Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Notebook Geekery — the Special Editions

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

My notebook preferences are deeply entrenched and codified. For example, I use a Leuchtturm1917 (preferably pink and unlined) for drafting and a Leuchtturm1917 Grid Ruled (of alternating colours) as a bullet journal. The colour switch on the journals lets me remember bullet journal “eras” when I’m looking back, while the pink drafting notebook frequently amuses me because I’m generally writing something horror related.

Brainstorming typically happens in project-specific notebooks, usually soft-cover Cahier Moleskins that can be colour-coded to different projects. Pocket notebooks will typically be Field Notes (I’m obsessed) or a Moleskine softcover.

I’m slowly experimenting with larger hardcover moleskins as project-specific brainstorming, especially for series works, as I’m rapidly discovering that certain projects are filling notebooks at a rate of knots. I’ve got three for my PhD novellas, and could well fill another three before I’m done.

All these decisions are largely made so I can quickly scan a row of notebooks on the desk and grab the one I need right now. Rather than looking for notes, I can search for a specific colour and size. It speeds things up.

Recently, I’ve broken ranks with this and started using fancier notebooks for very specific projects that I know will run long-term.

The smaller notebook in the image above, featuring art by Kathleen Jennings and produced for the Brisbane Writers Festival a few years back, is now the repository of frequently-checked-publishing details.

For instance, there’s page devoted to the standard price-points I use for Brain Jar Press so I don’t have to prevaricate about “How much can I charge for this project?” Instead, I just check the length and genre against the grid, and list the price.

There’s another page that breaks down certain price-points based on country. And another where I’m breaking down my editorial workflow, so I can quickly construct a checklist for each project and make sure I’m not skipping a step. The mostrecently filled in pages list the things I need to remember when setting up a cover, and Photoshop tools I’m not yet used to reaching for instinctively.

To put it in blogging terms, it’s evergreen content that I’m going to refer back to for years to come. Ergo, a notebook with cover art and some really nice paper quality, easily distinct from all the others.

The other notebook—picked up cheap a few years back, because JRR Tolkien-style art applied to Game of Thrones amused me—features a similar archive of research notes and key take-aways from my more in-depth research journals. Space where I can do quick reviews of core principles while simultaneously serving as an index if I need to get more in depth with what I learned.

These are the shorts of notes I keep meaning to transfer into digital storage, but there’s never enough time to do that in the day.

The Difference Between Busy & Working

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Back in 2013, I made the decision to stop using the phrase I’m Busy and it’s associated attempt to shut down conversations or engender pity/respect from people who asked I was going.

I did pretty good with it for a while, but words like busy creep back into your vocabulary if you don’t monitor for it. Certainly, this year, it’s back with a vengeance in my conversations, because the alternative often involves uncomfortable conversations about death.

So I went back to I’m busy. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to make other people uncomfortable, or deal with their emotional response as they realised they’d tripped over a livewire. However, after reading Jory Mackay’s recent post over at Fast Company, I suspect there was also a large part of me that needed the validation when other things weren’t going right.

Mackay’s writing on behalf of RescueTime (admittedly, a service I use and adore), so there’s a certain amount of vested interest in getting people to think about their relationship with busyness. It doesn’t, however, mean that he’s wrong, especially when he starts framing the problems of staying busy versus doing your best work.

There’s a paradox when it comes to busyness that goes like this:

Anyone with professional ambition strives to do great work and be recognized for their talent and therefore is in high demand (i.e. busy). However, the more in demand you are (i.e. busy), the harder it is to provide the same quality of work or creative thinking that got you there in the first place.

If being in demand is proof you’re doing a good job, it’s easy to mistake busyness for validation. 

This is why you’re addicted to being busy, Fast Company

So, yeah, it’s an article worth reading, particularly once Mackay starts digging into what the opposite of busy really looks like and the psychological benefits of tunnelling (which aren’t really benefits at all).

When we’re busy running around, answering emails, putting out fires, and racing to back-to-back meetings, time becomes much more scarce. To deal with that scarcity, our brains effectively put on blinders.

Suddenly, we’re not able to look at the big picture and instead can only concentrate on the most immediate (often low-value) tasks in front of us. (Research has even found that we lose 13 IQ points when we’re in a tunneling state!)

However, when we pop our heads above water at the end of the day, we realize that we’ve spent barely any time on the work that really matters. 

This is why you’re addicted to being busy, Fast Company

It’s not a huge surprise that I’ve recognised that feeling lately.

Nor is it a surprise that it’s started to recede now that I’ve set up the big picture whiteboard to guide my weeks, actually thinking through what needs to be done and making decisions long before a scarcity of time and resources kicks in.

Gathering the Threads

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

Over the weekend I sat down and wrote a proper whiteboard for the coming week, logging all the things on my schedule day-by-day and breaking down specific goals into component tasks. It gets to live in front of my desk-top, one of the first things I see when I step out of the bedroom in the morning, and it’s the most in-control of my time I’ve felt in over a year.

I kicked off this process last week, dumping every project that had my attention or needed timelines monitored onto the board in tangled lump:

It’s a useful list for looking forward, but it tends to miss a bunch of the stuff that will get me from here to somewhere over there when I’m done with all that. Mostly, I put this board together to see how I’d go having the white board on the desk, blocking my access to the desktop (aka my “just here to fuck around” computer) and reminding me there’s a bit list of projects that need my attention.

It went okay, so this week I’ve gone back to a habit that served me real well in the past–a weekly project whiteboard that breaks down all the tasks and tracks my progress throughout the week. Here’s that particular board as it looked before I started working at the desk yesterday:

I’ve ticked a few things off since then, picking up speed on tasks that I’ve been putting off for ages. I’ve done my daily word count on the thesis for the first time in weeks, and cleared my fiction quota for the day. I’ve also surged ahead–this week’s blogging is now done, with the exception of the Sunday Circle, and a full draft of my weekly newsletter is finished up. This gives me more time to spend on other tasks, or a chance to clock up a bit of a lead.

Either way, I’m well ahead of where I expected to be on the tail end of a Monday, and I’m remembering just how useful it was to have a white board prominently displayed with all this on it.

At the same time, I’m also logging things that either need more detail than a single check-point, or should be added because they’ll fall off the radar. Story development needed a few extra steps beyond the brain dump section I’d listed under “Short Fiction Lab,” which is where there’s a longer section of it with regards to the novella I’m planning on getting back to next week. Brain dumping remains an important first step, but there’s an entire development process that follows drawing steps from Damon Suede’s Verbalize, helping me get a handle on the kind of story I’m planning on telling and how I might generate conflict.

The goal with these boards has always been separating out the doing of a thing from the process of making the decisions about how to do it. To put concrete steps behind vague goals, and hard edges on things that would otherwise involve making decision about how long to spend working on something.

It’s one of the reasons that reading finds their way on there, tracking the number of pages I need to read per day in order to finish two books a week. It’s a level of detail that some people find abhorrent, but for me, it’s a reminder that a) reading is important and good for my overall mental health; and b) I need to prioritise approximately 70 or 80 pages of reading time per day.

In this respect, the whiteboard is equal parts a statement of intent–this is where I’ll spend my time this week–and tool for ensuring that all the moving parts of writing and publishing work are getting the attention I want them to have.