Category Archives: productivity

What is true now?

Are you looking for the reason to always have something to capture ideas with you at all times? Are you looking for the point in doing regular reviews? Are you stuck with not knowing what to do next out of the 50 things you should be doing and the 500 you could be doing? Then the solution can be found in answering, to the fullest extent possible, the one question above. Other questions, such as…

How |kaibk|referrer|nkrez
much time do I have?

What tools are at my disposal?

What is the next action to move the project forward?

None of these questions can be honestly answered until you have truthfully quantified “What is true now?”. This is why regular reviews, brain dumps, capturing things easily, etc. is so very critical. Until you can define all of the truths of your world, until you know where you are right this moment, until you can appreciate both what you have and what you don’t, there is no possible way you can know for sure that the next step you take is the one you should be taking

Writing Advice (To My Younger Self)

I recently had the extreme pleasure of being interviewed by Ian Hines for is wonderful new project, Intrvws. Ian is an extremely skilled interviewer especially via email. He takes his time developing smart questions and is very comfortable letting people take a while to think about and compose an answer. As evidence, our interview was conducted via email between August 1 and October 4, 2010 (Two months!). I’m incredibly proud of having been a part of it.

I really urge you to read the whole thing, but I wanted to post a particular section here. It is the writing advice I wish I had given my younger self. I encounter young and just starting writers all the time and have given them all manner of hodgepodge advice.Henceforth, I will point them to this:

Ian:

I wonder, if you had the opportunity to send some advice to your younger self to read as you were first beginning to write on the web, what would it be?

Patrick:

Focus on writing well. Read as many posts and books on writing as you need to learn the craft without letting it distract you from, well, writing. Because, after a certain point, no book or post or advice will ever help you as much as putting those words down.

Also learn how to edit your writing to turn it into something other than a collection of words ordered according to some universally agreed to rules. Because some of those rules should be broken. In fact, many should have never been agreed to in the first place. Because those rules can stifle you from finding your own voice if followed too rigidly. More often than not, what you will be editing out of your writing is the rules.

Spend at least twice as much time editing as you do writing. Slave over every detail, sweat every word and punctuation mark. Read what you write over and over again. In fact, never stop yourself from revisiting something you wrote and improving or expanding on it if you feel it would make it better. Even something as simple as adding a comma where there should have been one can change the feel of an entire essay.

Be curious about everything but find one or two things that your are insatiably curious about and interested in. A subject or two that you can never know too much, or think too deeply, about. Write about these things.

Also, ignore the numbers. Ignore the audience. Ignore the fact that, for a very long time, no one may be reading. Just make sure that you are. Be your own biggest fan (when warranted) and harshest critic (when warranted).

Finally, do what I say, not what I do.

Doing The Dishes

Confession; I like doing dishes. I find it very meditative.

I like doing them late at night, before bed, alone. I like the warmth of the water. I like the smell of the dish soap. I turn on our under-the-counter radio and listen to the BBC on Minnesota Public Radio. It is just me, the task at hand, and the news delivered calmly, with balance, and a proper tongue.

I perform each step in a particular, rarely wavering, order.

1. Unload the bottom rack of the dishwasher.
2. Unload the top rack of the dishwasher.
3. Rinse the dishwasher safe plates, glasses, and silver and load each in their proper place.
4. Fill the sink with soap.
5. Wash each item in order from cleanest to dirtiest.
6. Empty and rinse out the sink.
7. Wipe down the counters and oven.

I find solace in the structure of these actions performed rigidly so that my thinking is focused and somehow still. When my brain is relaxed in this way I find that my body follows suit.

I’m sure we all have tasks like this. Some of us weed the garden. Some of us knit. Some of us mow the lawn or shovel snow. These tasks that we get lost in almost by design due to their repetitive nature. In these times we drift into the order and let our minds go.

We often don’t think of these as moments of meditation but it often has the same mental and physical effect. We are busy doing nothing yet doing something all the same. The more we can identify these times of productive meditation, the more we can make sure to enjoy them for what they are.