Windows, Deadlines and Windows

   My poor grades in school from all the homework I didn't do can attest- it's tough to produce and improve on anything, especially when you're maybe afraid of wasting paper. In this industry, in the "creative sector," the practice is the creation, so those become doubly important. And creation can go down any time- you're never "clocked in" technically, so it's in a sense a full time job. (Not that it's a difficult strenuous work or anything; motivation to get the work done at all is the toughest thing.)

   In a sense being "clocked in" to do work is a good motivator; it's pretty basic stuff- if there's only a limited window to get done what needs to be done, you're not going to put off till tomorrow. It's like procrastinating till the last second to get things done, but the "last second" is self-enforced and day by day, an avalanche of last seconds cascading down behind you as you run to escape, with your path in front of you also appearing as you run, the platform materializing right as you make the leap for it. (It's hard to be truly honest and stuff about explaining this subject because I do talk about it in greater detail in one of the Hundred Things, so I don't want to explain too much for now, but- there's my totally awesome analogy right there.)

   If being thus "clocked in" is a good thing, shouldn't it follow that the more clocked in you are the better? Conceivably you could be clocked in all the time, but this would be the exact same effect as though you were never clocked in at all: when studying a subject, the most efficient method is not one long drawn-out cramming session, but shorter more focused reviews with plenty of breaks in between them. Specific, dedicated sessions- being clocked in, in other words- work the best.

   A great example of being clocked in for me is such as when there's a countdown to the time, 8:30 in the morning, when my posts usually go up-- have a deadline for my latest post, it's a lot easier to blog here in the mornings for me (that plus no one else is up and so I'm not conscripted into playing any awesome board games I can't pass up.) After 8:30 am, if I've missed a post-up time, it's arbitrary when my post goes up throughout the rest of the day. I guess the computer is kind of a valuable commodity at this time in the morning, and when I can't get on it in any form to do what I usually do to posts (which is, to polish the aitch out of the incomplete post I have generally prescheduled so that it's in a form I feel to be fit for publication) then, well, maybe I can cop a compy for time enough to revert the post to draft form so I can try again later on in the day. That Kindle I told you about getting is a nice tool for that sort of thing (thanks, Mom!), and I can even compose to an extent on the on-touchscreen keyboard (it's pretty neat; it's got these tools that guess what word you're in the middle of writing which speeds up the process a bit) but it's far from ideal for full-on composition, so I prefer a desktop or a laptop. And by that time already, post-up time is arbitrary, so... 11:30 pm post-up for yesterday!

   I like blogging every day like this, but my projects are so ambitious, when it comes time for it it's pressing to decide what I do want to say- so I just have one monster post full of a lot of really good stuff, like this, eh, rather than serialize my thoughts. Like I was saying last week. If I've got a post that needs to go up but I still have a lot of things to say, instead of breaking my post into smaller bites I just put the post off till the next day (and the next and the next and the next) and scrounge together something else out of my bag of vague ideas. There are a lot of posts like that coming up... big ones. Coming up, that is, if I don't put them off again.