New artwork: Where Can I Turn for Peace?
On this one I tried a new texturing technique which I’ll explain later, once I’ve used it on a few more pieces.
Blog
Beats
No, not the headphones. Or plotting. Less exciting than either, it’s a new productivity technique I’ve been using lately and oh my goodness it works well (for me).
Let’s rewind. My problem has been that I work on projects in several different areas (writing, art, coding, design, etc.) and would like to make progress across all of them, but in my mortal frailty I instead tend to spend most of my available project time on whatever is easiest.
A while back I read Andy Matuschak’s reflections on 2020. The “Executing alone” section talks about the costs of context switching, which gave me the idea to spend a week at a time working in any one area (or track, as I called them). A week on writing, a week on art, etc. Advantage: much less context switching than I’m used to. But it also meant long stretches of time between tracks (depending on how I rotated through the tracks), which wasn’t so great.
Next attempt: slicing time into days instead of weeks. I created a new calendar in Google Calendar to track my daily track assignments — one day for art, the next for writing, the next for working on tooling, etc. I also opted to give myself some flexibility to work on a track for more than one day in a row if I was on a roll. Better, definitely. But it didn’t stick. I don’t know why.
Finally, at long last, I found the right thing for me: the beat. The way I’m using it, it’s a flexible unit of time ranging from a minute or two up to however long is needed (so far ten or fifteen minutes). Even with a busy schedule, I almost always have a handful of free beats scattered throughout the day where I could get something small done — a next action, usually.
That’s all well and good, but the part that changed things for me was this: when I have an available beat, rather than having to decide in that moment what to work on, instead I just press a button. It’s a random decision. And it’s amazing (for me).
To get this working, I set up a list (in the iOS Shortcuts app) that has each thing I want to work on. The projects or tracks I want to work on more often are duplicated, so it ends up looking something like this (heavily redacted, ha):
- Writing — project 1
- Writing — project 1
- Writing — project 1
- Writing — project 2
- Writing — project 2
- Writing — project 3
- Art
- Art
- etc.
The shortcut then uses a Get Random Item from List action followed by Show alert: Item from List. Super simple, took about thirty seconds to put together. I have it set up as a widget on my phone and as a complication on my watch, and I find that I use the latter the most by far.
I’m not sure why this works so well for my brain, but moving the choice out of my present and into my past (where I can prioritize better) has worked wonders — most notably for me, I’ve gotten unstuck on several projects I’d been avoiding for months.
Anyway, I have no idea whether it would work for other people, so if you try it out, let me know how it goes.
New artwork: New and Everlasting II and New and Everlasting III, a matching set.
New artwork: That Same Sociality.
I’m finding, by the way, that Cirque continues to come in handy. Planning to get back to working on it sometime.
Links #37
Trying out a new format with these link bundles, in the hope that dropping the bulleted list format is a) more flexible and b) more conducive to writing a bit more about the links, rather than limiting myself to a single line with an awkward semicolon shoved in if I need more room.
Andy Bell on recent/upcoming CSS changes. Good stuff here. I’m probably most looking forward to using :is and clamp() and ch (all of which I’d read about before but had mostly forgotten). Oh, and scroll-margin-top.
Design Engineering Handbook by Natalya Shelburne et al., a free ebook which looks interesting. (I’ve read part of the first chapter so far.) Design Better (which appears to be an InVision thing) has other free books available as well, on various design-related topics.
Max Koehler on continuous typography. Also see his post about the tool and the tool itself. This is great, and I hope these ideas get broader traction. (Also, I’m excited to start using Source Serif 4 and its optical sizing axis.)
Aleksey Kladov on including an ARCHITECTURE.md file. Great idea. Having a high-level overview is so helpful.
Graydon Hoare on always betting on text. I’ve probably linked to this before, but it’s good and worth rereading occasionally.
New artwork: Salt of the Earth.
New artwork: Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me.
Release bundles reburied
The release bundle idea did not age well. It may be the right idea somewhere down the road, but this past week and a half it stifled my projects more than it helped. Putting it on the backburner for now.
Links #36
- Hillel Wayne’s series on whether software engineering is really engineering — loved this; it’s something I’ve thought about often, and I love reading about other engineering fields
- Hillel Wayne again, on the real history behind Vim’s use of hjkl — the history of computing is endlessly fascinating to me
- Melanie Richards on sticky CSS Grid items — good writeup
- Peter Voth’s art — delicious, and by the way I hope at some point to start doing this kind of art
- Jeremy Mikkola on writing readable code — some good ideas here
Release bundles reborn
Starting now, I’m going to batch releases of my art/writing/etc., posting things only at the beginning of each month. I did this back in 2014–2015 for four or five months, and I think it’s a good fit for me again.
Arbitrary reasons for doing it (acknowledging that it would be just as easy to argue convincingly in the other direction):
- To focus more. By not thinking as often about posting work (speaking mainly of art here since that’s primarily what I’ve been doing lately), I’ll hopefully be able to focus more on the work itself and less on its reception.
- To slow down. Being able to release finished work immediately is a magical and wonderful part of the Internet, but I think some detachment can be helpful, giving ample time to assess and reassess the work and to polish it further before finally posting it. (I have regrets. Not many, but I do have some.)
- I don’t know that batching will actually make this happen, but: to work more on somewhat larger projects that take more time. My current working theory, however, is that immediate release cycles encourage me to optimize toward projects I can finish as quickly as possible. The experiment is to see if slowing the release cycle down makes an actual difference there or not. It may not. I may just be lazy and ill-suited for large projects.
- To write more blog posts that aren’t just release posts. Or, failing that, to at least make the blog feel less like a neverending train of releases and navel-gazing meta posts. (I do believe I’m yearning for the old days, when I wrote “real” posts. We’ll see if the essayist in me still lives.)
Rules I’m arbitrarily giving myself in this experiment, and other tacked-on miscellaneous thoughts that I didn’t want to start a new list for:
- I’ll post each bundle on the first day of each month, or the second day if the first is a Sunday. (I’m calling these batches “release bundles,” by the way.)
- A project has to have been finished for at least a week before I can release it — so anything finished during the last week of the month will go out a month later.
- There’s no set end date for now. If it works well, I’ll hopefully keep doing it for a long time. If it inhibits the old creativity, I’ll stop.
- I’m not sure yet whether I’ll write about in-progress projects during the month. Lately I’ve found myself harboring some misgivings about working in public, or at least some parts of it, and I need to soul search and figure out what I’m comfortable with and what makes the most sense for me and my introvert self.
Here we go. Next releases will be on March 1.