day to day habits reflected this, but considering them from the perspective of what I actually did vs what I thought I did (through reading my journal, make sure to actually read what you write from time to time), they didn’t really, At least compared to those who’s habits and lifestyle I aspire to emulate (while also acknowledging that I’m comparing all of me to the version’s of themselves they present publicly). My work was a lot more ad hoc and disorganized then I wanted it to be. I couldn’t even tell you what I set my fall goals to be a few days after writing the post.

I too quickly wanted to be someone who knew what they were doing, my goal being to inspire others to live more focused, directed, and intentional lives, but I wasn’t able to do this myself yet. The foundations of my lifestyle and habits weren’t strong enough to support my ambitious goals. There’s a gap between the person I am and the person I want to be. It’s like trying to build a house in mud, no matter how motivated you are to build the house, if you don’t have the foundations to support it, then it’s not going to be able to support itself

This is what I’d repeatedly do, I’d try to build a house, it wouldn’t be finished, I would try building another, ironically more ambitious house, and it wouldn’t be finished either. That’s kinda how I’ve went 5 years of making video games and never really releasing anything finished.

So what are these “Foundations”? Well there is no concrete definition of the basics of living a good, focused, and intentional life, but Scott H Young does have a pretty good list he found on an egyptian stone tablet he should definitely return, and used for this really expensive course aptly titled “Foundations”.

They are:

Fitness
Food
Sleep
Productivity
Focus
Organization
Reading
Reflection
Money
Outreach
Connection
Service

I like this list. It seems pretty all encompassing, only issue with it is that I find sand in my pockets whenever I write them down.

My Goals for the winter (which I won’t list out unlike previous seasons), will all be based in fostering solid foundations that will allow me to build all the houses I’d like to have and demonstrate to others.

I would also like to focus on action over planning. Daily game dev showed me how rewarding and motivating small progress over a while can be, hopefully I can maintain more of that feeling.

What I’m up to from Jan - April

I have classes. They should hopefully be better than my fall ones, I have good professors, I hope the workload is manageable.

GDYU is becoming an Indie Studio and producing a project for Level up Student showcase 2025 (assuming we’re able to get a table). Optimistic about it and it’ll certainly take up a lot of my time this season.

But Overall I’ll be taking it slow. Focusing on building intentional, deliberate, and lifelong habits that will help me out in the long run. Learn how to build boxes and shelves and other furniture before working my way up to a house.

As for the blog, I’m going to try out some shorter, more specific and to the point style posts, they shouldn’t take nearly as long to make, and would just be based on a single idea or concept. Less about me and more about my work and ideas.

Thanks for reading, hope your holidays are holly and jolly.

(also I started a mailing list for the site! ~/mail)