I wrote a little while ago about the book The Now Habit, and how it was helping me organise my work and get it done with less stress. That’s still true, but as with everything in life, it takes practice to keep this system in place. Old habits are always ready to slip back into place, and then there’s the imagined ease of just not being conscious about it, floating along instead of doing that “plan your work, work your plan” thing.
It’s what they said in the workshops I took years ago: The things you say, commit to, or create come into existence, and in the next moment start going out of existence. If you want them to carry into the future, you need “structures for existence” to keep them alive.
As you might have noticed if you’ve been following, I like to make up little systems for myself then, after a while, break them and make up new ones. I suppose this is partly because I enjoy making the physical forms these things take (the nicer they look, the more inclined I am to use them), and it’s also partly because my livelihood depends on them: As a freelance copywriter on a retainer, I need to keep producing work if I’m going to keep getting paid.
I enjoy what I do, so it doesn’t exactly take discipline to do it — ‘discipline’ implies that the task is somehow distasteful or a burden, and I’m grateful for my work — but as with any creative work, it’s easy to avoid it. It’s easier to do nothing than to create, even if that nothingness isn’t ultimately satisfying.
Equally unsatisfying, though, is that with the kind of work I’m doing — either copywriting or doing book-stuff like podcasts or promotion — there’s no end to it. With no end, it’s easy to feel like you’re a hamster on a wheel, like you’re not getting anywhere because, look, there’s so much more to do!
My latest experiment is to take my work and make it as much of a game as possible. I’m inspired by the notion of Alternate Reality Games, in which, rather than using play as a way to escape from life, we use it to enhancing our experiences and abilities in the real world. Others, like ARG pioneer Jane McGonical, do a better job of imagining and describing these games and the impact they can have — which can range from finding new ways to play in your city to saving the world. In my case, I’m just trying to come up with a game that gives me a sense of progress about my various projects — more than just ticking them off in my project planning software to fall into a memory-hole.
A good game, I figure, will give me a way to:
- stay on track
- be productive
- explore new ideas
- have fun
- improve my skills
I’ve still got a lot to do to figure out what this system will be, but I figure it needs to work in the field if it’s going to be useful in a lasting way, so I’ve just jumped in and started.
So far, I’ve got a notepad for today’s tasks, a little book of sheets for tracking my daily “score”, and an envelope for collecting the score-sheets. I’m measuring my work in little, approachable sprints of 25 minutes (sometimes called “Pomodoros“), and for task I complete, I get a star.
Yeah, I know: it’s all a bit kindergarten. But do we ever really progress past the needs we had at five years old? Sure, we get more skilled at being ourselves and relating to others, but I know that I still need acknowledgement, praise, and rewards for my efforts. So, since I’m my own grown-up now, it’s my responsibility to provide those for myself if I’m not going to drive my editor crazy!
My system needs a lot more to it, though: As these stars accumulate, they have to contribute to growing, visible progress, and I want to be able to trade them in for rewards. I never played Dungeons and Dragons because that was for geeks and losers (or because my brother wouldn’t let me play, you choose), but I see “progress” as analogous to collecting “experience points” and the rewards as “levelling up”.
One of the contributors to McSweeney’s, Christopher Monks, wrote a book that’s pretty close to this idea: The Ultimate Game Guide To Your Life: Or, The Video Game As Existential Metaphor. I don’t see myself buying it, though, because — like so much of the McSweeney’s content, it’s occasionally funny, but overall it comes across as glib, smug, and a bit pointless (here’s a sample; judge for yourself). The idea’s in there, just not in a workable form.
Now that’s what I need to do: come up with a nice papercraft product out of this that would be useful to other people, too. There’s a nice-looking kit for novel-writers out there (which I can’t find again now), but it fails where many products for writers do: it’s too prescriptive, supplying a deck of idea-cards, which binds the author’s imagination to a limited set of someone else’s notions rather than helping them create something truly new, completely of themselves — which is my beef with the bulk of indie fiction: it’s far too heavily based in pre-existing stories. I know, I know: There are no new stories. But some retreads feel especially un-new and I agree with Neil Gaiman: they need a cultural rest.
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p>Okay, I’m stopping here ’cause I’ve got some copywriting stars to collect today. If you’ve made it this far and have any ideas for how to add to this game, or how you could adapt it to your work, please let me know!
