It's been said: if at first you don't succeed, lower your expectations.

Regular readers of my blog will be aware of the month-long experiment to see how productive I could become if I was cut off from many of the distractions that keep me from getting stuff done. Nothing was really proved by the whole experiment, because if your attention span is as short as mine, you'll find some other way to become distracted.

So, I started writing up to-do-lists. The list for this week is as follows:

-First draft of long article for Fangoria magazine
-Map out schedule for fall semester
-Unpack everything/clean room
-Memorize martial arts sequence for upcoming belt testing
-Read Sun Tzu's The Art of War
-Spend no more than 30 minutes/day on video games
-Donate all useless crap (old books, clothes, etc.) to charity.

My first draft is done and has been sent to New York, awaiting approval from my editors. I haven't been playing video games, even though I just bought an X-Box. The boxes are slowly being unravelled bit by bit, but you can actually navigate through the room without stepping on stuff. I got the sequence nailed down, and I've been reading through my copy of Sun Tzu.

In retrospect, either I really half-assed some of these tasks, or I really need to raise the bar a lot higher. But, it's only Wednesday, so that leaves several days for me to finish the rest. However, I am more than on-track. I even decided to toss a little art project into the mix too. I recently obtained a computer case, which I am repainting so it's not the standard old bland beige colour that we're all so used to seeing.

While I haven't been playing video games, I have been spending a bit (okay, a lot) of time looking up what other people have done to their computers. I've seen some really crazy modifications, such as one where a guy took an old US Military ammunition case and used that to house his CPU. Others built them into really old stereo consoles from the 70s. I'm probably just going to get a couple cans of spray paint and go with a black and green colour scheme. Nothing huge.

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