Butterfly.archive

19/02/2026 - Universes Around

=== Thoughts ===

In the last days of 2025, during the Christmas break from work (that rare period where I have both all the time in the world and no major commitments), I opened up a spreadsheet and planned this year out.

Not in any meaningful detail. Just weeks, colours, a note here or there. I looked forward at the next 52 weeks and tried to figure out how I wanted to spend them.

A couple of things prompted this. Firstly, I'd had one HELL of a 2025. We were homeless for six months of it, the remaining six were spent recovering from trauma and trying to put our lives together, one of our youngest cats passed away... it wasn't a good time. Secondly, I'd spent pretty much all of my creative energy in 2025 doing work for other people. Streaming, commissions, raffles, trades. All great fun, and I'm blessed to be able to say that I had a consistent commission pipeline in 2025, but it stuck in my brain that... yeah. I'd spent none of my creative energy on me. That needed to change.

So, alongside my sketch of colours and notes, I put together some guiding principles for this year, one of them being "One on, one off." Basically, if I spend time doing something, I should spent time not doing that thing. This primarily applied to commissions. If I spend a month doing commissions, I should spend a month not doing commissions.

Given that we're in February and you can see my project list below is only 33% commissions (this is an "on" month), you can probably guess that didn't last. Why?

In short, I started reading Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic, which led me to the pamphlet Time Management for Anarchists, by Jim Munroe.

See, I have ADHD, and that comes out in a few ways when it comes to time management & creativity:

  1. Any schedule that I try and set for myself, I know is a fake set of rules that is imposed by me, and I can safely ignore it without consequence.
  2. I procrastinate until the last possible minute on basically everything.
  3. I either hyper-fixate or completely burn out on projects, with very little in-between.

Reading Time Management for Anarchists was a liberation. I remember thinking to myself "Wait, doing things last minute is fine, actually?"

It turns out, when you stop to ask yourself what "last minute" really means, you can do a lot of effective planning. Couple that with making your work both quantifiable and visible, and the end result is that I've been able to maintain a sustainable pace for all of 2026 so far, whilst writing more words across more projects than I wrote in 2025, all without the guilt of having deadlines hanging over my head.

For me it's a massive cause for celebration. Even now, during what has been a terrible week across multiple metrics, I'm still finding myself excited to write. Heck, I'm here, micro-blogging, aren't I?

If this is something you've ever struggled with, I sincerely recommend you check out Time Management for Anarchists. And give Cory a read whilst you're there, too. He's one of the few writers who leaves me hopeful about the current tech-scape.

=== Project Progress ===

=== Stuff I Found ===

=== Everything Else ===