Tag Archives: productivity

Not Everything’s a Work of Art

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That’s my excuse, anyway. I’ve been wanting to write, but unable to drudge up the “artistic” aesthetic in my last two posts. Still, I suppose a short recap is in order.

Since my return from St. Louis, I have been experimenting with incremental productivity – building habits that lead to positive outcomes. For instance, a little writing each day. A little bit here, a little bit there, and I’ll have a book. That way, as long as I keep going forward, I’ll be ahead of the game in no time. I’d read so much about habits through productivity blogs. I did, in fact, write some stuff and learn to code some stuff. I was sure it was the way to go.

It wasn’t.

I’ve accumulated over 12 hours’ worth of Korean lessons over the past three days as a result of a complete abandonment of my other goals and habits. Sure, maybe I’m doing it wrong. I don’t care – whatever I have been doing has not been producing results. This, however, does.

I am forgetting about habits for now. Maybe they’ll work for me in the future. But for now I’m going to leap into the next adventure. Complete a 68 lesson Korean course in a week? Sure. Next? Who knows? But it will be fun and exciting.

It took me over 6 months to re-learn the fact that I am an adrenaline junkie.

Full Time Brian

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So far, I’ve felt the most productive in my career as an author when I wasn’t writing. Eight hours a day or more, five days a week, a happy buzz, and exactly 0 words written. Clearly, I was doing something wrong, so I began to write every day.

At first it was easy, but my subconscious was working against me. I wrote 8,000 words of drivel a day during National Novel Writing Month 2010, which, though crappy, still set unrealistic expectations. I couldn’t even write 2,000 words a day. I found myself less and less motivated, and the harder I tried and the longer hours I set, the worse it got. The more I forced myself to sit down and write, the worse I failed and the longer I spent contemplating that failure instead of living life – life, the fabric of stories!

I dreaded the act of writing. Meanwhile, the stories and world still came to life in my mind when I daydreamed, which I found myself doing a lot. The story was still alive, but my ability to set it down on paper was in the midst of a slow and painful death, 9-to-5 Monday through Friday.

I came to a few important realizations:

  • If I couldn’t make writing a positive experience, I would not be able to continue. Period. End of stories. End of dream.
  • Time spent daydreaming was productive, but it could not be confined to a 9-5 workday. Nor could I track it, since it happened in my sleep as well.
  • And finally, I read a BoingBoing interview with Ran Prieur that allowed me to give myself some slack. I was, and am still, learning to self-motivate.

“When you quit that, and you have these vast blocks of time where there’s nothing you’re supposed to be doing, people get depressed. What you’re doing during that time is you’re learning to self motivate.”
-Ran Prieur

So the new plan:

  • All writing “counts” as productive writing: dreams, journals, and blogs. I pay myself in karma and kudos.
  • Social motivation is huge. Get my stuff in front of people as soon as possible. I <3 Wise Readers! You'll see stuff soon, I promise.
  • Relax time constraints and do other things. Have more adventures. Have fun. Life sucked as a “full time writer,” so I’m making it a priority to be Brian Kung full-time.

What I forgot was that it’s not about wasting time hammering my head against the clock. It’s about telling stories and having fun doing it. It’s about being a complete person.