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- April 27, 2015
Metaphorically Holding My Breath to Be Productive
April 27, 2015Read moreSynopsis: When I’m working on challenging/tedious projects, I need adequate external motivation to charge up my creative engine. Without it, I have to use ineffective methods, and progression is far slower than I would prefer. In this post, I break-down how my creativity, desire for connection, and expectations are possibly connected.
- April 22, 2015
Two Interviews with Dave Seah
April 22, 2015Read moreAdded to the list of Dave Appearances on the internet:
Back in March I was invited to Answer Tough Creative Project Questions on the Lean Into Art podcast with Jerzy Drozd, Kate Shields, and Robert Stenzinger on their live Google Hangout stream. This is the third of what seems to be a yearly visit to their podcast, and it’s always great to talk about art, creativity, productivity, and inspiration with a collection of driven community-minded illustrators.
I conducted an interview with Poetic Muselings. Michelle had seem my Annoyed Task Planner and was curious enough to conduct a really comprehensive interview over email with me, probably the most detailed of all interviews I’ve had. It’s so big, it will be published in three parts.
- April 21, 2015
Reader Poll: What kind of posts to include in the main blog roll?
April 21, 2015Read moreI’ve been tinkering with the way I’ve been writing, trying to maintain balance between “keeping track of my thoughts” and “posts that are still accessible to a general audience”. My assumption is that some posts appeal to some people, and they are OK with just ignoring the ones that aren’t interesting. This is not the way to build audience, but then again making big numbers has never been my focus. I write to think, basically, and if what I write is useful to just a handful of people I am content with that.
That said, I really don’t know what readers are interested in, and it just occurred to me that I could just ASK. This is kind of a new thing for me; I get really uncomfortable with it, assuming that asking is unwelcome or not socially acceptable. I might get this from my late mother. It’s something I should get over, I think.
Here’s my question:
How can I write about varied topics in a way that is not inconvenient for readers?
Followup questions:
What mix of topics have you found most appealing?
Does the feed / blog page need any reorganization so you can more quickly find the topics you are interested in?
There are off-limit suggestions. Please reply in the comments below, and I’ll try adjusting my mix of articles to better-fit those preferences for a while to see what it’s like! This website has been a mess for a long time, and I want to fix it.
Thanks!
- April 20, 2015
Microtask Day 13: Furious Creativity with Friends
April 20, 2015Read more
This post follows from yesterday’s Mission Abort! Microtask Fail post, so I recommend reading that before reading this.
Yesterday I admitted to myself that microtasks weren’t working because I just didn’t want to do the work. I concluded that the root of the problem was lack of motivation, not lack of clever process. I also flipped the decision bit on the suspicion that I don’t take to structured work by nature, requiring significant amounts of external motivation to get started. Furthermore, the kind of external motivation that works best for me comes from people, specifically those that I am interacting with directly. However, it can also be a love/hate relationship. I felt awful about thinking about people in such negative terms.
After sleeping on it, my waking DUH moment was that my negative feelings about people depends on WHICH ones I am interacting with. What is less obvious is how the right people relate to value-driven goals, and how the wrong people spoil them. (more…)
- April 19, 2015
ABORT MISSION! Microtask Challenge Days 10-12
April 19, 2015Read more
Today would have been Day 12 of the Microtask Challenge, but I’m calling it a dud. While the idea of microtasks supported with specialized worksheets is cool, I am finding they don’t address the actual problem I’m trying to solve: making sustained, regular progress on my personal projects. My will to work is being sapped before microtasks have a chance to kick-in.
To recape, the hypothesis behind microtasks is that any action at all, no matter how small, tends to result in sustained effort over a period of time. When working completely by myself, the challenge for me is getting over the threshold of starting. I thought that making the starting threshold ridiculously small might work, if I was able to accept that even ridiculously small tasks were worth swinging at. The psychological hurdle, I thought, was that I thought small tasks were dumb.
While the approach seemed to work for the first week for exploratory tasks, it completely failed to ignite progress on the main challenge: making progress on my game programming project.
Postmortem follows. (more…)
