8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [08] Gaps & Spaces

Building a practical creative practice around a busy life.

  • String Games

    I remember watching tv when I was a kid and that old trope of tying a string around your finger was something that snagged on my consciousness. After all, how the heck does trying a string around your finger help you remember something? But a lot of tv and film characters seemed to do it, so, there must have been something to it, right?

    Much later in life I realized that the finger trick and similar memory triggers are a bit of a hack—and not necessarily tied up in string.

    For example, sometimes if I need to remember to bring something when I leave in the morning, the night before I’ll leave something else out of place: I’ll move my toothbrush or put a sock in my shoe. It’s stupidly simple, but the next morning I’ll see the out of place item and my brain will connect with the reason it out of place which is tied back to the little story I put in my head about needing to remember that thing and… boom, there it is.

    String around the finger was just that: a memory hack. Why did I tie that string around my finger again? Oh, right… I need to do that thing.

    It got me thinking about memory hacks for creative work. What’s the driving down the road and suddenly being struck with inspiration without a notebook equivalent of the string around the finger?  How can I make sure I don’t lose a great idea just because I can’t immediately write it down? 

    I think if I figure that out, I’ll have a lot more great ideas—or at least one’s that I remember when I’m not sitting ready at my computer.

  • Productivity Obsession

    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.

  • Derailed Days

    To say it is easy for a creative person to get derailed in the span of any given day is almost not worth saying, it is so obvious. Stephen Pressfield in his wonderful little book The War of Art, a must read for any creative soul, calls this a kind of resistance.

    Resistance is the force, says Pressfield, that keeps us from doing our work as creative people.

    Today, I found my day full of resistance, derailed and amok.

    I will spare the details of the chaos in this post, but needless to say that I ran up against a lot of external resistance in the hours when I would usually be creating something worthy of the concept.

    And yet, here I am and I have opened my laptop late into the evening to fight the resistance that swelled up over this day and to finish off the waning minutes having done at least a little of something.

    It is easy to get derailed, but it is important to find one’s way back to the tracks sooner than later. Resistance is tricky like that, always tempting you to take the easy route, go to bed having accomplished nothing, when all it takes is to resist right back.

  • Morning Vibes

    The ritual of the commute may not spark other folks like it sparked me, but having become a guy who largely works from home—be that on my own projects or on contract work—I have started to understand not just the value, but the need to have a morning groove.

    (As an aside, it hasn’t helped my routine that I also gave up coffee a couple months ago—for health reasons.)

    Without ritual, without pattern, without routine I often find that my day struggles to really start. I’ll sit in a cozy chair in my pyjamas (really) and at some point look up and it will be nine-thirty, and though I’ve poked around on some files or done some pre-work, my day feels decidedly unstarted.

    On the other hand, if I plan to be out the door and sitting in a cafe by 8am with a hot drink in front of me and my laptop open to a word processor, then by nine-thirty I’ve often already written something, posted something, or at least made progress on a project of some sort.

    The difference is stark, and all that accounts for it is the routine of a morning plan.