(no subject)
well, I said I was going to try to update more. this is an article I wrote out of frustration with myself because I'm a lazy bum. I can cut, if I remember how...
(for the record, this is all my own opinion, not to be followed or observed as actually tested out or anything. I'm just glad I finally finished writing something that wasn't being graded tomorrow morning...)
Tips to Improve Focus and Get Shit Done!
Let me first preface this by saying that I am not the person to write this article. My personal methodology for work is to do as much as I can possibly do in quick, two-minute bursts throughout the day, leaving behind countless hours of distraction and tomfoolery. Even now, I sit here staring around at objects on my desk: a bottle of water I desperately need to drink, a roll of tape that is three inches from being gone, an incredibly ugly lamp, a box full of ammunition waiting to be shot up and replaced, and a stack of Type O Negative CD’s to be listened to intently and re-organized in the collection later on (RIP Peter Steele.) Yes, I organize my CD’s, another part of my weird methodology of chaos.
While writing this, I should also point out that there is a constant flow of editing happening concurrently with the writing. There are words that I am obsessing over as I type that must, must be changed soon. “Methodology” has been used twice. “Tomfoolery” sounds incredibly stupid. And there, “incredibly” appears for the second time and should be edited out. (For the record, I would have changed the first occurrence of it to “unbelievably ugly lamp”.)
This is the way that my life revolves, around an immense amount of information that is useful in small pieces but overwhelming as a point of focus. There are thousands of bits of ideas and memories and opinions bursting from every seam of my brain, and each of them is totally unusable in their current state. What I need is a storage facility in my head, where I can take all of those thoughts and channel them into different cerebral cubbyholes to be drawn from later. Then, at my mental refinery, I will take one flawed, fuzzy idea-blob at a time, trim the irrelevancies, build up its strength, and polish it to crystal clarity. One big problem with that is, I have no mental refinery. Another big problem is that a very small percentage of my ideas actually involve any kind of conclusive material. Everything in my head asks, “what if?” and is generally answered by static. Even this article that I am writing has no point. It was born of the phrase, “my brain is bursting” and evolved from there into a rambling, loquacious mind-dump.
At this point in the process (and believe me, this point is very familiar,) I usually give up, go surf the net and tell myself that I can figure out the details later. The point of a story is a very big detail. So here I am constructing my mental refinery, where I can melt everything down and come out with gold. Or maybe uranium.
The first step in the refining process is to determine what material you are working with. (If you say “nothing,” then you are working with a blank canvass that can be distorted, stressed, and beaten into submission, and you will be expected to do at least that much.) If your material is physical, such as painting or metalwork or grand theft auto, consider yourself fortunate! These media yield immediate and tangible results that will no doubt provide endless frustration and five to ten. If you are a leather worker, immediately stop reading this article, go to your local goodwill, find the cheapest, ugliest 1970’s-era leather jacket in the place and get to work. Revive that monster and let the tortured bovine soul finally rest peacefully. Then, continue with the article. The same advice goes for the rest of you skilled with physical media.
For those people whose talents are less material-based, such as writing, psychic powers, or general human interaction, determining what your material is can be a little more difficult. Much in the same way that an artist discovers he is gifted with paints, but not with chalk, your specialties must be developed through trial and error. If your passion is to write a mystery novel, but the test audience giggles the whole way through reading the first draft, put a comedic edge into your writing. If you can’t walk through walls, but walking into walls gives you visions of the future, well you get the gist.
I heard someone in the back with a comment, “but I enjoy doing lots of stuff! How can I pick just one?” The answer is simple: pick just one. There, easy as can be. The question that you should be asking is, “how can I finish the just-one that I started ten years ago?” Good luck with that! I mean, that leads us to the next stage in our process.
Sorry, I had to catch the weather. Did you know that in Arizona, it is legal to carry a concealed weapon into a bar? Oh that reminds me, I was going to show you this video my niece texted me, it’s a bunch of dancing llamas, hilarious! Boy I’m hungry, Panda Express really sounds good right now. Wait, weren’t we talking about something?
This concludes our role-playing session, let’s have a round of applause for me! The only person in the skit. In order to refine your work, you need to clear out the rest of the distracting elements in your area. This is very difficult, because we love all our distracting stuff. We love food and texting and phone calls and email, we love hiking and biking and playing with our dogs. All of these things are wonderful, important parts of our lives, but if you have trouble with focus, those things will always-always-be agents of non-productivity. Put your phone in the car, lock your dog in the bathroom, disconnect your wireless card, and coagulate your body in front of your medium. Staple your brush to your hand, weld your torch to your prosthetic arm, and go until your first iteration is finished.
