8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Category: January Journeys

Chapter List

  • Productivity Obsession Updated · v2

    I will admit that I have a bit of an obsession with the notion of tracking personal productivity.

    I have tried apps, journals, lists, calendars, logs, books, spreadsheets, databases and more.

    In October I coded a new app to take another swing at the “productivity tool” challenge.

    Past attempts have been simple task tracking apps with checklists and goals.

    This latest attempt has been a behemoth of curiosity and complexity: it posits an imagined futuristic city inhabited by a creative underground market where skills are traded and jobs are posted. The more creative work one logs in the system the more the city grows and the more interesting things are unlocked.

    My proudest achievement is that the imagined city has a radio station that plays lo-fi tunes in the background while I work, encouraging me to have the app open on my computer for easy logging.

    It’s immensely cool and I’m having so much fun exploring the little novelty, but…

    Does any of it actually work to make me more productive?

    I’d like to sit here and write the virtues of all these tools in leading to a more productive creative life, but at the end of the day what probably works best is just simple accountability to self. All of these little gimmicks, checklists, logs and databases no matter their format, are meant to bolster that accountability, but if one doesn’t have accountability to start with then no amount of filling pages, sorting lists, or checking boxes is going to change what ends up on the pages that actually matter at the end of the day.

  • Doodling Inspiration Branch · Part Two

    Once I get past the idea of seeking quality in my art, I often find that doodling is a kind of meditative randomness that drives me creatively.

    Doodling is different than drawing, of course. Drawing and sketching in my mind implies an external subject, and turning what one sees into lines and colour on the page. Sketching is the act of replacing a camera with a bit of ink or pencil lead. 

    Doodling, on the other hand, is the freedom of the pen on paper to explore shapes and express notions that are mere thoughts in our own heads. It is generative. It is creation from ideation into shape and form upon a blank canvas. It is something from the intangible and ineffable. It is an outlet for our deepest minds to express themselves. 

    I have been re-reading The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes[1], a controversial book of pop psychological theory that speculates that consciousness arose from the conversation that happens inside our own minds between the two lobes our our brain. 

    Whether you buy it or not, its central premise of Jaynes’ book relies on the notion of two plus two equalling five: or that is to say, that the union of two things is often more than the sum of its parts. 

    In as much as my doodles combine with my fiction writing to make more than the sum of their parts, a mental creative union of something perhaps just as curious and interesting as consciousness itself, no?

  • Loop Loop

    Perhaps if you have been reading along, sensing that something is building here in my labs and behind the scenes, you will be wondering wherein all this creative energy is distilling.

    I am far from a breakthrough, but after two full evenings of creative musical play following the so-called completion of my musical set up, I have learned the rawest of basics about my tools.

    A looper pedal, an effects pedal, a synth, and a recorder.

    Creative play is never meant to be shared, but as with many of my other creative endeavours in art, fiction, photography, and beyond, I enjoy the act of documenting progress no matter how unpolished.

    The final step of creativity after all is performance and exhibition of the effort, and to fear such things is not a failing, no, but it is a shame.

    Here is what I created on my first two nights of kitted synth exploration. It is a mess, but it is interesting.

    MP3: Zero One Zero

    …a soundscape

    See you in February.

  • Incomplete Able

    No creative setup is ever really complete, is it? But it is possible to say that milestones have been reached in aiming for an unreachable completeness, no?

    Case-in-point: I received a new piece of music equipment in the mail on Wednesday and it (so-called) completed my composition setup.

    The piece in question is a mid-range multi-track looper pedal, and it fits into my plan of making ambient background music tracks for my audio production project. It joins a list of other equipment including a recorder, mics, a preamp, an effects pedal, a synth, and about a hundred feet of various cables to connect it all together.

    And so for now my setup… it is complete.

    I can do what I want to do. Make what I want to make. Create.

    Which really means…

    It is probably not complete, of course, and in a month or a year or at some other point in the future I’ll decide that there is a gap in what I am able to accomplish with this current-state setup that will suddenly and irreversibly become less complete than what it is today.

    But for a moment, completion for the incompletable seems just so. I relish it, but know that incompletion will drive me to something else equally interesting, too.

  • Productivity Obsession Outdated · v1

    I will admit that I have a bit of an obsession with the notion of tracking personal productivity.

    I have tried apps, journals, lists, calendars, logs, books, spreadsheets, databases and more.

    This afternoon I vibe coded an app for my Mac that (for now) emulates the key features of the popular and once-trendy bullet journal but in a task list-meets-log sort of way. Maybe I’ll even use it… for a while.

    Does any of it actually work tho?

    I’d like to sit here and write the virtues of all these tools in leading to a more productive creative life, but at the end of the day what probably works best is just simple accountability to self. All of these little gimmicks are meant to bolster that accountability, but if one doesn’t have it to start with then no amount of filling pages, sorting lists, or checking boxes is going to change what ends up on the pages that matter at the end of the day.