According to Seth Godin, there is no such thing as writer’s block. He’s been on my mind recently, not just because I listen to his regular podcast, but also because he’s doing the book marketing circuit on the podcast shows I typically listen to. As of writing (November 3rd), his latest book was just delivered to my door.
From what I understand, Seth’s belief is that writer’s block is a function of our desire to not ship bad work. Instead, we hold out until a good idea arrives and we work on it. His advice to overcome “writer’s block” is to constantly write regardless of how bad you think it is. It’s a bit of a spaghetti approach – you throw as much at the wall and see what sticks. He maintains that buried under all the bad writing, there is bound to be some good stuff. The job of writing bad stuff is to eventually unearth the good stuff for you to work on and polish to completion.
Seth is known for having posted on his blog every day for over a decade, tallying over 7000 posts. He says that for every post we read, there are up to 8 that didn’t get published.
I have this bad habit of coming up with thoughts for blogs as I’m trying to sleep. I promise myself I’ll remember to jot it down in the morning – that it’s not worth staring at my screen in the darkness when sleep is so close by.
And yet, here I am – kicking myself over the n-th missed idea that never came to fruition.
Perhaps there’s not a lot I can do when inspiration strikes me other than keeping a notebook on hand to capture transient thoughts. However, if the pandemic and working from home has taught me anything about creative activities, it’s that I shouldn’t wait for inspiration to take hold, but rather inspiration should find me already hard at work at the process of making. That is to say, it’s more important that I build regular practice and development into my routines so that I increase the chances of inspiration catching me as I work.
I’m not the first person to suggest this strategy. It’s common advice from many creative folks. What’s new is that I’m seeing the advice in action in my own work: the more I write and practice, the more ideas flow out of me.
If I do this, if I do the work in between the deliverables, I suspect I’ll capture a lot more of those posts from the ether.
Back in January, I discussed how I set up my monthly notebook. I’ve since updated the system and added a new process that I thought I should share.
Previously, at the start of the notebook I would collect a running series of to-do items. Most of the items at the top of the list would be things that had been carried-over for multiple months, with a few small items at the bottom that likely were first jotted-down in the previous month. I found that I was continuously copying out the same items month-over-month and the list was growing. On the one hand, if the thing isn’t important enough for me to complete in a reasonable amount of time, it could be the case that it’s not important enough for me to carry-forward and that I should just drop the task all together.
Yet, I felt that some of the tasks were things I’d want to complete “one day” in the undefined future, but that I had lots of other pressing things that needed my attention first. Or, some tasks would require a fair amount of planning or coordination, and so I would tackle it after an adequate amount of lead time.
Some time ago, I created an account on Trello, but it was sitting unused as I didn’t know what kind of boards I would find useful. This seemed like the perfect experiment to help me remain flexible.
I set up several columns (buckets) of items. In the far left, I labelled the list “Pool” and dump in all to do items. Within each of the cards I can make notes or sub-lists to help keep me on track of things. At the start of each month, if there is something I don’t want to carry forward into the new book, I put the item into the bucket.
An example where I grouped a bunch of items under a single heading – in this case, splurge purchases I want to make but at a time when I have the discretionary funds.
Next, is the “Planning Phase” bucket. The beauty of Trello is I can drag cards from one column to the next, so when I’m ready to move stuff from the Pool to another phase of activity, I can easy drag-and-drop. Items in the Planning Phase might require me to do research or make purchases in preparation to work on the project.
If no further planning is required, I move it into the “Active” column. When a task is active, it’s something that I’m placing priority on and is meant to remind me to carve out space in my schedule to address.
An example of something that requires research and ongoing monitoring, I had ants in my yard last year and I wanted to deal with them without harming the grass or affecting my dog. Now that it’s Winter, I can’t deal with this again until Spring.
Sometimes, a project needs to be put on hold. I created a bucket to put tasks that are underway but I’m not making active progress on. Items in this bucket might require someone to get back to me on some action of detail, or maybe I need to wait until a future date to complete the tasks. Whatever it is, if I don’t want to move a task back into the pool column, I place it here and make a note of why the tasks is in limbo.
“Completed” is my win column – it gives me a chance to see what I’ve crossed of my list and as the column grows, I can take satisfaction in my accomplishments.
I created an “Abandoned” column because sometimes I will choose not to complete a task but I don’t want to delete it outright. Maybe it’s something that’s still important, or maybe I missed a window but I want to be reminded of it.
