Unstructured

A friend recently forwarded an article (blog post) over to me that deals with the productivity transition from a 40-hour-a-week job to freelance (which in my case is unemployment). The author focuses on how having rituals and structure can lead to more creativity, but what I got out of the piece was the importance of structure in productivity and efficiency.

It's an issue that I've dealt with in the past and that I see happening both to myself and people around me. When you have an entire day to get a few things done, it's a lot easier to procrastinate or bum around the house, put it off and think, "I have time, I can do it later." I've noticed this tendency with myself on weekends where I have no plans or weeks where there's nothing going on. It feels a lot easier on Monday night to say, "oh, forgot to run to the store, that's okay, I can go after dinner," then change your mind after dinner and put it off til Tuesday when you also have free time. Compare that to the Monday night where you know that you are busy after dinner and have an urgent obligation on Tuesday. You'll be much more likely to remember to run to the store with that little bit of free time you have.

This is a huge issue to me during this period of unemployment--I always have a list of things that I need to do, but I kept putting things off and putting them off because hey, it's not like I'm in a hurry. I have no job pending, I can totally sit around and watch three hours of What Not To Wear while my room's a disaster, I haven't made any necessary phone calls, and my resume sits there unfinished. I let emails pile up, I forget to respond to voicemails...it all just gets really bad when I have too much time on my hands.

I know for a fact that i'm more productive when my days are structured. Since I don't have work or events or anything to structure it for me, it's time to start listening to my alarm and creating rituals and habits. (btw I sat down and cleaned my room and put things in the proper place and set up my pc. I feel so productive! hope I can keep it up!)

Worrying

I inherited a terrible habit from my father: worry.

As a child I felt anxious about a lot of things: whether or not I was as smart as I thought myself to be, whether I would pass my classes or ace a test, whether I would ever gather the courage to talk to the cute guy in my English class, what I wanted to study in college and where I wanted to go, whether I would figure out my life before it started, and whether I'm doing things wrong.

I would also worry about things that were outside my control like: what if the other third-graders make fun of my clothes? what will happen in the Middle East (I was a strange middle-schooler)? what if my parents aren't happy ever again? what if my siblings aren't successful in life?

I still worry constantly. What if the job I'm currently in is where I still am in six years? What if I get married young and then regret it? What if I get pregnant and don't want the child? What if I end up living in a terrible neighborhood? What if I change jobs and the new job is worse that the old one? What if I'll never become a writer because I'm just not good enough?

I also still worry about things outside my control. What if my young cousins forget who I am or we grow apart and I don't see them often enough to soothe my guilty conscience? What if I try to become friends with my parents and for one reason or another it doesn't help our relationship? What if I do this move across country and it turns out to have been the wrong decision.

There's the fear of making mistakes, and then there's the fear of others making mistakes.

I had a conversation this evening with my roommate about worry and our relationships to others when we are trying to give them advice or guide them or teach them from our mistakes. She does it with her teenage sisters, hoping to keep them from making the same mistakes that she did as a young adult. I reminded her that the best thing she can do for them is to be a role model to them, not offer unsolicited advice except in the most non-judgmental way, and to listen listen listen to them, treat them like equals and not children, and allow them to come to you with their mistakes, their concerns, and their problems so that they can feel that there is a non-parent in their life who cares about them enough to want to see them succeed.

Of course, I finished telling her my feelings on things, and I immediately wondered what the hell I'm doing with my brother. He's becoming independent and finding his way in life and here I am in the same boat as my parents and aunt feeling like I need to do all I can to guide him and ensure that he doesn't sink. It's the worry that I feel, and I wouldn't say that it's misplace, but it's misguided. Yes, I should worry about him as much as I worry about everyone else, but no, I can't change the course of his life just by giving him unsolicited advice that encourages him to do things the way I did (or wish I did). He will need to learn on his own how he wants to live his life and if he makes mistakes on the way, better to learn now than later. By worrying and guiding and helping for the past two years (the guiding didn't affect much), all I've done is ensure that I will be more worried that I was in the first place because now I feel like my interference was a key to his success, when really all it may have done was hinder it. At least hinder independence.

I'm probably rambling, I don't even have my contacts in. But this is something that has been bothering me for a while--I spent so much energy worrying about other people that I would displace well-founded worry about my own life and situation.

