I’ve spent the bulk of 2023 mentoring a bunch of young and aspiring writers and publishers. Some of these have come via my personal mentorship offer, but the majority are run via the fine folks as Spectrum Writing, who offer peer support and capacity building mentorships to neurodivergent creatives. On any given week, I’ll run between 4 and 10 mentorship sessions and workshops, across a variety of topics (poetry, self-publishing, genre writing) and trying to meet a variety of needs (help with systems, help with craft, help with marketing, etc).
After spending the bulk of 2021 and 2022 serving writers in jobs that were more admin than hands-on learning, this year’s felt like coming back to what I’m meant to be doing, not least because it’s involved a lot of research into how and why certain things work, and just as much questioning of fundamental assumptions around what writer’s “should” do. It doesn’t quite pay all my bills, but when it’s coupled with writing and publishing, it’s edging up on my minimum viable Ramen number.
One area where I’ve been doing a lot of research revolved around writing and attention disorders, which has been enormously valuable to me personally (not ADD, but it’s surprising how many of the strategies for helping also work really well if you’re anxious). Whole swathes of “default” writing advice are comparatively horrible if you’re not wired for habit formation and your working memory engages differently.
Working with various writers sent me on a re-read of Ryder Carroll’s Bullet Journal Method, re-engaging with smaller intricacies like daily logs. Carroll’s journaling approach is born, in part, of his own experiences with ADD. As he puts it:
I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD). This was back in the 1980s, when mullets were better understood than my condition. The few resources that were available were either too complicated or proscriptive to prove helpful, or didn’t fit my needs. If anything, they salted the wound. Nothing worked the way that my mind worked, so I was left largely to my own dull devices.
The main culprit was my inability to rein in my focus. It wasn’t that I couldn’t focus; I just had a hard time concentrating on the right thing at the right time, on being present. My attention would always dart off to the next bright thing. As I cycled through distractions, my responsibilities steadily piled up until they became overwhelming. I often found myself coming up short or trailing behind. (The Bullet Journal Method: Track Your Past, Order Your Present, Plan Your Future, p. 4).
For Carroll, the bullet journal is a tool for being intentional. By externalising his thinking and to-do list, he makes it easier to juggle what’s necessary and what can be delayed. He can sort what needs to be worked on from what should be worked on, and what he’d prefer to be working on instead. Perhaps he will ignore the necessary in favour of the preference, but he will do so by making a decision instead of falling into it from sheer overwhelm.
I’ve long used White Boards for much the same effect, especially in the old days when I lived alone. I could lodge a massive white board with my weekly/monthly projects and committments in front of the television, and I would have to actively choose to set those aside in order to bingewatch things on Netflix or play computer games. I could track my writing by making little check boxes to mark every 500 words, and reliable predict how much I’d get done.
Sharing a house with my spouse-mouse makes blocking the TV less effective than it once was, and much of my long-term planning has now migrated to journals or project tracking software depending on who I’m working with and what needs to be logged. I make use of large swathes of Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal system, particularly daily logging and migrating to-do lists, manually rewriting all the outstanding tasks and making decisions about what gets moved, what gets deferred, and what doesn’t need to be done.
More recently, I’ve started externalising my daily to-do lists and putting them on a white board right by my desktop. Seperating out the process of figuring what to priorities from the actual process of getting things done. It helps take what could be an overwhelming amount of stuff for one day and turn it into a managable amount of work. It also makes it easier to sieze opportunity — I’m writing this entry in a half-hour gap which showed up because I dropped my spouse-mouse at work early. I could have spent this half-hour scrolling facebook or checking email, but the little reminder to post to Patreon on the “Could Do” part of my list reinded me this could be a better use of the time.
I would have struggled to make the choice that writing a post was important enough to justify using a free half-hour for it, but having made that call a few hours back when charting my priorities for the day, I made it easy to just open the file and write.
