Category: Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

I’m sitting at my desk thinking I should probably write something, but it is a chaotic kind of morning on a chaotic kind of day, and my brain is focusing on everything but the task at hand. I keep projecting into the future, looking at all the things that need to get done in order to finish off any given project. Even when I sit down and apply the various management tasks that are meant to stop you doing that – Getting Things Done, the Pomorodo Technique – I am still projecting forward and the resistance is building up and the subtle, low-key panic of so-much-to-do-and-I-am-not-enough builds up. My conversations with my psychologist often revolve around the fact that my brain is not my friend, and it’s surprising how often they’re the one telling me that despite the fact that get your fucking brain out of the process has been my writing mantra for years. I’m meant to take a

At the start of this year, when everyone was flush with New Year Energy and optimism, I had a bunch of conversations with various peeps about the way I used whiteboards and bullet journals and generally planned my life. At the same time this was happening, I was basically packing in all of those habits and letting them lie fallow for the summer. Not because they were bad habits, but because they were responses to specific situations where conflicting priorities and time-crunch made my natural workflow untenable and inefficient. Basically, once the scholarship kicked in and my thesis was underway, I didn’t need to plan so heavily because a) I rarely needed to be anywhere, b) most of what I was doing was reading things and noodling with ideas, and c) it didn’t matter if I destroyed my sleep schedule by staying awake and working until 5 AM, because it wasn’t like I needed to get up at a specific

I frequently get the shits with antidepressant medication and seeing my psychologist and all the processes that are necessary for managing the inside of my heaf. Part of that’s the ongoing struggle with self-stigma that any of it is necessary at all, part of it is the annoyance of the month-to-month cost of keeping my shit together, and sometimes it just feels like it’s not goddamn working and all the time, money, and effort is going to waste. It’s not. I spent a good chunk of last night taking a really long walk, ’cause I was starting to get a little squirrely and fragmented. Two years ago, I would have disappeared into a week-long TV binge or computer game obsession where I skipped sleep for days on end, so even when three hours feels like a failure, it’s not. Where I once used to stress-eat incredible amounts of junk food and cola after rising at midday, I will now usually respond to

So I used to have a problem with shoes. Not a problem with owning them – although you could argue, at the point where I had twenty-odd pairs of converse sneakers, there was a problem there as well – but a problem storing them. I’d wear a pair of sneakers out for the day, shuck them off after arriving home and sitting on the couch, and then I’d forget to move them to the cramped box of shoes in my wardrobe after I finished watching TV or reading. This cycle would continue over a week or two, until all twenty-odd pairs of sneakers were residing on my living room floor and I’d trip over them in the morning when I wandered to the couch with my coffee. It wasn’t terribly efficient, but it was the path of least resistance. Two months back I acquired a shoe rack. It spent about twenty-four hours living in my wardrobe, which was not a good

I inherited my father’s roll-top desk over a decade ago, after my parents renovated their study. It’s travelled with me from apartment to share-house to apartment, sitting in lounge rooms or the corner of my bedroom, frequently serving as a site for storage and the accumulation of junk rather than an actual work place. This is the tyranny of a modern workspace where a computer is prominently featured, and the desk was designed for an era where computers weren’t really a consideration. It was always easier to buy a small computer desk that sits in the corner work there when I needed an actual desk,, and spend the rest of my writing time on the couch or the bed. This weekend my problems with the desk came up against another problem: the PhD needs space to spread out when I’m working, layout out research books and notepads and index cards with raw ideas so they can be absorbed and synthesised into the

I didn’t make a big deal about leaving social media, mostly because I haven’t actually left. I still check Facebook a few times a week. I still hit twitter and check in on my feeds. I have so many friends who use Facebook chat as their default messaging system that I don’t have the energy to retrain them or myself, and I still Instagram  because I like the way it forces me to pay attention to the world around me. What I did do, back on January 1st, was remove all the various apps from my phone so I wasn’t using social media twenty-four seven. My access is desk-top only, and since I don’t log in at work, that limits me when it comes to Facebook and Twitter. That isn’t quitting social media, but holy hell, it feels like it. My average usage has dropped to about 15 minutes a day, which is enough that you suddenly realise how social

Every couple of months I sit down and look at my writing process, trying to pick up inefficiencies. I study my habits and the things that go wrong, and I double-check systems to make sure they’re working the way they should. The last time I did it, I noticed a bunch of slightly interrelated things that went something like this: My primary work-space had become my couch, which is also the place where I eat food, read books, waste time on social media, and stream television from Netflix. This meant I needed to be really conscious about writing, when I sat down, because there were so many other habits tied to the location that it was easy to get distracted. The desktop computer, which I’d originally intended to be my primary work-space, had gradually been ignored. Primarily this was because there were always multiple steps involved in sitting down and using it, starting with “move all the laundry off my office chair,

One of my major tasks for my time away from the day-job was figuring out the storage problems in my apartment. I moved in with a lot of stuff and quickly discovered that there was no place to put it, whether that stuff was books or files or DVDs or kitchen utensils. I’d lived in a pretty sizeable two-bedroom place when I first put my stuff into storage, and the apartment I have now is single-bedroom and oddly shaped. I’m coming up on my second year in the apartment and a lot of that time has been spent downsizing the stuff that was easy to get rid of. Lots of books have gone out the door. Lots of old clothing that I’m never going to wear again. A collection of sheets and towels that were well in surplus of what I’d need, bottles of wine that I’d been carting around for years (and can no longer drink). DVDs of films

I live my life by certain un-written rules. Or principles. Or random-ass shit that gets stuck in my head and guides my decisions at various points, even when it seems counter-intuitive. They largely came about to take the element of decision making out of very small things, since I hate making decisions without access to thinking time, a white board, and a panel of experts willing to weigh in on the potential drawbacks of each option. So, rules. I never thought of this as strange until back in 2012, when I had to explain my philosophy regarding onion rings to my boss while at GenreCon and it clicked that not everyone did this. Or, if they did, they didn’t actually talk about them. I like to talk about things. On the internet. Not actually a rule – more an slight character flaw – but it happens. And so, a few years back, I started writing these things down, paying attention to why they’d come

I have to write 750 words a day between now and October 24th, otherwise bad things will happen. The kind of bad things where you end up emailing an editor and sounding like a heel, on account of the fact that you aren’t getting done the things you said you’d get done, and really that’s not the kind of email that any writer wants to send ’cause editors do neat stuff like pay us to write things and we’d prefer to seem reliable enough that they keep asking us to be involved in their projects. Now 750 words doesn’t seem like much, but it quickly gets kinda hard to attain. ‘Cause at the same time as I’m doing this, I’ve got a bunch of full-day workshops that need writing. I’ve got at least three Writer’s Festivals/Conferences that I’m going too, which will involve chairing panels or similar activities that have associated prep-work that come with them. I’ve got that pesky GenreCon