Blog 9-7-16 – September Update

So it’s September, and I said I would update y’all by the first week of the month, and here I am, proving again that I am not dead, and not much has changed in the way of the posting schedule.

I had no idea that the process of my moving would take more than a year, but, as many more productive people will tell you, when you can’t devote your full attention and effort to a single project, it will get done less efficiently. I definitely wasn’t able to get done what I had set out to do in a reasonable amount of time and I am sorry that in doing that I have severely diminished the amount of content that has been featured on this site (hopefully temporarily).

But, things are getting back on track, as hopefully the last few (and next) days of posts will prove. I didn’t do as many exciting things these two months as before, but here are a few photos from another art show “Clarity in Chaos” that I did with the new West Texas Collective (Facebook Instagram Twitter) in Alpine Texas. It was a really fun show, and I hope to do more like it in the future.

photo-196 photo-197

I won’t be fully up and running for a while longer now, but I’m getting close to being back in a position where I can do so. It’s more than likely I’ll have something working by the end of the year. I’ll post another update by November, and be on the look out for that one, because there are a few other really cool things that I’ll also be doing in November. So stay tuned and thank you for reading/watching.

-Austin

Dragoncompany.org   Artsupplycritic.com   Dragonfunnies.com

Book Review – Getting Things Done (By: David Allen)

Getting Things Done is one of the most popular books By David Allen (not that he’s written that many) and from what I can tell one of the most popular books in the “self-help”/organization genre. I’m reviewing here the older copy (pre-2015) and I don’t know what, if anything, has been revised in the new edition.

Getting things done cover

The book is mainly a set of structures and guidelines to the “art of stress-free productivity”. Allen details how to get things out of your mind and into a medium (be it paper or electronic) and then to organize it all to be processed. The idea behind this is to allow for decisions to be made easier, and thus actions taken faster to get in control of the work you are doing, while eliminating your mind as a container for remembering, (to-do lists, shopping lists, dates, reference material, etc.) so more, if not all, of your brain power can be devoted to creative thinking and problem solving, instead of simpler tasks.

The guidelines in the book are fairly robust, and seem like they would work quite well, though I feel like a complete implementation of his system would be far too cumbersome to allow you to go about your regular life or have some relaxation time. He does continue to tell you throughout the book, though, that only full implementation will yield the best results. I feel though that this is more of a tactic to get you doing any of the things at all, and it probably works on a lot of people but I personally found it redundant and slightly annoying. I’m not sure anyone could possibly fully implement this system and have a way to capture ideas close at hand and usable at all times (unless there is someone else with you in the car, nothing will be {or should be} written down).

David does balance that point out, though, with his own experiences of using his systems. He doesn’t claim to be a robot and do it all. He relates times when he was slipping in his work and keeping track of his system, or how in many cases he was doing work less to get it done and out of his mind, but more to mess around with his new digital gadget. But he does use his own system, and its core is so simple and so versatile that it can easily be rebuilt after slipping. (As one of my {Teachers, Friends, Collaborators} once said {Roughly paraphrased} “Life is just creating one system that works and then watching it slowly fall apart and burn down, then moving on to the next system”)

The central philosophy is essentially:

  • Have a way to capture ideas, projects, and actions to take with you whenever possible
  • Transfer these notes and all of the other “paper” (digital files, office supplies, etc.) and put it in to an “inbox”.
  • Process this inbox every day and sort things into things you need to do, things someone else needs to do (either through delegation or they need to get back to you with info), things that will need reviewing the future, and things that can be easily done right now.
  • Do the simple things right now (or ASAP) and then add the other items to various checklists to review at appropriate intervals.

While it is not the simplest thing ever, it is quite easy to understand and do. It just takes the startup investment time and then one could be off and running. Even if it breaks with only a few of the core elements around, the others can easily be added. Some of the ideas might even be so simple you’ve figured them out yourself and have been using them for some time. For those that this applies to, the book aims at coordinating and making these systems you’ve created more effective by integrating it with the “getting things done” method. With stress being on the point that it will take time now, but it will save you way more in the future.

That idea is hard enough to get into people’s heads already, and I’m guessing if more people figured that out we’d all be more productive. But to combat this inherent laziness and constant “mind numbing” from thinking about all the things we have to do, the “getting things done” method emphasizes breaking big tasks into little ones that can be done right away, and riding the ‘I got something done’ wave on to being more productive in the next project. With “what is the next action?” being a core part of the process. Deciding on what the next action is is getting quite a bit of the way to getting it done, and makes one feel more confident and accomplished.

For all the time the book spends hammering in the rules above and how to get things ordered on the lower, every-day level, there isn’t much talk about the larger picture. I will say this book does better than some, which focus only on the immediate or the big picture. But it has much less of a plan for how to shape your big picture plans and where to go with them. Perhaps this is a good thing, as you don’t want some random book guy telling you how to run your life, but I found the last few chapters which were dedicated to this to be a redundant slog.

And to that end the book falls into the traps that many “self-help” books do, it becomes a slog to get through. Too much information is covered in every chapter, meaning that it needs to be constantly re-gone over. Even then there are numerous callbacks to earlier parts of the book. Information is repeated again and again to ingrain it in the heads of readers who retain less information than ones like me and quite frankly I get bored of it. Fortunately for this book multiple times when I was beginning to think Mr. Allen hand run out of things to say I was proven wrong, I just wish he could have been a little more concise about it.

