rotten bananas

I have a lot on my plate, as they say. I’ve got goals - both short and long term - as well as dreams, or plans if you will. My mind is always racing, coming up with new schemes and ideas. To give you an idea of what I go through on a regular basis, here’s what’s on my mind right now (for those of you that are bored by my personal life, fast forward):

• Keep blogs updated, gain more traffic (obviously)
• Create new targeted site to test out Amazon affiliate program - I already have the groundwork laid as far as what I’m selling
• Start a webcomic (already got the ideas laid out for this as well)
• Learn SEO
• Create Family-based CMS and improve my PHP skills in the process
• Learn Ruby on Rails
• Improve my guitar playing (I’m currently learning to improvise)
• Write a movie script about the IT world (no joke, it would be hilarious, I promise you)

Those are all of the things that I’d like to begin tonight. I think this is awesome. I’ve got a lot of interests and a lot to keep myself busy. The problem is that I feel like I don’t have any free time to do it. It’s not that I get nothing done, but not as much as I’d like. I do a lot of reading on things that I’m interested in (especially SEO right now), but there’s been very little action. I’m seriously starting to wonder if it’s actually a lack of free time or an abundance of procrastination.

Or perhaps a lack of prioritizing. Tuesdays I go out with friends. I may have a few drinks (as I did this past Tuesday), which does not bode well for productivity.

Wednesday, I was visiting an aunt that was only in town for the night. When I got home I had to tackle a hard drive issue on my desktop. I could have sworn it was clicking like the Armageddon was upon us, but last night I had nothing but a silent, albeit corrupted, drive. I can’t possibly be minus a desktop for any extended (read: hours) period of time, so that needed dealt with last night.

Tonight I am mostly free aside from a weekly work-related commitment that won’t take too much time. I’ve already written 2 blog posts (well, about 1.5 - this one is just gettin warmed up), and I’ve practiced a little SEO by trying to linkbait a bit on my other blog. Though, it’s gotten me nowhere so far.

Tomorrow night, Friday, I’m going to see Tool in Baltimore, which I am quite excited for.

Saturday night is my step-niece’s graduation party. I’m looking forward to the gift portion, as I plan to do something entertaining, but it’s another night gone. I’ll have the day, so hopefully I’ll manage something out of that.

Sunday is fair game.

On top of my seemingly busy schedule, I’m dealing with a host that is not nearly as helpful with transferring domains out of their control as they are transferring them to within their control. I’ve had to have my new host (Yes, that is an affiliate link. While I can’t speak much of the quality of their service yet, I can certainly speak to the quality of their customer service, which resembles the biblical stories of Jesus. If you’re actually interested in AN Hosting, let me know. I have some coupon codes for free service.) re-initiate the transfer tonight, so I wish the old godspeed.

There’s a lot to be said for these hippies and their theories on using free time wisely. Though Steve Olson seems to be in support of procrastination under certain circumstances, which I actually found to be a silly post. I’ll save you the time. The jist - when you’re planning to do something sinister, wrong, illegal or otherwise not what Jesus would do, then putting it off is probably for the best.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that I’ve got so much on my plate, I can’t buckle down with one thing. I’ll be honest, in the end I’m just looking for the same thing as everyone else: to be filthy, stinking rich. The kind of rich that would require nightly bonfires with a crowd of Benjamin Franklins to even hope to start thinking about running out of money. So, I guess my question is - what will get me there?

I could go for the big score with a movie, or some big web two point oh social networking user generated content idea, which would pay off amazingly, if I’m one of the lucky ones. Or I can just hack away with my blogs and SEO and work my way up to comfortable, which wouldn’t be all that bad either.

Any amount of additional income would be exciting (I did make 9 cents from Adsense). But, when I pull the sheets over my head, I guess what I really want is to be able to think to myself, “Self, I accomplished something today.” I’m not going to get rich tomorrow (I don’t think), but taking a step in that general direction will be very motivating. And I have actually done quite a bit more in the last 3-4 months than probably ever before that, so I’m not disappointed in myself. I’m moving in the right direction for the type of productivity that leads to a comfortable life of slacking.

I’m sure that the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs of the world realize just how good they have it, but for once, I’d like to know.