Category: Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

I spent the dying days of 2020 making lists of habits I’d like to establish (or, in most cases, re-establish in the wake of 2020’s unpredictable daily routines). Stuff like I’d like to start blogging everyday, and maybe turn the blog into a monthly zine or chapbook’s worth of content or post a free short story to every month or release 52 chapbooks over the course of the year. All of them fell victim to my inability to pull the trigger on a year-long commitment, and thus risk the body-blows to my ego. Because they were all ego projects, to some extent or another. Attempts to stay in contact with my self-perception as someone who writes as my plans for 2021 looked increasingly focused on editorial tasks. 365 days is a daunting timespan, just as 100,000 words is a daunting amount of words to write if you’ve never written a novel. There’s always the danger that ambition outstrips ability, that

It’s New Year’s Day here in Brisbane. January 1st, 2021. The hell year of 2020 is in the rear view, and the coming year is shiny and new and only a little splattered by the ongoing shit it inherited from the previous 365 days. I woke up this morning, wrote three pages, then spent an hour walking around the neighbourhood to check out the damage New Year’s wrought. Here, in my neck of the woods, it’s mostly roadside vomiting and evidence of some kind of car accident at the intersection near my house. More than I expected, as we seemed to be taking things quietly last night, but nowhere near the New Year’s record. Once home, I made a coffee and fired up a fresh logbook for the year. I picked up the logbook habit from Austin Kleon, who advocates for the practice on his blog and in his book Steal Like An Artist. The process is basically what it

Earlier this week I launched a Now Page, based on an idea put forward by Derek Sivers about including pages about what you’re focused on right now alongside the customary About and Contact pages. Most websites have a link that says “about”. It goes to a page that tells you something about the background of this person or business. For short, people just call it an “about page”. Most websites have a link that says “contact”. It goes to a page that tells you how to contact this person or business. For short, people just call it a “contact page”. So a website with a link that says “now” goes to a page that tells you what this person is focused on at this point in their life. For short, we call it a “now page”. from about NowNowNow.com I first came across the idea on Warren Ellis’ blog, where he plumbed the flaws of the concept; namely, if you want it

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

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

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)

I was catching up on twitter and noticed my friend Kate Cuthbert posting about Romance at MWF. It’s…rather good news: I HAVE HAD TO BE QUIET ABOUT THIS FOR MONTHS. IT HAS BEEN SO HARD!! I’m so so so happy that A Day of Romance is now out for the public! Come and see the devastatingly talented writers talk frankly and intelligently about writing about love at #MWF19 I CAN’T WAIT. ❤️❤️❤️ pic.twitter.com/8lTYXQEhRt — Kate Cuthbert 📚 (@katydidinoz) July 10, 2019 For those who can’t see the image in the quoted tweet, it features a shot of the Day of Romance program that looks something like this: And, oh god, that looks good. It’s the 8th of September, and you can grab the full details for each event over on the Melbourne Writers Festival website, and it’s a rather spectacular program in terms of content and talent. I’m frankly jealous of all the folks in Melbourne who get to go

We cleaned the apartment last weekend, trying to drive a stake through the heart of the debris that had accumulated through the rolling hell that was the month of March. I took this snapshot of my desk prior to tidying it up, capturing the accumulated mass of bags, stacked notebooks, and paperwork that hadn’t been processed. I have a process for cleaning my desk these days–drawn, unsurprisingly, from a quick YouTube bit Marie Kondo put together for a UK magazine back when her book came out. It runs through a five step process: Take a moment to refocus on what the space is used for, and how I’d like it to be used. Pull everything off and group them into Notebooks, Papers, Misc Stationary, and Sentimental Things (Anything that doesn’t fit into those four categories probably doesn’t belong on my desk) Keep the things that help me ‘spark joy,’ which in this context means ‘do my job better’ as much

I started tracking my days in half-hour increments after finishing Laura Vanderkam’s Off the Clock: Feeling Less Busy While Getting More Done. Unlike Vanderkam, I track things old school instead of using an excel document: Every morning I wake up, note the time in my bullet journal, and mark off a series of half-hour increments down the page. Then I fill them in as the day progresses, noting the time spent faffing about on the internet and actually doing work. Noting any major turns in my day, where somethings happen to redirect my attention. Often, noting down word counts achieved or specific things read. It’s not the first time I’e done this–all sorts of productivity advice suggests doing this sort of thing to get a firmer understanding of how you’re actually using time–but those usually suggested doing it for a week. I just hit the end of my first week, and I plan to keep on going this time. What

Joanna Penn’s post about the importance of Creative Routines showed up in my RSS reader this morning. I clicked on it immediately because, right now, my creative routine is basically out the window and there are no hard edges around my process. I scramble after whatever project needs attention most urgently, engaging in long work binges where I’m doing as much as possible to keep all the plates spinning. Here’s the thing: I love my creative routine. I know the value of having hard edges to my work day, and the power of slow, incremental progress on a particular project. I also know how easily this stuff gets derailed because I start focusing on solutions instead of figuring out what problem I’m trying to solve.  In short, I’m falling back on two key fallacies of creative project management: If I’m busy enough, no-one can blame me for things not being great, and repeating the same solution even after it doesn’t work, because obviously

I’ve taken to doing a Friday Status Update here on the blog, recapping where I’m at and what’s going on in various parts of the world, which means that Thursdays are rapidly becoming the day when I review projects and make decisions about the coming week.  I started today by doing a brain dump of all the projects that are occupying my attention at the moment–essentially, the things on my to-do list that are proving sticky, nagging at my attention because I don’t feel adequately in-control or like they’re advancing. The short-list runs something like this: Write my conference paper Prepare for mid-candidature review on my thesis Produce at least two more thesis novella drafts Finalise the current thesis novella draft Write four more thesis chapters Finish Warhol Sleeping Tidy my desk (still a force of chaos) Update the old CGW products (particularly the two books that are at the short-burst-of-busy-work stage) Finish my plan for the the next non-fiction

A few years back, after I first installed RescueTime, I got it into my head to reduce the amount of time I was spending on Facebook and Twitter.   Lots of people decide to do this, but it rarely exceeds. For one thing, social media companies excel at luring you in. It’s easy to use them to fill the blank times, the little moments where there’s a break in your attention and you’re looking for distraction. For another, ‘doing less’ of something is one of those vague definitions of success. How much less do you want? How do you gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, beyond trusting your gut? I recently had a conversation about this where I realised how important RescueTime actually was in cutting back. The service tracked time I spent on apps or using certain programs, telling me exactly how many hours and minutes I spent on social media every week. I could weigh those hours against the