“Concentrate” means “to make denser, stronger, purer” according to Google’s web definitions. It also means to centralize, to digest, and to direct one’s attention to something. I like the word coagulate, because it gives me a stronger sense of what I am producing. To coagulate thoughts into art means to take all of the particles of the same idea, clump them into one group, and then pound on them until they become a homogeneous whole. Whether that whole is an article, a piece of music, or Ayn Rand’s personal contribution to Hell, it must agree with itself, and that agreement comes from revision. Taking that first iteration and chipping it down, adding support where necessary, and blending it until it is concrete. You are in control of what determines agreement, but skipping from this point in the article to a rundown of New York Yankees team history would leave all of you unsatisfied (at least a little bit.) If you have a great idea that just doesn’t fit into the current scheme, file it away in another cubbyhole and draw from it on another project.
This leads me to my last point: brevity. (I warn you, some people will not like the content of this paragraph.) Now, please don’t confuse this with censorship or poor quality, I’m not trying to tell anyone to write a three-page paper on the Civil Rights Movement. However, brevity is sometimes overlooked when it comes to artistic media, and with myself often from pursuit of “perfection.” If you don’t like it and can’t figure out how to improve it, then maybe it’s finished and you just don’t like it. Someone else will. Don’t make the mistake of spending too much valuable time on a piece that “isn’t right” because overall, most of those pieces stay that way-“not right” and unfinished. In my opinion, it is better to have a finished sculpture of Quasimodo than a sculpture of Esmerelda with only half a face. It is a difficult ideal to follow all the time, but one that shouldn’t be completely ignored.
Another important component is conciseness. Whatever you are working on needs to be what it is, and nothing more. In this article-written purely for self-inspiration to get something done-I don’t need to give imperious accounts of how Hunter S. Thompson wrote remarkable volumes of work while high on a dozen different drugs. It works against me to list “the top ten best writer’s working environments: 1) India, 2) Zion National Park, 3) Inside of a frog…” None of that matters. What matters to me is finishing this little exposition and thereby giving myself a sense of accomplishment and hopefully some useful advice to work on other stuff that is being ignored.
So, to be all fifth-grade-ish: summation!
1) Pack all your ideas away inside your head (write down what you think you’ll forget.)
2) Clear your mind, body, and physical location of everything that is remotely any fun at all.
3) Pick one thing to do and carry it through to a rocky, ugly termination.
4) Revise, coagulate, and end appropriately.
5) Repeat all these steps on the next project and maybe you can finally get some shit done.
so uh, nothing else going on really. the weather is really nice out, so I'm gonna try to go biking regularly, starting tomorrow. exercising sucks so I have to try to mask it as something fun even though deep down I know it isn't, hahah. ok done.
(for the record, this is all my own opinion, not to be followed or observed as actually tested out or anything. I'm just glad I finally finished writing something that wasn't being graded tomorrow morning...)
Tips to Improve Focus and Get Shit Done!
Let me first preface this by saying that I am not the person to write this article. My personal methodology for work is to do as much as I can possibly do in quick, two-minute bursts throughout the day, leaving behind countless hours of distraction and tomfoolery. Even now, I sit here staring around at objects on my desk: a bottle of water I desperately need to drink, a roll of tape that is three inches from being gone, an incredibly ugly lamp, a box full of ammunition waiting to be shot up and replaced, and a stack of Type O Negative CD’s to be listened to intently and re-organized in the collection later on (RIP Peter Steele.) Yes, I organize my CD’s, another part of my weird methodology of chaos.
While writing this, I should also point out that there is a constant flow of editing happening concurrently with the writing. There are words that I am obsessing over as I type that must, must be changed soon. “Methodology” has been used twice. “Tomfoolery” sounds incredibly stupid. And there, “incredibly” appears for the second time and should be edited out. (For the record, I would have changed the first occurrence of it to “unbelievably ugly lamp”.)
This is the way that my life revolves, around an immense amount of information that is useful in small pieces but overwhelming as a point of focus. There are thousands of bits of ideas and memories and opinions bursting from every seam of my brain, and each of them is totally unusable in their current state. What I need is a storage facility in my head, where I can take all of those thoughts and channel them into different cerebral cubbyholes to be drawn from later. Then, at my mental refinery, I will take one flawed, fuzzy idea-blob at a time, trim the irrelevancies, build up its strength, and polish it to crystal clarity. One big problem with that is, I have no mental refinery. Another big problem is that a very small percentage of my ideas actually involve any kind of conclusive material. Everything in my head asks, “what if?” and is generally answered by static. Even this article that I am writing has no point. It was born of the phrase, “my brain is bursting” and evolved from there into a rambling, loquacious mind-dump.
At this point in the process (and believe me, this point is very familiar,) I usually give up, go surf the net and tell myself that I can figure out the details later. The point of a story is a very big detail. So here I am constructing my mental refinery, where I can melt everything down and come out with gold. Or maybe uranium.
