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Focus & Flow
Jan. 7th, 2014 03:10 pmOne of my biggest strengths and weaknesses is the sheer number of ideas that I have to act upon. It's great, but I have a tendency to end up spreading myself too thin and doing the worst case scenario version of multi-tasking: not getting anywhere on six or seven things at once.
It was the fear of dropping the ball on yet another promising project that led me to do some serious thinking about how and why this happens, last Thursday night and Friday morning, and as a result I made the decision to get my ducks lined up in a row and see the project through before rushing to publish or publicize it, a process that took me a couple of hours a day over a couple of days.
(I've since then improved it a little more, because the advantage of working ahead is that hindsight becomes foresight.)
Does this mean I'm going to be restricting myself to only one or two projects at a time? Well, not really. Because I don't work that way. I'm just not going to try to do so many things on a single day. None of this half hour here, hour there stuff. Every creative thing I turn my attention to is going to get enough time for me to build up a decent flow with it. It won't always be a matter of seeing a side project through to completion before switching gears (especially since "completion" is usually relative), and being that this is creative work, sometimes it will be a more matter of "what am I feeling today?" than any kind of master plan... but then, the thing I did Thursday and Friday wasn't even a twinkle in the sky before Thursday night, so that's pretty much par for course.
And of course, I have to be aware that things have a tendency to click along and fall into place for me like this during the cold months, when my brain is sharpest and I wake up each morning feeling refreshed. But given that I'm out of the attic and my new nest is right next to a window a/c in a small room, I'm hopeful that I can sustain a reasonable level of self-awareness and creative energy through the warmer months.
It was the fear of dropping the ball on yet another promising project that led me to do some serious thinking about how and why this happens, last Thursday night and Friday morning, and as a result I made the decision to get my ducks lined up in a row and see the project through before rushing to publish or publicize it, a process that took me a couple of hours a day over a couple of days.
(I've since then improved it a little more, because the advantage of working ahead is that hindsight becomes foresight.)
Does this mean I'm going to be restricting myself to only one or two projects at a time? Well, not really. Because I don't work that way. I'm just not going to try to do so many things on a single day. None of this half hour here, hour there stuff. Every creative thing I turn my attention to is going to get enough time for me to build up a decent flow with it. It won't always be a matter of seeing a side project through to completion before switching gears (especially since "completion" is usually relative), and being that this is creative work, sometimes it will be a more matter of "what am I feeling today?" than any kind of master plan... but then, the thing I did Thursday and Friday wasn't even a twinkle in the sky before Thursday night, so that's pretty much par for course.
And of course, I have to be aware that things have a tendency to click along and fall into place for me like this during the cold months, when my brain is sharpest and I wake up each morning feeling refreshed. But given that I'm out of the attic and my new nest is right next to a window a/c in a small room, I'm hopeful that I can sustain a reasonable level of self-awareness and creative energy through the warmer months.