How do you know if you’re doing Productive Things? | The Modern Hidalgo

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Differentiating what is productive, to what is unproductive.
THE MODERN HIDALGO: Entry_014
Written: Thursday. July 18, 2019.

Ididn’t get any exercise done for the day. I dunno. I just didn’t feel like working out at all. Plus, the cold weather is too good not to enjoy.

I did, however, doubled down on reading the book I’m currently reading, which is of course The Three Musketeers.

I still quite can’t wrap my head around what’s going on in the story. Though I can imagine some of it. The translation is just too convoluted.

Today was supposed to be all about productivity. And me not having exercised is sort of ironic. But let me explain a thought that I’ve been having, when it comes to talking about productivity.
How do we define what is productive, to what is unproductive?
This is a recurring thought in my head. Because much of the things I do, to which many people might also be doing, makes me feel like I’m doing something productive. But do these things that I do really make me productive? And not just by the feeling of it?


  • I read a lot, so that’s productive, right? But that means I resort to reading a lot instead of writing, that’s why I haven’t written anything new, in terms of maybe Short Stories, or plotting out my Epic Fantasy Project.
  • I write a thousand words a day. Hence, this Daily Journal (although I don’t post on Sundays cause that’s a rest day). But this form of literature is quite different from what I really should be focusing on — which is writing Short Stories and plotting out my Epic Fantasy Project.
  • I exercise 6 days a week (not counting today). I do it because I have to. In order to maintain a level of fitness. But the time I put to exercising, and the amount of energy I give it, is deducted from the 24 hours of the day that I get to use, in order to focus on writing Short Stories, and plotting out my Epic Fantasy Project.
You see the pattern?
I do all of these things, and more, yet I find it hard to get into the zone when it comes to writing or plotting.

Why is it so hard for me to just focus on the important stuff?

Here’s what happens whenever I try to write something: I sit in front of my laptop, and look at the blank document in front of me. I try writing a few words, then I immediately hate what I’ve written, and hit the backspace.

This happens too, when I have to plot down an idea I have for this story that I’m working on. I write a few words. Then, all of a sudden, I feel exhausted.

Like…why does that happen?
I don’t know why that happens there, and that it doesn’t happen here, in my daily journal entries.

I’m guessing it’s because I have allowed myself to be more informal here, than how I’m formal when it comes to writing stories. Because here, I get to just be myself when having to write a story. Because I’m telling the story.
It’s through my lens, in which you get to absorb the story.
But when it comes to stories, you have all these different perspectives to worry about. How the character talks, how they think, how they interact with other characters. Plus I have to do another narrative voice, to allow the exposition to happen. Because stories tend to always have omniscient narrators.

So those are a lot of factors to think about when writing a story. But in here, there’s just me, telling you what I’m thinking about.

I dunno. I guess I’ll find a way to fix that problem in the future.

For now, I guess I’m gonna talk about another thing that’s been in my mind.

I haven’t really posted anything new in my Channel. It’s been — wow! I just looked at my Google Calendar, and realized that I haven’t posted since 2 weeks ago.

I think it’s because I felt burnt out in the last few weeks. This isn’t really that bad of a issue. I just all of a sudden realized that I haven’t been posting anything new.

And maybe that’s why I was able to get back into thinking up new things to talk about, in the channel. I feel like my mind just needed to breathe. It needed space.
God dammit. Even my mind is asking me for space, wow. I can’t believe it…
The ideas I have aren’t really new. They’re sort of ideas that I scrapped, because I wasn’t confident enough to do them in my channel back then. But now, I think it’s safe to try and do it. We’ll see what happens.

Though that takes me to another thing I’ve been debating about with myself. Whether or not I treat Youtube as an actual occupation that would gain me revenue.

This was something that got me to experience burnout, actually. It never really occurred to me that I had to really be prolific when it came to producing new videos for the channel, so that I can gain more views and subscribers.

I guess it’s the same as any other job. Only that I play by my rules, which is more difficult to get by, but is the most efficient. Mainly because I get to control how I do things, when I’ll do the work, the recording, the editing, the posting, etc. But the downside to that is that there’s no one else to tell me otherwise, other than myself.
And I’m a very unreliable person. Especially to myself.
I’m going to have to do it better this time around. I need to fix a schedule. Make new ideas. Scrap some ambitious ideas for later. Basically, get my act up.

But that’s also another thing that overwhelms me. It’s the type of ideas that I get to come up with, that sort of always scares me. Cause there are some ideas, if not always, that are too ambitious for me to do…alone, that is.

Word of the day: Nemesism.
  • Coined in the 1930s, nemesism is an old psychological term used to describe anger or frustration directed solely towards yourself — the kind of behavior that could literally bring about your nemesis.
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