I had a moment last night when I did this at my desk (evaluate my situation), and the first thought I had was “obviously I should clean up my desk,” and the second thought was “nah that’s so much work though,” and the third thought was “let’s do a little bit of it for funsies anyway?” — and within a couple of minutes I had a mostly-clean desk and substantially more peace of mind. Which reminds me: people often disagree about the relationship between a messy workplace and a productive mind. I actually think it’s quite possible to have a coherent model where everybody’s perspective can fit.
- there are different stages of work which benefit from different sensory environments. I noticed these differences within my own process when working on my last book: early stage drafting felt like a noisy, messy mining process best done with Led Zeppelin blasting on the speakers. Final stage editing felt like intricate jewel-setting work, best done in a quiet clean room in something like a hazmat suit.
- there are productive messes and unproductive messes. the difference i think boils down to something like clarity of intentions. a useful mess is one where you at least roughly know where everything is, and the presence of different elements has a cross-pollination effect. I almost said “cross-contamination”, which is an interesting ‘negative affect’ version of the thing.
« ARRANGEMENTS: I’ve been thinking a lot about arrangement recently. the arrangement of objects, of ideas, of anything. when I used to work in content marketing, a fond memory I have is of how me and a colleague would collaborate to create infographics (which were really popular around 2013-2015 or so). We were determined to make good ones. One of the ways we would do this is look for good extensive lists of quotes on some topic, and then I would spend some time sorting the quotes into categories. So something like “how to do blog promotion” might have 30+ quotes, and I would try to assemble them into about 7 main themes. Then I’d try to organize the themes to have a coherent narrative from start to finish. I similarly enjoyed this work when working on my book Introspect, where I tried to synthesize everything I’ve ever read and learned in the self-help genre, isolating what I’ve found personally helpful, and then assembling them into a coherent narrative.
In the past 2 years or so since shipping Introspect, I’ve felt rather unmoored, listless, fragmented. I’ve come up with hundreds of fragments of drafts, but I’ve not yet found an organizing principle that’s really satisfying to me. I believe that when I do, I will suddenly seem much more productive as a writer, publishing at a much higher cadence than I’ve managed these past 2 years. I’ve had fleeting glimpses of some visions which have not yet manifested. I trust that it’ll happen eventually, but I’ve been getting increasingly flustered at not feeling much sense of progress. It’s hard to really know which internal reports are correct and which are misunderstandings or wishful thinking.
I have a bunch of different ideas about what approaches I could take in order to try to solve this puzzle. Restated, the puzzle is: I’m trying to find a way to rearrange my stuff in a way that feels resonant. One idea that was funny and appealing to me recently was to do an “all-hands meeting” with myself. »
« RELIEF: (condense into 2 sentences?) I’ve been conflicted and knotted about many things in many ways for some time now, which makes it difficult for me to get very much done. Most of my efforts go towards caring for my child. I have been playing a lot of Witcher 3 while he naps on me. A part of me would like to write something nice and comprehensive about the game, but I can’t seem to muster the energy for it.
I don’t want this substack to be about the interior experience of my creative struggles all the time. There are other things I want to write about. But I find it challenging to go on some of my nerdposting expeditions when I feel like some of my basic needs aren’t met. If someone needed to pee really badly, it doesn’t make much sense to ask “bigger” questions like…»