October 21, 2014 2 Comments

Everything I Know About Productivity I Learned in High School

I know I haven’t got much time so I’ll be brief.

I realize that in perhaps no more than a minute a little bell will sound from the Antisocial app on your smartphone, indicating that the app is now automatically scrambling the WiFi signal in your home, pulling down the mechanized blinds on all your windows, throwing the dead-bolts on all your doors, and sending out on your behalf a death notice to the NSA. For after all, it soon will be time for you to get back to work.

And, blast it, that’s what we writers are all about, isn’t it? Work! Sweat! Honest toil!

Indeed. We writers don’t like to waste a morsel of our allotted time on this frantically spinning orb. Up at 4:30 A.M., we swallow a shingle of toast & marmalade and then, with our preferred cup of stimulation in hand, we beaver away like prisoners making license plates until our designated fifteen minutes of recreation (spent, of course, reading blog posts on productivity).

So, knowing that you will soon need to get back to the rowing bench, I’ll just say a quick word about a new productivity strategy I’ve been employing that is working very well and that I think might help you, too.

High School Musical

It’s true. Everything I know about productivity I did learn in high school. Not the high school, however, I attended in the years of my callow youth. There, the only lessons in productivity I learned were about how to draw a cartoon of the teacher while appearing to be absorbed in Byron’s “Don Juan.” No; I’m speaking here of the high school where I now teach part-time.

It is the unswerving practice of my department chairs at school to request of me a 3-Week Calendar previewing the coming attractions (assignments, due dates, and whatnot) in each of my courses. At first, I must admit, I blanched at the request. Course planning was something one did each morning while walking from the parking lot into the school building. The last thing one wanted was to straightjacket one’s improvisatory talents by planning in advance.

But now, I must further admit, I’m hooked on the drug of the 3-Week Calendar. There’s simply nothing like waking up on a cold, dark Wednesday morning knowing that one can walk from the parking lot into the school building with a song in one’s heart, assured that the day’s strategy has been set down at HQ weeks before.

Interestingly, too, the practice of the 3-Week Calendar helps summon the Muse of creativity as I plan my courses. What makes the picture, as G.K. Chesterton once said, is the frame.

Home on the Middle Range

I can hear you scoffing.

“This is rich” (scoffs you). “You think you’re the Columbus of Productivity because you’ve learned to apply a 3-Week Calendar to your writing! But I’ll have you know, I’ve been keeping all manner of plans and schedules for years. I have a 5-Year Writing Plan, a 2014 Writing Plan, a Tornado Warning Writing Plan, and a Writing Plan for Low Biorhythm Days. I also keep both a weekly and a daily writing calendar on my laptop, my phone, and in a black Moleskine underneath my pillow.”

That slurping sound must be you sucking in your teeth with satisfaction.

But hold on, I say. Hold on one minute!

All those plans and calendars are very well. No doubt you get a lot of work done. But until you’ve unlocked the treasures of the 3-Week Calendar, I don’t think you can call yourself serious about getting things done.

What precisely are the benefits of the 3-Week Calendar?

At bottom, the 3-Week Calendar allows you to plan the middle range of your schedule. Farther out than the daily or weekly calendar, but not so far out as the monthly or annual calendar, the 3-Week Calendar charts an arc of time in which small but significant projects, or parts of projects, can get done. In three weeks a sonnet sequence can get written, a new direction established in one’s marketing efforts, or a book read and savagely reviewed–thus increasing one’s sense of accomplishment and spurring one on to even greater efforts!

(Skeptical about the significance of getting smaller projects done? Then try this blog post by Seth Godin on for size.)

The temptation for the writer is to overload the daily or weekly schedule, or to dream too big with the annual plan. But with the 3-Week Calendar, one can look over the hedge of the daily schedule but not indulge in the vain task of trying to pick out the fuzzy horizon of year’s end. One sees the bigger picture but doesn’t try to take in the entire cosmos.

The Mystical Number 3

There’s something almost magical or even mystical in the number three. I learned to crawl at three. I eat three meals per day. And Mrs. Stooge gave birth to exactly 3 Stooges.

So please, writing colleagues, give the 3-Week Calendar a try!

What are your thoughts on the 3-Week Calendar? Does it sound like a strategy that would be really useful to you?

