A leisurely time writing at Needmore Coffee The introduction to this book struck me, but like a lot of Newport’s work the first half is like beating a dead horse from an argument standpoint—because that’s his training as an academic. But the second half is filled with helpful suggestions. The introduction, however, is argumentative gold.… Continue reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgcM8II7L4o Cal Ripken's Many Batting Stances You’re probably like what? What does this have anything to do with writing and being a parent? Cal Ripken and Don Mattingly were my favorite baseball players growing up. What I liked about them is they were dependable, reliable, and highly competent in their jobs. That means they were… Continue reading What Would Cal Ripken Do?
This comes from Essentialism by Greg McKeown. I’m paraphrasing: That when you’re multi focusing you’re trying to focus on two things at the same time and humans are terrible at that. We're not even good at multitasking. I'm probably worse than most. Multi-tasking shallow activities is something we can do. Like we can drive a… Continue reading Do Not Multifocus.
Gerard Way in his home office, thinking thoughts about comics and music. The critical part of all of this is, really, to make use of the time you do have. It’s always changing, so you have to be adaptable. For me, I know making the best use of my time to write is to get… Continue reading How I make the best use of my time.
Noah Hawley's old home office desk from his instagram. This is kind of complicating and it involves how I approach the deep work block and layering in the work I need to do. So the first thing I do is use my Scrapbook for loose ideas, my Journal for outlines and important notes and Word… Continue reading Writing.
What my desk typically looks like when I'm in a deep work block. This means that in my Deep Work block these are the only things I can do: After my morning routine, in which I capture, decide, and organize my day I start a Deep Work Block on whatever I’ve identified as the most… Continue reading How I recognize and eliminate distractions.
Standing desk specs in a notebook from last year. After the morning routine, I decide and organize my day. This one is based on a Charles Soule newsletter on how he schedules activities. In the past, I’ve used his methods to create a framework for My Productivity. It’s like this: 1. Schedule the task: Plan… Continue reading Decide and Organize
I'm a morning person. When I'm knee deep in a project (almost always), I usually wake up around 4am and get to work. But there's a few steps that I take first to make sure I'm ready to get after the work at such an early hour. This is what I do, and it's based… Continue reading The Morning Routine
My Story Board. Cal Newport is probably my work MVP over the course of this last year in A New Bloom. Around New Years last year he wrote about his rooted productivity document. To be more concrete, create a single page document that describes the key productivity rules, habits, and systems (which I’ll summarize as… Continue reading My Storyboard
I’ve written two novels. My starting point philosophy is that it’s a lot like exercise or sports–the more you work out the better you’re going to get, but you have to start small. You have to have a good coach, because the fallacy of the 10,000 hours or 10,000 page thing is that you wrote… Continue reading How to write a Novel: Part 1.