Being Alone

For the past few days I've been mulling over the wisdom of Louis CK on Conan O'Brien's show last week. To sum up this point, he believes that smartphones help people to never be alone, and thus suppress extreme emotions like sadness and happiness. It's an interesting take on the problem that most of us acknowledge, that of the attention that the smartphone demands. I can't count how many times I've been in a waiting room, a cafeteria, or just people-watching and see people in social situations with their face buried in their phones. Now, it's unfair to say that they just can't be bored for a moment as you can never tell exactly what they're doing. I often write on my phone's notepad, some people play games, some read books, and others text sixty people in the hopes that one will respond and give them someone to talk to.

I felt punched in the gut when Louis CK explained the feeling that he gets sometimes of feeling utterly alone and the immediate reaction of grabbing the phone to text, tweet, or facebook your feelings to the world. It really is a fear of being alone, a fear of being no one's judgments or expectations or relation, it's being that person that you are when you are completely alone.

Not an hour after starting to ponder these rather existential questions, I went to lunch and sat in my car afterwards, staring at the trees. I felt a pang of sadness, of loneliness, and I had a thought about the weather or something that I want to do next month. Immediately I reached for my phone....and stopped.

I don't find it that hard to be away from my phone. I often lose it in my room or forget it in my purse and while there's sometimes a moment of panic if I want the security that it offers or I realize I didn't have it when I thought I did, but I rarely go back for it. But I know the exact feeling of being cut-off from everyone, from feeling utterly alone.

I used to get that feeling when I would sign-off of instant messenger when I was in high school. It would be evening and I'd be chatting with someone (sometimes of little consequence, it was just a fun distraction), then have to log off in order to go finish homework or go to bed, and the second that I clicked the button to log off, even if I was going to continue to sit on the computer working on something, I would get this intense feeling of loneliness. I was alone in the room with a piece of machinery, unwillingly and uncomfortably alone with just me, a person that I often hated.

Since then, I've lost that feeling and now I revel in the time that I spend on my own and away from technology. Logging off means I get to be alone, not have to be alone.

I think Louis CK hit things on the head--it's fear, fear of being alone, fear of being just a person, no more and no less.

Perfectionism

The other day I read a very excellent article on how to overcome perfectionism in your creative pursuits; the key is to learn to accept less than perfect results. Sounds pretty easy. I'll be focusing on writing simply because that is what I like and understand.

I'm a fan of the suggestions, that is, giving yourself a handicap (extreme time constraints, unusual criteria, or a more tangible handicap) when producing your work, which will help you to appreciate what you produce under these circumstances.

You want to hold yourself to much lower standards in order to push yourself to actually follow through with your creative endeavors.  It doesn't matter if it's bad, nobody (including yourself) is expecting perfection from you under these circumstances. - Mark Mahoney

This reminds me of National Novel Writing Month* (NaNo) which encourages the goal of producing a 50,000 word novel in only 30 days. I've participated for the past three years, mostly willingly, though it's slowly becoming more of a ritual. For most people, it's a large goal set within a small time constraint, and one of the most commonly heard suggestions to reach your goal is to write without editing, which is something that lots of people find very difficult.

It can be hard to see yourself as a writer of a specific caliber and then for 30 days produce work that feels so far below your usual standard that your first inclination upon finishing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is to throw the whole thing away and never do it again.

It's the same as the feeling that I get when I try out a recipe I'm really excited about (like double chocolate m&m cookies) and enjoy everything about the process, then get to the very end, pull the cookies out and they're nothing like what I was expecting. They're misshapen and crumbly, not at all like the gooey, chewy, shiny cookies in the picture on the recipe. They don't even live up to the taste expectation, and I find that I can't eat more than half due to extreme disappointment. I end up leaving them in the kitchen for my roommates or taking them into work (if they're not embarrassingly bad).

Same with writing, but as there's less need to share, it's much easier to hide away writing that you hate and ensure it never sees the light of day. I have three half-written first-draft NaNovels on my hard drive, and only four people have seen them because I'm so embarrassed by the hastily constructed metaphors, overly flowery description (hey, I was trying to hit my daily word counts and needed to come up with something), meandering plots, and weak characters.

But...

But the goal of NaNo is to get you, as a writer, to finish your goddamned project. That's the first step. Finish a first draft, take a break, then rework your plot, rework your characters, rework your story, and write the second draft. Not everyone does things this way, but it allows you a second chance to tackle that imperfect draft you tossed aside at the end of November.

Maybe that's the way to quell that terrible perfectionism: constant improvement.

*National Novel Writing Month takes place in November, and more information can be found here. I highly recommend the challenge--you might go insane, but it's a ton of fun.

Routine

I've noticed in the past week that my body is starting to get onto a schedule. I have an alarm set every morning at 7:30 am, and while this has been a standing alarm for the past year or so, my body is finally starting to adapt to it. Rather than hitting snooze and rolling over, I've started feeling more awake when the alarm goes off, and the few times that I've rolled over and wanted to go back to bed, my body won't let me. This morning I woke up four minutes before the alarm was set to go off. This used to happen back when I was in high school and had a set wake-up time every day, but the weekends would always throw everything off.

