8 Clicks from Nowhere ䷀

Dispatches ⌂

Tag: planning productivity

Chapter List

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Morning Person

    It’s nearly 8pm as I write this and I’m stumped.

    I do almost all my writing for this project in the mornings. I get a hot mug of tea, I set up in a quiet-ish place, I open up my word processing software, and I just start writing.

    It’s nearly 8pm as I write this and my family is out for the evening leaving me alone with a quiet house, no obligations, and drizzling bit of cozy weather outside. One would think I’d be up to my elbows in motivation, huh?

    Instead, I’m stumped.

    I’m writing about writing and how I can’t find the focus to write, which is exactly what writers do when they can’t find the motivation or inspiration to write what they are supposed to be writing. Ugh! Writers.

    Lucky for me I have a whole writing project and website about this sort of thing.

    One set of advice will tell you (and I strongly agree) to treat creativity as a job. Sit down. Make the conditions. Get it done. Excuses are people who don’t finish their projects.

    But then—well—there is also a realistic part of me that acknowledges that productivity and progress on a project is also about knowing the conditions when you work best, having a routine, and being in the right frame of mind.

    I’m a morning person.

    I work best in the morning.

    I’m productive in the morning.

    I wrote this in the evening proving that I’m not rigidly locked to that schedule, but given the choice—well, you get the point.

  • Post Haste

    I’m going to let you peek behind the curtain for a moment and remind you that sometimes creativity is smoke and mirrors, too.

    Truth is, I write these words weeks in advance of you reading them.

    Writing a daily mini-essay is not always just about the dedicated day-after-day work of coming up with new ideas and then sitting down at a keyboard. Rather, sometimes it’s about working smarter and planning ahead. Sometimes it’s about organization and staging and schedules. Sometimes it’s a business plan.

    You want a life skill? You want to be better at a desk job? You want to get into a corporate strategic mindset? You want to learn how to get stuff done on a schedule? Oh, you can read about it in a textbook or download a course on business planning. 

    But might I suggest that you try instead a big creative project.

    Make a weekly web comic that demands you create on a schedule and manage a website.

    Join a band and try to release a demo that involves scheduling, promotion and technical skills.

    Write a novel that insists on long term strategic planning and holding big scope ideas in your head.

    I write these posts sometimes weeks in advance and try to keep between five and ten in my publication queue. Not only does that save me from rushing to write something on topic on every busy morning, but it gives me time to edit and hone and shuffle and plan out how I am making this site.

    It’s strategy. It’s planning. It’s bigger.

    And it’s more than creativity: it’s resume fodder, too.

  • Ad Naseum

    I gave my Kid a bit of advice that might have helped her pass her high school English class. It went something like this: when you are writing an essay, first make your point, then make it again, and then loop back around and make it one more time.

    Saying the same thing different ways three times may or not may be some secret formula for high school essays, but it boosted her grades significantly when she started following it.

    That advice didn’t come from nowhere. 

    Saying things on repeat is how we emphasize their importance.

    Repeating the same idea over and over again gives it weight in the mind of the reader.

    Ideas ad naseum might be stylistically clunky, but making multiple passes with the point across the audience, bluntly or otherwise, makes sure that it sticks.

    I bring this up because I have been reading through my past posts on this site and trying to tiptoe around retreading old ground in new writing… but that is probably not a great idea.  

    Avoiding repeating the same idea has a big negative side effect: it assumes that I got it perfectly right the first time I wrote about it. It assumes I have nothing more to say to refine the idea. It assumes that everyone understood it on the first attempt.

    All that is to add, if something you read here seems familiar then maybe that’s on purpose.