One thing I often tend to forget (and really need to remember) is that the first few drafts of something — a painting, a story, whatever it is — are usually imperfect, and that that’s okay. I forget that and get discouraged and give up, but I’m fairly certain in hindsight that many of those abandoned projects would have turned out fine if I’d stuck with it and iterated a few more times. (Especially if I had let things sit for a short while and then reviewed the work to figure out the specific things I needed to fix.)
In my interactive systems class, we recently had an assignment to make something with either a laser cutter or a 3D printer. I ended up making a fairly simple pad out of wood on the laser cutter:
The design only took five minutes or so in Illustrator, and I’m fairly happy with how it turned out. (I do think having an engraved area in the middle for the index cards to sit in would help, though.)
Over the past few months I’ve been getting Cal Newport’s newsletter, the focus of which has been largely on deep work (go figure) and the need to block out enough undistracted time to do truly great work.
That’s the ideal situation, of course, but for me — where my creative pursuits aren’t my day job, and where I want to spend time with my wife and kids — I end up having to work mainly with small slivers of time here and there. It’s not perfect, but you can get a surprising amount of work done in small chunks over time.
I find that three of the things that help me be productive in those moments are:
Think. More specifically, I try to spend some of my downtime (shower, walking) thinking about and around and through current projects. This is especially useful in pushing through problem spots. For me, the work goes far more smoothly when I take time to think through things first.
Journal. As a close counterpart to thinking, journaling about projects helps me talk myself through what needs to be done and how to go about it. A month or so ago I started doing a daily brain dump journal entry where I talk to myself about what I’m working on, and it’s been really, really helpful, especially because I now have something external I can look at to remember where I was on a given project (important when I’m not able to work on every project every day) (I tend to work on several projects at a time).
Next actions. One of the main things I took away from David Allen’s GTD methodology, identifying next actions is an integral part of how I work. My available creative time often comes in chunks of two or three minutes, which is just about the right length of time for a concrete next action. My daily journaling has turned into the best time to identify these.
There’s nothing groundbreaking here, of course, but hopefully these are somewhat helpful.
Update on projects: I’m working on a short story. All of my story drafts of late have turned darker than I’d like, so this one is intentionally not dark. Seems to be going better than the others.
I’m also partway through revising my next picture book. This one is a story (as opposed to The Circle Book, which was just a list of random things) and I’m excited. The urge to design a typeface for it has proven too strong to resist, though, so I’m working on that as well. The typeface is called Golly. I’ll post some screenshots soon (I’m almost done with the lowercase letters).
Sidenote on type design: I built Curves (a Python library for designing type, via exporting to UFO and compiling that to OTF) to see whether designing type in code works. Turns out it doesn’t. Even with easy previews (SVG and @font-face), the cognitive gap between the code and the points seems to be a little too much. I have some other ideas for type design tools that seem more promising, though. More on that later.
And I’m slowly working on the remaining reader’s editions (print/PDF of D&C, Pearl of Great Price, and Words of the Prophets).
Current status: in the thick of thesis proposal revisions. (Just finished the first full draft, with the final deadline coming next week, and the plan is I’ll present the proposal mid-December sometime.)
After far too long, the re-typeset print edition of the Book of Mormon reader’s edition is now available. You can download the PDF or purchase a perfect-bound paperback via Lulu.
There’s also a new spiral-bound wide margin edition. It’s basically the reparagraphed text of the reader’s edition in the wide margin style of the study edition.
Despite the fact that they do not look streamlined, a wombat can run at up to 25 miles an hour, and maintain that speed for 90 seconds. The fastest recorded human footspeed was Usain Bolt’s 100m sprint in 2009, in which he hit a speed of 27.8 mph but maintained it for just 1.61 seconds, suggesting that a wombat could readily outrun him. They can also fell a grown man, and have the capacity to attack backwards, crushing a predator against the walls of their dens with the hard cartilage of their rumps. The shattered skulls of foxes have been found in wombat burrows.
The IPCC authors promise that we will see coastal cities swallowed by the sea, global food shortages, and $54 trillion in climate-associated costs as soon as 2040.
On the plus side, we still have about ten years in which we can make changes that would prevent it from happening. Sounds like there’s significant political opposition to those changes, though. Oh, humanity.
Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.