Finally, for tasks that occur regularly but infrequently, I have a column so that I can see when the last time was that I finished a task, and remind myself that it will need to go back into the active column (e.g. changing my tires, changing the furnace filter, etc.).
I’ve been using this revised system for a few months and it seems to be satisfying my immediate needs. It both cuts down on the number of items I need to manually copy from book to book while allowing me to indefinitely store things in a user-friendly format – effectively marrying my love of analogue with the convenience of digital.
For as much as I read about productivity and “tactics,” I’m not all that organized, in my opinion. I am forced to keep track of a lot of threads in my projects by necessity of having too much on my plate, so I make use of notebooks and applications to sort, categorize, and remind myself of things. This includes my email inboxes – if something is unread, it means I haven’t tended to it yet and need to circle back.
From time to time I hack away at my unread messages, but items will sit there for long stretches during peak deadline times.
Last week, however, I hit inbox zero for my main account for the first time in a loooooong time.
Let’s ignore any messages currently in Boomerang limbo…
I honestly don’t remember the last time I hit zero messages in my inbox. It’s been a long slow process of setting up filters on messages to get rid of promotions cluttering my inbox (which I started setting up in January). I was tired of having to constantly decide whether I wanted to open promotional messages or auto-delete. I didn’t want to block or unsubscribe from them all since I still used the promotions on occasion, but the constant, daily deluge of 30+ messages was draining.
I don’t really subscribe to the inbox zero system per se, but when I finally cleared the last message kicking around, I stared at my empty inbox in confusion. It was weird to see. And I feel a slight motivation to keep on top of clearing emails. When a number pops up in the tab, an itching anxiety kicks in to get rid of it as soon as possible.
Demon be gone!
I feel odd celebrating something like this. I know rationally that clearing emails isn’t really a marker of productivity. Nevertheless, I think it’s important to celebrate those times when you feel a modicum of control over your life and work (even if it’s an illusion set up by my capitalist overlords… /s).
I’ve noticed an annoying trend in the podcast marketing of new books. The marketing itself works quite well – I’ve purchased a number of books based on authors who appear on podcasts I listen to and discuss the main ideas of the book with the host.
The problem I have is when it seems like a significant amount of the content discussed in the podcast accounts for large chunks of the book’s main ideas. For instance, I picked up a book recently and all of the key ideas (the theoretical framework and main argument for why the topic is important) laid out in the first 70 pages were discussed on a podcast. I’m curious whether the rest of the book will be similarly spoiled, but I’m holding out to be surprised. From what I’ve seen so far, though, the next 150 pages are presented as tactics and strategies to apply the main ideas, so I’m not overly optimistic.
I understand that this is part and parcel of the marketing format for these books. An author is invited onto a show with a certain audience reach, the two discuss the book as a common framing device for the conversation, and everyone is happy – the author gets promoted, the publisher gets advertising, and the podcast generates revenues on sales kickbacks and sponsored content. The only person that loses is the reader who pays for a book that was effectively summarized an hour-long conversation for free. This is doubly bad when the book is an animated bibliography, and you’ve read enough books in the genre to get the punchline from the stories cited.
I can’t put all the blame on the author. After all, they are just trying to sell their book and there is going to be a lot of repetition of the talking points if you do a lot of interviews. A lot of the blame, instead, falls on the quality of the podcasts. I find that podcast hosts tend to stick to a common format of teeing up questions based on key points from the chapters. Sometimes this is handled smoothly, as in cases where the host poses an interesting question that the author uses to circle back to something discussed in the book. But I have listened to podcast episodes where the host states a thesis from the book without a question, and the author then just elaborates on that point.
In an ideal world, I would want an interview the way it used to be when I watched Jon Stewart’s run of the Daily Show, where the author would be invited as a guest to the show on the pretense of discussing the book, however the conversation would be about whatever Stewart wanted. Often the conversation was an excuse to catch up, swap stories, and bore little direct connection with what the book was about; the book was usually mentioned as an afterthought as the interview wrapped up. Maybe this wouldn’t sell as many books, but at least I wouldn’t feel cheated reading through a book I already had the conclusions for.
Or maybe I have too high of expectations of free content, which runs counter to the content farming that needs to occur to regularly post stuff for consumers.
A Paramedic's Notebook 