Getting a workshop, even a digital one, off the ground is a lot of work. Even if I’ve got a spreadsheet I’ve inherited from my Final Fantasy 14 Free Company leader, getting it updated and ready to be used after most of it hasn’t been updated since 2024 is a pretty significant undertaking. Adding on to it the way I want to (and have been) in order to support other kinds of projects and an “I will buy this from you” list for my own purposes is an even larger undertaking. I’ve spent at least a few hours a day on it for five days straight and I’m sure that I’ll eventually be adding more to it tonight, once I settle down to “game,” since gaming these days is seventy-five percent idle crafting while I work on this spreadsheet, twenty-percent doing my daily grind for levels, four percent doing weekly reset work, and one percent doing things that are fun. I miss doing fun stuff and I can’t wait to get back to it once I have this spreadsheet updated, a project-management process in place, and all of my new projects humming along. It’s going to be difficult to manage at first since I don’t have the kind of in-game money needed to support the more proactive of my fellow players, but if I keep it up and have picked the right items to make and sell, then I should be able to translate all this effort into even more money. We’ll have to see if it actually works out, though. I might wind up losing a bunch of money and needing to shut down all parts of the workshop other than the group-contribution efforts, or just not making the money fast enough to keep up with the influx of materials (since I can only make things so quickly and can’t flood the market with them if I want to keep prices up). Only time will tell.

There’s a part of me that wants to throw this all away, tell my FC leader to find someone else to head up this crafting effort, and to focus my efforts on doing stuff I enjoy. I can even hear one of my friends reading this and yelling “do it! This is a game! We’re supposed to have fun!” at me in a text chat somewhere, but the problem is that I value infrastructure. I enjoy planning things and building out shared resources for a group of people to us. I like meticulous work that will be a benefit to all. I’m just struggling right now because it is so much more immediate work than I expected and there’s really not a lot of ways for anyone to help me get it done that won’t require some amount of extra reworking at the end or moderate-to-heavy management work on my part. Eventually, when this flurry of price investigation, table building, and value-linking is finished, I will have been glad I did it and I know that maintaining it will be much less work than this major overhaul and update has been, but that’s not super helpful today as I watch the deadline I set for myself get further and further away. There’s just been so much to do lately that I haven’t been making the kind of progress I would have liked and now that the deadline I set for myself has passed, I feel even more pressure to buckle down and do it.

Which I’m doing. I’ve been spending every moment of time I can spare on it these past few days and only given up on it when I was nearly to the point of losing my mind due to boredom. It’s good work. It’s valuable work. It’s also onerous and repetitive work that prevents me from doing other stuff like listening to podcasts or watching a show since I need to stay very focused on the numbers I’m editing, the tables I’m building, and which thing gets linked where so I have an accurate representation of how much things cost or how much things will sell for and how much of that final price someone is entitled to for their contributions. Lots of number crunching. Simple number crunching, for the most part, but it is so easy to lose my focus, forget a number, or accidentally put the number in the wrong field so I can’t afford too many distractions when I’m already this tired and worn out from typing in numbers. Hopefully it’ll only take a few more days so I can get this wrapped up and finished before the next season of the roleplaying wrestling group I follow in Final Fantasy 14 so I can focus on recording and editing those shows around the project cycle I’m going to set up once I finish this workshop worksheet.

I, uh, really do a lot of work that is mostly for the benefit of other people, don’t I. Stop running D&D so I can relax and I fill my now-free sunday afternoons with raiding. Had a momentary span of days where I was wondering what to do with myself and now I’ve got two workshops to run (one largely for ease of making current consumables and one for mutual profit). Wanted to get into some light roleplaying and now I’m on the hook to attend and record every event for a roleplaying wrestling federation. Wanted something creative to do and now I’m trying to improve my video editing skills enough that I can actually do fun stuff with them by volunteering my time and meager skills to assist that same wrestling federation. I always find the work required to fill all available time. I might have a problem. I think I’m really bad at resting and that maybe I should talk to my therapist about how I can’t seem to stop taking on new things to do. Which won’t happen for over a week after this posts, at which point I will have finished this spreadsheet, edited a wrestling event, and likely recorded another one. Nothing for it but to keep working I guess. Heaven forbid I stop long enough to actually register what it’s like to not have my little tasks to do.