Getting Organised

Streaking: 7 Days In

PETERMBALL Works in Progress , , ,

StreakingWeek1I’ve written a minimum of 1,402 words every day for the last seven days. There’s nothing special about that. I’ve done it plenty of times before. But I’m noting it, in this instance, because one of my goals for 2014 is to put together a writing streak.

This is predicated on the Seinfeld approach to productivity, where you get a calender and built up a chain of X’s marking the days where you’ve achieved a certain goal. After a while, the Xs accumulate, and the desire to keep from breaking the chain becomes part of your motivation to keep working.

I’m actually using my calendar to track two different streaks. The first half of the cross gets put in when I clear five hundred words for the day – a kind of minimum viable productivity level that’ll keep me in touch with project du jour – while the second half is put in when I clear the 1,600 words I need every day to hit my goals for the year.

Once I break the chain – and lets be honest, I’ll break it eventually – it becomes the goal I chase. I start a new streak the following day and try to build a longer one.

Discovered immediately after writing this post: Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t want credit for the Seinfeld productivity secret.

WRITING STATS FOR 2014

Current 1,400 word Streak: 7 days
Current 500 word Streak: 7 days

Project Du Jour: Exile (Flotsam, Book 1)

Dear Google: Thank You

PETERMBALL Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking , , ,

I try to be pretty sanguine about changes to the tools I use to access the internet. A lot of them are free, for certain values of free that translate to “we make money by getting you to come here and generate data,” which means I’m generally pretty low-key in my responses to, say, Facebook changing the layout of its feed.

Various Google tools have always been the exception to this. For a few years there I worked from a suite of Google apps that pretty much ran my life: Gmail; Reader; iGoogle; GoogleDocs; Calendar; etc. They pretty much let me run my online life like a ninja, filtering everything I wanted to see through a single iGoogle page that was there when I loaded up my computer.

Then the Gmail layout changed, and it bothered me. Fortunately, this was back when I was working for the dreaded day-job where I didn’t actually do anything, so I had the spare time to Google a work-around and put together an interface that more-or-less did what I wanted it to do. Google tools are frequently handy like that – they’re stripped down, but if you take the time, you can pretty much add in the features you’re looking for.

Then the news came down that iGoogle was going away, and that bummed me out a whole lot. That customized home-page was pretty freakin’ sweet, even if the vast majority of the information I got through it was now available on my phone. There were few irritated hours following the update, but I rolled with it.

I pretty much lost my shit when they announced the death of Google Reader through. I soak up a shit-load of information through RSS feeds; they’re one of the most valuable resources I have in both my day-job and my time spent online away from work. It always struck me as surprising when other people didn’t use them, in that what do you mean you *still go to the website to check out updates* kind of way. When I heard Google Reader was going away (via twitter, which is, oddly enough, probably the reason RSS has lost its importance), I got angry for a good long time.

Now, I pretty much want to kiss whoever killed off Google Reader, ’cause the act of having to migrate to a new RSS reader and actually engage with my feeds in an active way has been kinda awesome. I finally got around to organizing my feed into categories, so the stuff I want to read carefully is all segregated off from the stuff I usually breeze through looking for interesting stuff. I’ve added all my work feeds (previously handled by Outlook RSS) into the same reader, since the set-up was easy enough and there’s a lot of cross-over in the stuff I read for work and the stuff I read for home.

It’s not that the current reader is superior to Google – it’s different, but I’m kinda digging the differences – but Reader was one of those tools I’d grown complacent about. My tangle list of feeds had grown in fits and starts, mostly in the days after everyone abandoned livejournal and started blogs instead; I’d always read the feed in exactly the same way, from start to finish, ’cause that’s the way it showed up on my iGoogle page and there wasn’t an impetus to do anything different; I never bothered learning how to use the damn thing beyond the most basic level, because there was never a reason to do so.
It’s easy to get so familiar with one particular aspect of a tool that you forget about it’s other aspects. Kinda how I’d owned a hammer for about six years before I figured out what the claw-thing on the other side of the hammer was used for (really, given how often I hammer stuff, I’m surprised it only took me that long). Being forced to engage with my RSS feeds in a new way has streamlined the process of getting through them considerably – it used to take me about four hours to get through streams of data on a bad day. Now, I can pretty much knock it over in a hour.
I owe someone at Google a thank-you. And an apology for the many bad things I said about them when I first heard the news.

 

 

 

Rain

PETERMBALL Journal

More rain, today, and I do love the rain. Last night I turned off all the lights around nine o’clock, trundled off to bed with Fritz the Laptop, and wrote things while it was deliciously cold and wet and almost rainy. There were houses in the neighborhood who’d lit their wood fires, filling the air with a piney-smokey scent. It was…kinda awesome really. A deeply satisfying end to the evening, and one where I felt utterly justified in finishing my writing stint after hitting the thousand word goal I’d set myself.

Completely satisfying days at the keyboard come along so rarely that I celebrate them when they happen. My default state is…anger, I guess. Desperation. An incessant need to do more. Doing *enough* is a foreign concept. There is never enough, really, just nights where I feel like I’ve reached the outer borders.

This morning I’ve been plugging dates into calendars, marking off deadlines. I’m plugging in things I’d like to go do, writers festivals and gaming conventions and catch-ups with friends, many of which have been floating around my subconscious for months without me ever plugging them into a calendar and figuring out whether I can actually go to them, or I just think I can. I’ve been at it for an hour now, and I’m still nowhere near done.

I’m looking askance at things like, say, the Queensland Poetry Festival, trying to figure how much time I can spend there without utterly blowing the next Flotsam deadline (some, but less than I’d hoped), or whether I can afford to duck off to a second convention this year (nope), or indeed at any point inside the next year (maybe).

I’m looking at the things that need to be fit into the deadline calendar. Projects that…well, projects that I want to start. And projects that I want done. And projects that need to be done, but haven’t actually had to fit in for a while now.

There’s something enormously satisfying about the calendar. It’ll remain satisfying until it all goes wrong.