I still find collage — glueing one thing to another — the most restorative thing I can do to get back to a good place in my work. It never fails to get me unstuck. These two collages were, fittingly, made from a Restoration Hardware catalog. The robot above was made for my 5-year-old, and the comic below was art directed by the same 5-year-old. (It’s been a happy, lazy Sunday.)
It’s a new year, so naturally people are regretting all the things they didn’t get done last year, and thinking about all the things they want to get done this year.
A friend of mine messaged me this week and asked me what I think about bullet journaling, and I, ever the helpful friend, said, “I don’t think about bullet journaling.”
Another friend sent me this article making a case for using a paper planner.
I’ve gotten a handful of tweets recently asking me about “productivity systems,” which is funny to me because it assumes I do any thinking at all about productivity. Productivity is pretty low on my list of cares. “Productivity is for machines, not for people,” Jason Fried recently tweeted. “Think about how effective you’re being, not how productive you’re being.”
Some people tell me they have all these great ideas, and they just can’t get it together enough to make them happen. I am envious of these people, because I do not feel full of great ideas. I have plenty of faith in my ability to do something with a great idea, should I have one, but what I do not have is any faith in my ability to actually generate that great idea. I spend almost all of my time trying to have an idea worth doing something about.
Anyways. The best thing I’ve read about productivity is still David Allen’s classic, Getting Things Done. It’s way more Zen than its cover might suggest, and it’s full of little nuggets like, “If it’s on your mind, your mind isn’t clear,” and “Get the ideas out of your head so you can do something with them.” Allen’s advice, as far as a system goes, is: “All you really need is lists and folders.” You need a list of stuff you want to do, and you need a place to put things so you can get to them later. Nothing fancy. I make do with a Google Calendar, Dropbox, a couple of to-do list pages in the back of my notebook, a filing cabinet, and banker’s boxes.
Really, the best way I know to see something through is to get yourself a calendar, put an X in the day’s box after you do your work, and don’t break the chain.
And maybe stop worrying so much about productivity and getting things done. Worry about things worth doing.
A thought from Thoreau’s journal, on this day, January 4th, 1860:
A man receives only what he is ready to receive…. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now.
Receiving, here, means a taking in, or a welcoming, as you’d receive a visitor. This is, to my mind, a good argument for self-directed learning, for following one’s nose, so to speak, as we take in best what we want to take in. (Although almost anyone who’s been taught has been haunted by the words of their teachers, which often only make sense in time.) People learn best what and when they want to learn. The first step to thinking, according to my friend Alan, is to want to think in the first place.
Reading, for example: We must be ready to take in a book. I am fond of the saying “It wasn’t for me” to describe a book I didn’t connect with, because it allows that given enough time, it may be for me, and I may be ready to receive it. We are always changing, so we will find new things to receive when re-reading. Thoreau follows up with a specific example, about Aristotle and fishes:
I find (e.g.) in Aristotle something about the spawning of the pout & perch — because I know something about it already & have my attention aroused — but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.
Reading is a part of our education, and education is a drawing out of who we are and what we care about. We meet ourselves in the words of others.
Earlier in his journal, Thoreau is observing the snow, and how the presence of tracks reveals formally undetected animals. So he already has tracking on the mind, and turns the idea on himself: He’s tracking himself in his journal, in his reading, in his observing. (As A.K.R. said, “Pay attention to what you pay attention to.”) Part of his work is examining his own chain, adding links, identifying the weak ones, fortifying others…
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