Getting Things Done – Peter M. Ball

Adventures in Lifestyle Hacking

How Do You Give Up Being Busy?

If you asked me how I’m doing for the last six months, there’s pretty good odds I told you I was either busy, really busy, or completely fucking manic depending on how well we know each other. It’s the default answer to the question for me and a lot of other people in my office (and, lets be honest, worldwide). Thing is, I don’t really want to be busy. I want to be getting a lot of shit done, which means I’m okay with loading up on a whole heap of projects, but I dislike the idea of busy being my default state. So I’ve decided to stop using it, particularly in light of this post from 99u, which points out the inherent problem in talking about the amount of stuff you’ve got on: Saying, “Busy!” has become the automatic non-answer when somebody asks, “How are you?” It immediately shuts down an interaction and any opportunity for constructive conversation is

PeterMBall 15/07/2013

Smart Advice from Smart People

Joe Hill’s Secret to Achieving Creative Focus

One of the things that makes the great truly great is their ability to make difficult things seem effortless, at least when they’re looked upon from the outside. It’s one of the reasons I’m intrigued by seeing the process of great writers up close, even if I’m long past the stage where I believe there’s some mysterious secret to writing that will unlock everything. In this respect, Joe Hill’s tumblr post on creative math achieves greatness twice over. It makes his writing itself seem effortless, while simultaneously acknowledging the effort that goes into his work, and its a distillation of a great deal of complex thought and experience into a single elegant point: what’s my trick for staying focused on a project? Happiness. I follow pleasure. It makes me feel good to stay focused on one thing at a time, to pour myself fully into it, so that’s what I do. I think any creative act usually grows naturally from enjoyment.

PeterMBall 17/06/2013

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

500 words

So it appears that I finished a story draft this week. It’s not a good story, not yet, but it started the week with a 200 word opening and by Wednesday night I declared the draft zero complete around 2,500 words. It will need some rewriting – that’s what this weekend is for – and it’ll need some fleshing out in order to make the story bits actually resemble a story, but it’s a draft and it’s finished and it’s broken a somewhat long drought. Many droughts, actually, in that I have a) finished a story draft, b) that’s shorter than 7,000 words, and c) actually started the next story more-or-less right away. The pattern I’m aiming for is 500 words a day, every day, and a finished story every two weeks. My instinct is to scoff at that pace, to write it off as easy to accomplish, because my instincts were forged in the days when I taught session

PeterMBall 27/07/2012

Works in Progress

NaNoWriMo? We Laugh at NaNoWriMo…

For the second time since starting the new bloggery regime, I’m writing a post in real time. This time, at least, I did it on purpose. As I write this I’m bunkered down in the QWC office with a team of twenty other writers, all of them ferociously typing away in an attempt to write 30,000 words in the space of two and a half days. We call this madness the Rabbit Hole – the third that the QWC has run – and this time around it’s being run in several locations around Australia. This my second bite of the cherry for the Rabbit Hole. The first time around I was a newly hired employee of the QWC who signed up ’cause it seemed like a good way to generate some work. I showed up and worked exclusively on Fritz the Laptop, who routinely objected to such tasks as “playing music” and “running word” and generally “working for longer than

PeterMBall 01/06/2012

Tag: Getting Things Done

How Do You Give Up Being Busy?

Joe Hill’s Secret to Achieving Creative Focus

500 words

NaNoWriMo? We Laugh at NaNoWriMo…

Book Information?

Need Help?

About Laautor

Support

Newsletter