The first step in the refining process is to determine what material you are working with. (If you say “nothing,” then you are working with a blank canvass that can be distorted, stressed, and beaten into submission, and you will be expected to do at least that much.) If your material is physical, such as painting or metalwork or grand theft auto, consider yourself fortunate! These media yield immediate and tangible results that will no doubt provide endless frustration and five to ten. If you are a leather worker, immediately stop reading this article, go to your local goodwill, find the cheapest, ugliest 1970’s-era leather jacket in the place and get to work. Revive that monster and let the tortured bovine soul finally rest peacefully. Then, continue with the article. The same advice goes for the rest of you skilled with physical media.
For those people whose talents are less material-based, such as writing, psychic powers, or general human interaction, determining what your material is can be a little more difficult. Much in the same way that an artist discovers he is gifted with paints, but not with chalk, your specialties must be developed through trial and error. If your passion is to write a mystery novel, but the test audience giggles the whole way through reading the first draft, put a comedic edge into your writing. If you can’t walk through walls, but walking into walls gives you visions of the future, well you get the gist.
I heard someone in the back with a comment, “but I enjoy doing lots of stuff! How can I pick just one?” The answer is simple: pick just one. There, easy as can be. The question that you should be asking is, “how can I finish the just-one that I started ten years ago?” Good luck with that! I mean, that leads us to the next stage in our process.
Sorry, I had to catch the weather. Did you know that in Arizona, it is legal to carry a concealed weapon into a bar? Oh that reminds me, I was going to show you this video my niece texted me, it’s a bunch of dancing llamas, hilarious! Boy I’m hungry, Panda Express really sounds good right now. Wait, weren’t we talking about something?
This concludes our role-playing session, let’s have a round of applause for me! The only person in the skit. In order to refine your work, you need to clear out the rest of the distracting elements in your area. This is very difficult, because we love all our distracting stuff. We love food and texting and phone calls and email, we love hiking and biking and playing with our dogs. All of these things are wonderful, important parts of our lives, but if you have trouble with focus, those things will always-always-be agents of non-productivity. Put your phone in the car, lock your dog in the bathroom, disconnect your wireless card, and coagulate your body in front of your medium. Staple your brush to your hand, weld your torch to your prosthetic arm, and go until your first iteration is finished.
“Concentrate” means “to make denser, stronger, purer” according to Google’s web definitions. It also means to centralize, to digest, and to direct one’s attention to something. I like the word coagulate, because it gives me a stronger sense of what I am producing. To coagulate thoughts into art means to take all of the particles of the same idea, clump them into one group, and then pound on them until they become a homogeneous whole. Whether that whole is an article, a piece of music, or Ayn Rand’s personal contribution to Hell, it must agree with itself, and that agreement comes from revision. Taking that first iteration and chipping it down, adding support where necessary, and blending it until it is concrete. You are in control of what determines agreement, but skipping from this point in the article to a rundown of New York Yankees team history would leave all of you unsatisfied (at least a little bit.) If you have a great idea that just doesn’t fit into the current scheme, file it away in another cubbyhole and draw from it on another project.
This leads me to my last point: brevity. (I warn you, some people will not like the content of this paragraph.) Now, please don’t confuse this with censorship or poor quality, I’m not trying to tell anyone to write a three-page paper on the Civil Rights Movement. However, brevity is sometimes overlooked when it comes to artistic media, and with myself often from pursuit of “perfection.” If you don’t like it and can’t figure out how to improve it, then maybe it’s finished and you just don’t like it. Someone else will. Don’t make the mistake of spending too much valuable time on a piece that “isn’t right” because overall, most of those pieces stay that way-“not right” and unfinished. In my opinion, it is better to have a finished sculpture of Quasimodo than a sculpture of Esmerelda with only half a face. It is a difficult ideal to follow all the time, but one that shouldn’t be completely ignored.
Another important component is conciseness. Whatever you are working on needs to be what it is, and nothing more. In this article-written purely for self-inspiration to get something done-I don’t need to give imperious accounts of how Hunter S. Thompson wrote remarkable volumes of work while high on a dozen different drugs. It works against me to list “the top ten best writer’s working environments: 1) India, 2) Zion National Park, 3) Inside of a frog…” None of that matters. What matters to me is finishing this little exposition and thereby giving myself a sense of accomplishment and hopefully some useful advice to work on other stuff that is being ignored.
So, to be all fifth-grade-ish: summation!
1) Pack all your ideas away inside your head (write down what you think you’ll forget.)
2) Clear your mind, body, and physical location of everything that is remotely any fun at all.
3) Pick one thing to do and carry it through to a rocky, ugly termination.
4) Revise, coagulate, and end appropriately.
5) Repeat all these steps on the next project and maybe you can finally get some shit done.
so uh, nothing else going on really. the weather is really nice out, so I'm gonna try to go biking regularly, starting tomorrow. exercising sucks so I have to try to mask it as something fun even though deep down I know it isn't, hahah. ok done.