Neon Cities

I’ve previously mentioned that I recently built a small productivity web app to try to help me be more accountable to myself.

Productivity is a tricky thing to get right, and making a piece of software to “force it” seems a bit contrived. I went through a half dozen iterations of the idea and ultimately I honed in on a gamified world that thrived when I logged creative practice.

Writing, drawing, taking pictures, and playing music are logged in small bursts and all of it feeds a little virtual neon city that has enough complexity that it reacts in subtle and curious ways.

But I find that having a strange gamified abstraction of my creative journey at my fingertips has resulted in me reacting in subtle and curious ways, too.

An example: I’ve been meaning to improve my urban sketch crowd drawing.

You know what I mean, right? You sit down to draw some simple, loose urban sketch in a fast-paced moment. You’re scribbling lines and shapes and adding depth and complexity to the architecture and just as you think you’ve got the scene… you look at it one more time only to realize that you’ve drawn around all the people. You’ve left them all out. Urban spaces are cluttered with humans, after all.  So you try and add a few later but—hey—you’re good at drawing buildings not tiny little blobs that look like tourists.  I should try to get better at that, you think.

I wanted to get better at drawing crowds when I’m out in the world drawing urban scenes.

I could have probably approached this a hundred ways, but inside this little productivity city that I built something random happened: I was offered a job. I mean, that’s normal—that’s what the system does. It prompts you to practice your skills by randomly dropping jobs. What was weird was that the first job it picked for me after I added my disciplines into the system was “figure drawing.”

So I did some figure drawing, and I logged it.

And then I did some more. 

And then I decided to add a “project” to draw one thousand little figures before the end of the year. Suddenly, I find myself sitting in front of the television sketching little people over and over and over for long stretches—getting better and better at drawing crowds of urban sketchy people.

Productivity is subtle, and I don’t know yet if this counts as productivity. But it feels like an interesting thing to wander a virtual world and see what is around the next corner, particularly if it’s leading me somewhere I want to go.