I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked the book. Quite the contrary, I very much liked it and have used many of the ideas presented to improve my own personal productivity. They really have helped me, and while I think a “full” implementation of the process might be impractical for me, I will be adding more of the ideas as I can until I feel the diminishing returns aren’t worth it. It’s still a lot to tackle personal productivity in your mind, though, as I proved when, even though I liked the book, it took me the better part of a year to get all of the way through it (I got ¾ of the way through and then didn’t read a page for probably half a year) (My total read time was probably only in hours, though). It has the aforementioned problem of falsely inflating itself to be worthy as a “book”, where I think it could have easily been done in far fewer pages, but people might have dismissed it then as we tend to think of bigger as better. Still, I could consider this book essential reading, along with “People Skills” on this list of “self-help books that actually have good points”.

Forcing My Work

Well, I just got back from a little Thanksgiving vacation where I also sold some of my books at the Artwalk event in Alpine, Texas. Now that I’m back, I actually have to do work again, like this article. And after reviewing my list of articles to write, I realized I didn’t feel like writing any of them.

I realize that I have a list so that I can write things, not so that I can muse on what I want to write. If I don’t know what to write about, I go to the list and select one. That’s the way I can get things done. And it might be the only way for me. Everyone has a different method for writing, and mine is quite “brute force”. If I have an idea floating around, I write the idea down, and then I pick it up later in time for my deadline. This works most of the time. Except this time, because I have missed my deadline even as I write this. Still, it does work quite often.

I have no idea why that is. It never seems like just sitting in front of a computer screen or staring at a blank piece of paper and saying to myself ‘be creative’ would work. But it does for me, and I know that for the vast majority of people it doesn’t. And it’s weird that it only works for creative things: in school I got things done early. I never worried about studying because I never needed to. And in what work I have done I get it done at a good time, or sometimes never if I don’t want to. In any of those cases I don’t ever have to force myself. I will either do it or not.

Creativity does come easy for me, but not the creation of a finished product. I can’t tell you how many book synopses I have written and scattered about that could only possibly be made into books if I spent the rest of my life writing. I love ideas and doing different and new things, which is why I have so many comic strips, but also why I have a problem with them.

I just have to sit down and force myself to make them every week. And that’s something I couldn’t do with a lot of other things (like empty the dishwasher). I guess that’s a good thing(?) But here I am writing about this, instead of one of the many things on my list which I now think will require quite a bit more research than initially anticipated. Or I could just wing it.

My experience has shown me that whatever the case, I won’t do fun things for fun. I have to force myself to create. Then, sitting back, and looking at all I’ve done makes it worth having forced myself to go through it.

Where to Start…

So… I’m gonna talk… About stuff…

But seriously, this article isn’t going to be my usual article (is it too late to say I’m mainly a humor writer? My latest blog/article posts make me think it’s too late.) Not that this’ll be sad or anything, just different.

Now, I’ll be the second to tell you I’m not the smartest in the world (the people I know who are in school would be the first), but I think I can be a reasonably insightful person. And when I start writing I can write (type) like there’s no tomorrow (but there are hand cramps). The real problem is knowing where to start. Over the years I’ve developed many theories and views that intertwine to the extent that I have no idea where to even begin to explain them, because each piece requires another piece to fully comprehend. The ideal “book” in that case would be circular, one where it simply starts somewhere and then ends in that same place. Even more ideally, the language and concepts would be simple enough that one could simply jump in anywhere and start reading until they looped back around to that point.

Unfortunately, due to the very reason that so many things relate to each other, a book like this would end up being much less like a circle and more like a choose-your-own-adventure book, or a food web, with many complex ideas growing from or branching off of smaller “stepping-stone” or “building-block” ideas.

But what are these ideas that form the basis of all other ideas? Is the idea of a language to communicate ideas the basic idea, or merely a tangential one? And there are even more basic ideas even further down. And higher “ranking” ideas are necessary to understand the smaller ones. We’d need a word made up of letters to express the idea that perhaps a letter is the smallest idea. It isn’t, but that’s what we’d need. The problem here is that new ideas are infinitely majuscule and miniscule. In science (or all of the physical world, really) a Planck-length is the shortest measurable distance, there is nothing smaller, nothing ever gets smaller or acts over a smaller distance. But in our minds we can easily imagine something say… Half the size.

Now what does this have to do with my inability to figure out where to start? Well, first off, it showcases my ability to write something completely tangential to what I intended to talk about whenever I feel I am unable to start something. It also really means that there is no good place to start anything. There are an infinite amount of topics to discuss that could lead to greater understanding of the central (undefined at the moment) topic. Of course, this also means there are an infinite amount of topics that could lead to misunderstanding of the topic as well, and that infinity is likely larger.

Now looking at what I have just written, infinity seems quite large, and diving into something that could lead to infinity seems quite daunting. But I find that the projects I simply start end up being better than all other projects (mainly in that they aren’t really projects until they’re started). So, I guess that’s really the answer: just start, start anywhere, you don’t need a good place, and if you find the “best” place retroactively, place it in front. Make things better, work at them, but start anywhere. Starting is better than staring at the monolith of work in your mind and doing nothing.

Of course you might like to start at the monolith.