Non-Zero Day
2020-01-20 17:24
by zlg
updated 2020-02-13

A while back, I found a post talking about the concept of the Non-Zero Day. [1]

The idea is, to fight depression or demotivation or analysis paralysis, or 
whatever mental block is between you and what you want to do, you do ONE thing. 
Doesn't matter if it's just tidying a room, taking the trash out, *something*. 
If you're trying to focus, make it one task -- any task -- regarding your goal 
that you can do. Find something you can start and finish in 10 minutes.

Even if that's all you do, you still took a step toward something. It's still 
progress.

I am trying to apply this concept to my hobbies. We'll see what happens.

Today, I got closer to moving away from pulseaudio again, back to apulse. Ever
since moving Windows to a 2TB hard drive, I feel less inclined to put up with
pulseaudio and friends on the GNU/Linux side for 'muh games'. There's a list of
15-20 packages I need to remove the USE-flag from and blockers to navigate, etc.
Unfortunately some of those are big, like Firefox, qemu, webkit, etc.

Instead of looking at that as the Gordian knot of deptree it is, I'm looking at 
it in pieces. conky's PA support is easy to disable, so I chose that first. Now 
the package list is one line shorter. Even if I do nothing the rest of the 
evening, I'll still have gotten a little closer to my goal.

The goal is beyond the switch to apulse. My goal is a Red Hat-free Linux
userland. Whether that journey happens on Gentoo, Slackware, Void, Bedrock, or
LFS, who knows. I'm open to suggestions. But I'm going to do this, one non-zero
day at a time.

-z

[1]: https://old.reddit.com/r/NonZeroDay/wiki/the_four_pillars