My mind is developing an evening routine as well, partially due to the fact that I have a standing order to produce a blog post daily and wish to do so before I go to bed, and partially because I've (surprise surprise) been able to keep my promise to myself that I'd accept the challenge and do just that, no matter how stupid or incoherent the post.

What's really weird, is that feeling my body and mind fall into a routine is one of the most freeing feelings I've had in a long time. For the past three years of adulthood, I've blundered along, making lots of mistakes and just barely learning from them. One of those mistakes, I found, was allowing myself to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. If I told myself I wanted to get up early to make breakfast, the next morning I would have no qualms hitting snooze 47 times then rolling out of bed and rushing to get to work on time. If I told myself that I would definitely be finishing a particular project by Friday, I had no problem letting the deadline past and deciding that since it was already too late, I might as well do something else.

Lazy-me didn't hold myself accountable to not-lazy-me. It was frustrating, because as months passed, seasons passed, and holidays passed, I realized that the project I'd thought about 8 months ago could be nearly complete if I'd started immediately and held myself accountable to my vision. Instead, I wasted my time away. I wasted three years away.

I feel like I've been asleep, or at least in a fog. It sounds stupid, but things seem to be finally falling into place for me.

I should beat lazy-me with a crow-bar.

The Negative Side of Negativity

Everyone complains.

I caught myself complaining about difficulty I was having with a project at work by saying that the day was terrible and the project was terrible and everything was going wrong. After I'd made my case, I realized that it wasn't just the frustration talking. Actually, I quite enjoy a challenge, and I'd only become upset with my inability to solve the problem quickly. I wasn't having a bad day, but I was in the habit of having bad days, and framed my current complaint in that same language. All in all, I'd actually had quite a good day, all things considered, but I wasn't used to looking on thinking of my day that way.

I'd fallen into the habit of complaining.

But I'm not that far gone. My preferred adjective of choice is awesome, and I'm a big fan of happy emoticons, particularly ones that seem to confuse other people :_D <@:_D

I have a couple friends who have fallen into the habit of complaining to such an extreme that I cannot remember the last time that I heard a positive (non-sarcastic) word from them.

Blind optimism can be as annoying as perpetual pessimism, but it's striking how much your approach to life can influence your mood and the way you relate to others.

Probably the saddest story that I know is the way my Grandmother cannot go five minutes without criticizing or complaining about someone or something. I can't count the number of times that I've gone to a restaurant with her only for her to ask to be moved because the vent is blowing on her (this happens every time without fail), or hear how the hostess sat us too close to the kitchen, etc. I once watched her loudly berate her 92 year old husband for improperly recalling his own age.

I complain a good deal. But I recognize the pessimism within myself, and I strive to overcome it. The positives in life are everywhere, and I never want to be too blind to see them.

Adding yet another potentially unhealthy habit

If I decide I want to fix a habit, there are numerous places I can start. I can stop biting my fingernails, thus depriving myself of germs and satisfaction that my brain so desperately craves. I can stop procrastinating, reading useless articles on the internet and taking inane quizzes about whether I am truly an introvert or have an anxiety disorder (do I??). I can stop using internet speak when I talk to specific friends, which just looks strange amid manicured and correctly capitalized and punctuated sentences.

HOWEVER

It is paramount that rather than dwelling on the negative in my life, I begin introducing positive. Those same evenings that I lurk on Reddit or skim internet forums, in the back of my mind I know that I ought to be writing. Three years ago I told myself that I would start writing a novel a quarter, or a short story a month, or a flash fiction piece a week, or even a couple sentences a day. For three years, I failed to convince myself to follow through, and all I have to show for it now are a couple unfinished (and restarted) novels, portions of short stories, multiple scenes without context, and a number of languishing story ideas that cry in the corners of my Google Drive and look up expectantly when I open my idea file and throw another half-baked on in there to waste away with the rest. 

For the next month (that is, 30 days) intend to start fresh, and commit to writing 10 minutes of fiction a day. That's every day, including weekends. I've had the hardest time committing myself to a routine habit, even one as mundane as writing daily. I'll spend weekend days lounging around in bed, watching five movies, going out to eat, and half-heartedly attending parties. But there's no excuse--10 minutes a day is nothing. I probably spend that much time preparing for bed (on the days I don't pass out in my clothes).

So that's it. Write fiction for 10 minutes a day. Let's see if I can do it.