I put a lot of pressure on myself to be productive. I love to learn and obsess about interesting ideas, but also turn them into actual productive things in real life. It's exhausting sometimes. There usually isn't enough time to do both.

I've also noticed an interesting struggle as I get older: the more you study and research, the more amazing the world seems. As your understanding grows, it's more likely that you will look around and be able to pick apart how things work, to deconstruct them. When this happens you are constantly inspired. You are able to do more, but it's crippling.

It gets harder to figure out where to spend time. You have to be ruthless about ignoring interesting ideas, but it's hard to decide which ones to ignore.

Even worse, you probably already have a smattering of open-source projects that have gained some traction. These require small bits of your attention, which add up quickly. The more you produce the more you are bound to bugfixes and maintenance.

I don't know where I'm going with this. I am not burned out. In the words of Bilbo Baggins, "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." Even though I'm ignoring a lot of interesting ideas, I still find myself thinking about too many things at once, and I end up spending all my time figuring out which one to work on.

If you follow my work, I have a question for you. Would you rather see more tutorial-style blog posts from me, or do you think several 15-minute screencasts about building apps with webpack/react/etc would be good? I'm having a hard time deciding which to focus on. Let me know.

I usually don't write personal posts like this. But something strange happens whenever I write. I did something, which usually kick-starts my motivation to focus and start working on a specific thing.