Periodically, I will find my mind brimming with ideas I want to explore. The ideas range in scope and more often than not they are hobby-oriented and related to creating something. Sometimes I find this abundance of things swirling around in my head pretty overwhelming.

I've noticed that in response to this barrage of ideas and inspiration, I often end up writing everything that's interesting to me down as a list. I go from a jumbled web of disparate points to a list of things, like a train passing by. Each train car might be related or different in appearance, but at least I can look at them in sequence and clarify my thoughts. I find that just writing things down like this is healthy and helpful for me. At first, I found it a little odd and a little bit discouraging; I would end up with a list with all these things that I wanted to do, and I knew that realistically, I wouldn't do most of them.

I've been considering adding more inefficiency in my life. It's time I embraced it. Instead of trying to be a finely tuned, get-things-done-machine, I could be a bit more human and exist between my tasks.

Our careers shape our lives. Being a programmer for the last 10 years has shaped my life. Primarily, it has lured me into optimizing my personal life: Creative projects. Personal admin. Relationships. Content. Time. Time is one of those things that I try to optimize. Only in the last few years have I really begun to question the driving force behind that engine.

Recently, I cooked up a little project where I interviewed a few of my friends and put it together into a short video. Watching the footage back, I realized that they are all more to-the-point than me. I'm mostly okay with that, but this also isn't the first time that I've been confronted with my long-windedness. This is also not the first time that I've thought, hey, I'd like to be able to say what I'm thinking and it not take half an hour.

What does it take to be more brief? Why is it important to me? And why has it been hard before?

This year I started out with a phrase. The phrase was "Say yes to less." So far it's going poorly. Tonight I spent some time reflecting on that and a few other things. Employing the macabre but scarily-useful technique of imagining I'm at the end of my life and looking back, I realized that one thing I need to do better is just let (most) ideas be ideas.

Ideas are a hot commodity, though. People want them. People feel bad if they don't have them. There is an overwhelming desire and pressure to make real an idea, in varying capacities. Whether one feels an idea should be realized for money, status, security, or some kind of meta-reasoning: people want ideas and they want to turn them into something.