If you have a better planning system for your writing, please share it with us.

Filed Under: Productivity Tagged: , , ,
June 5, 2014 Leave a Comment

The Art of Focus for Your Writing

Tell yourself no email, no social networking, indeed no digital stimulation whatsoever (except perhaps for some music) for several hours while you concentrate on your work, and notice how your mind relaxes. The daily dog-paddle we do against the current of the digital sea is exhausting–and not nearly as stimulating as our habitually fractured consciousness wishes it to be.

In an article this week in the New York Times, “The Art of Focus,” David Brooks talks about an interview with child psychologist Adam Phillips that appeared in The Paris Review. From Phillips’s work with children Brooks gleans a principle to help combat digital distraction more effectively:

“The lesson from childhood, then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”

The point is not not to say “no” to the trivial distractions. Regular digital fasts are necessary for the good of the soul. But in order to make that “no” easier to say we need to focus even more on the “yes” of the passion that brings us to our writing in the first place. That can be done in myriad ways. By re-reading something from a favorite author, or undertaking a long free-writing exercise to get back into the groove of composition. For me, a sustained period utterly focused on writing is enough to remind me of that writing is play and more interesting than anything on Facebook or a Twitter stream.

Brooks quotes Phillips as saying something else very interesting, that in order to pursue their intellectual adventures, children need a secure social base. Observes Phillips:

“There’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a book, say.”

The loving parent is the best guardian of the absorbing play of the child. There is a spiritual analogue here, I believe, for the writer.

Filed Under: On Being a Writer Tagged: , , , , , ,
May 28, 2014 Leave a Comment

What Writers Can Learn from a Navy SEAL

One of the most moving things I’ve encountered this week is the 2014 University of Texas commencement address given by Naval Admiral William H. McRaven, a U.S. Navy SEAL. In the address Admiral McRaven gives 10 life lessons drawn from his training as a SEAL. It’s an inspiring exhortation, and the behind-the-scenes tour it gives of the life of a SEAL is enough to make you want to drop and do 250 push-ups and stop, at least for five minutes, letting the Human Race down. You can read and watch the entire address here, at the fascinating website I’ve just discovered, Farnham Street. But here’s a sample I particularly like:

As Navy SEALs one of our jobs is to conduct underwater attacks against enemy shipping. We practiced this technique extensively during basic training.

The ship attack mission is where a pair of SEAL divers is dropped off outside an enemy harbor and then swims well over two miles—underwater—using nothing but a depth gauge and a compass to get to their target.

During the entire swim, even well below the surface there is some light that comes through. It is comforting to know that there is open water above you.

But as you approach the ship, which is tied to a pier, the light begins to fade. The steel structure of the ship blocks the moonlight—it blocks the surrounding street lamps—it blocks all ambient light.

To be successful in your mission, you have to swim under the ship and find the keel—the centerline and the deepest part of the ship.

This is your objective. But the keel is also the darkest part of the ship—where you cannot see your hand in front of your face, where the noise from the ship’s machinery is deafening and where it is easy to get disoriented and fail.

Every SEAL knows that under the keel, at the darkest moment of the mission—is the time when you must be calm, composed—when all your tactical skills, your physical power and all your inner strength must be brought to bear.

If you want to change the world, you must be your very best in the darkest moment.

Now every walk of life demands this kind of composure at “the darkest moment of the mission.” But for the writer, this is the moment when all the hard work you’ve put in on a project fails to resonate with an audience. When the light coming through the water as you swim–which is to say, encouragement in the form of praise, sales, employment, recognition, status–fades into darkness. And there you are, with nothing but your depth gauge and a compass–which is to say, your craft and your mission to create something beautiful and true.

You can’t see your hand in front of your face. No encouragement from the outside world is there to confirm you’re on the right track. And because of this it’s easy to get disoriented, discouraged, and to fail.

This is the point where heroes are made. You’ve got your craft and your mission and that’s enough. Quite enough. Encouragement from others is all gravy anyway. So keep calm and focused and follow through on what you need to do.  

In this darkest moment, you have to be at your very best.

 

The image above, of Navy SEALs training themselves to endure freezing water, is reproduced courtesy of Shane T. McCoy at Wikimedia Commons.

Filed Under: On Being a Writer Tagged: , , , , ,