Decision making.
It’s a key element in gaming.
As it is in sports, and the lines between the two are beginning to blur a bit.
Strategy, tactics, in the moment.
And it’s the same in life more generally.
Decision making is crucial.
As is taking action.
The two go hand in hand.
To some degree, neither are much use on their own.
With decisions, you can always rethink and change direction.
With actions, not so much.
But, I still believe that action is the more important of the two.
Even action in the wrong direction brings experience and practice at doing.
You may even have found out that the decision is wrong only because you took action on it.
Anyway, I’ve been wrestling with a decision about the stream streak I’ve been pursuing.
It’s come to mind more regularly over time.
There were a couple of reasons for starting the streak in the first place.
One was for the challenge of it.
And I’d found doing a couple of previous streaks quite good fun.
I figured I’d try and get a new PB
Beyond day 45 of the most recent streak, each new day was a personal best.
I wrote about it here a couple of times, the latest being back on day 100.
There was never a definite number in mind as an end goal though.
Once I’d started, and had written about TheBusinessManPK inspiring my stream streaks in the first place, I’d seen the numbers DeeJayKnight and CohhCarnage had hit (1k and 2k respectively).
They sort of became targets, but not really.
It was more a case of just going online every day and seeing where the journey took us.
I expected something to happen along the way that would prevent me streaming.
Scattered sleeping pattern or illness were my bets on likely candidates.
But it didn’t happen.
Eventually, I got to the point where I wanted to make a conscious decision about it.
And I chose to end the streak.
A second reason for starting the streak was to start work on purposefully building habits.
Intentional habits.
It’s odd to have got to my age and spent most of my life just thinking that habits are what they are.
Not realising that they are all a choice.
(Even if that’s an unintentional choice to just keep whatever externally influenced set of habits you already have.)
So the stream streak was something to practice on.
Choosing habits and building them is a skill.
And like any skill, you need to practice.
Doing it helped me prove to myself that I am far more capable of sticking to something than I’d previously thought.
Feeling that I have that ability as part of my skills toolkit, has been put to good use.
More daily streak practices have been added.
The highest priority one being to write a daily blog post.
Over time I expect to expand the amount of writing I do beyond blogs.
A book in the works?
Maybe…
But there’s only so much time in a day.
Add journalling, exercise and left handed guitar to the recently added daily habits, and it’s getting to be a bit of a tight squeeze.
The stream streak had become quite a high priority over time.
Stiff mostly fun, but as the number got bigger, there was an element of protecting it which started to creep in.
Often, I’d have a choice to make.
Think about and make improvements to the stream. Or stream.
Work on the back end graphics, layout, emotes. Or Stream
Actually practice a game and get beyond noob level. Or stream.
You see the pattern.
As a tool to help me with habit building the streak was very helpful.
But it has now served it’s purpose.
I don’t think it went as far as becoming a bad habit, but it was moving that way.
It made for a good excuse to not make more effort to set a definite schedule.
As long as I did my hour I’d ticked of the streak.
But would less days at definite times make for better quality?
I suspect so.
And is still building a good habit.
Just a variation on the ‘every day’ theme.
Well, at the risk of getting drawn in to another 640 day run, I’m going to go and stream.
Day 2 so far!
RIP Streak. F.