You may be wondering “Isn’t it only 7 in the morning for you?”, and yes … yes it is. I woke up at 5 o’clock to get some work done on GoZen. You may wonder why, well that’s because I’ll be having one hell of a busy day today which I can thank myself for hahah.
I really enjoy writing these daily reports, not certain if any of you find them interesting. I started these to talk about each day of No zero days November, to share the progress to show that I am actively working on GoZen. But they (are getting/have been) quite detailed about my life as well, how I try to balance everything. Not certain if people would like videos about how I balance my life, but I will probably be working on some after this month. :p
My plans for today
- Working on GoZen;
- Come up with a better weekly calendar/schedule;
- Create a study plan for my Japanese;
- Stay-at-home dad duties (Cleaning, cooking, lots of groceries);
- Make a business plan (Planning on registering myself officially as a freelancer);
- Better GoZen roadmap;
- Create a recipe book;
- Come up with ways to have more daily balance;
Weekly schedule
Basically my weekly schedule is not working out, my Japanese is not improving at all even though I study daily, I can’t manage to get anything done for my other channels, I keep running into roadblocks by thinking of what still needs to be done on GoZen, … I’m a stay at home dad, but my wife is working full-time, before going to her job and on her off days she is helping in house-keeping making it impossible for her to have any time for herself.
On one hand I’m happy to be able to get work done as it gives me more time, but on the other hand I’m supposed to be doing all the house-work as that is still considered to be my main job (for as long as I don’t earn anywhere near of an actual income).
Creating a balance is something I’ve been thinking about and I had created a weekly schedule … but I could never commit to it due to it being too busy. So back to the drawing board and I’ll be working out a more flexible schedule, with less TODO’s.
Progress on GoZen
Because of my busy day which I have planned out for myself, I forced myself to wake up early at 5 o’clock and start my day with getting around 3 hours of work done on GoZen. I think I finished the demuxing part of a video container. Now comes the decoding part and actually figuring out how I can get it into frames to display in Godot. ^^” This will be another annoying part to get working correctly I imagine. But I’m looking forward to the challenge, as after that I can work on the timeline, YEY 🙂 …. D:
The timeline will probably be even harder compared to the FFmpeg stuff. If the timeline doesn’t work or feel well, people will never even think of using GoZen. A smooth experience is required for the timeline to make GoZen into a good video editor. Will i use GDScript or GDExtension?? No idea yet, probably GDScript first and maybe for optimizing switch certain parts to GDExtension code instead.
New GoZen roadmap
I’ll also be planning more in detail of what to work on for GoZen. One part of why it took me so long to work on the FFmpeg stuff was because I had no idea where to start, and we had the pipe renderer with the python script, so I kind of knew GoZen could be possible. This made me push back on the bigger frogs the entire time. That’s why today I’ll be making a better timeline in which I really break down piece by piece of what needs to happen and find a good order in how I can work/learn on certain things. This may seem as procrastination, but this will be something that could help me personally in the long run.
Japanese study plan
It’s also Friday so I have my weekly Japanese class, because my wife’s parents babysit my kid, I also have to prepare dinner for us and for them (cooking for 5 people can take time). So cooking dinner + Japanese class take away 4-5 hours of my day. Luckily this is my last Japanese lesson, I enjoyed those classes but the level was a bit too low for me to actually learn/improve by a lot.
So far I’ve been daily studying for over 160 days using Duolingo and Lingodeer. This does not seem to work so I’ll be changing this to 4 days a week, instead of everyday. I used to study between 10-20 minutes each day, and I’ll be changing that to 40-50 minutes minimum each day instead. Having bigger blocks of time could help to learn more actively. Except for the studying, I’ll be using Japanese more in daily life and start consuming more Japanese content in my off time.
Freelancer?
Japan is very flexible on this, and is considering freelance work as an actual job compared to some other countries. My plan is to make myself into a freelancer. This won’t change much but I will need to earn over 200 000 jpy a year to make it more ‘official’. Starting from that amount of money I can get tax returns which could help a lot in upgrading my work station/area. Tax here is only 10% so it’s not that much, but every bit helps.
Also being a freelancer gives me a job title … which will be needed when I want to renew my visa. Even though I am married to a Japanese person, this does not guarantee a lifelong visa. If my wife were to pass away, I’d have to leave my life here behind. So I’m working towards achieving citizenship, one part of that is having a stable income, another part is being fluent/proficient in Japanese. Hence why I want to work more on my Japanese in a serious manner.
Recipe book??
Why would I need a recipe book you may wonder. Well, here in Japan we eat 3 hot meals a day … yeah, if you were wondering what to eat for lunch, that is what I have to wonder about 3 times a day. ^^” Last couple of days we went to some restaurants and had some take-away good.
This made me realize that I mainly make the same dishes every week, without much variety nor typical Japanese dishes (my wife really misses those typical Japanese dishes). Having more of a list of meals I can make and want to make could help me to select from a bigger assortment.
Daily balance
I will start using a timer more often when I am working on stuff. I’ll also set a limit on how much time I can work on each part each day. Nowadays, when I start programming in the morning, that would become the thing I do for the rest of the day. Same with cleaning, studying, procrastinating, … I hope this, together with my weekly schedule, could help me in creating more of a work-life balance.
Overal working and planning the future
We are also planning to have a second kid, so I should get everything somewhat figured out and get my life to be a little more organised. One of the changes which I’m planning on doing next week is improving my work environment (desk). Not a very big change, but a clean and less messy looking desk may make me more productive.
Conclusion
Will today be a day of procrastinating or not? Well, if I don’t follow the plans I make today, then today would have been procrastinating. But I do intend on creating a good structure, so I can do less but achieve more.
This was a bit of a long one, again, not sure how interesting this may be but I like looking back at these logs every now and then to see what I was able to achieve the past couple of days/weeks. Exactly 14 days left!! 2 more weeks left, by the end I would like to be finished with FFmpeg stuff and be working on the timeline. ^^ がんばります！ (Japanese for I’ll do my best!)
