A return to structure
A cursory glance at my on-again/off-again diary paints a clear picture: January is the month for new systems. And for resolutions that I refuse to call resolutions. And for writing about this new system… along with all of those non-resolutions. It’s often mostly skin-deep, a fresh coat of paint yada yada… But this year, it happens to run deeper. This time, it’s about righting a rudderless ship.
The fallacy of magic
Most of us grew up with the myth of the angst-ridden-artist, spiralling down the abyss, imploring muses for inspiration, and waiting for the blinding light. This is art as revelation, the artist as vessel; passive, almost. It’s an enduring perception because, like most myths, it’s rooted in truth: lightning does strike occasionally. And when it does, it usually appears as entirely foreign, like a radio signal captured at random from the depths of space—like magic. It isn’t. Inspiration stems from the things we know, what we see and feel, what we need. It comes from the pulse of our lives, the words in our blood; from us and no one else. And it requires abandon, but it also dies in aimlessness.
I’ve allowed myself to drift.
Over these past two years I rebelled against organization, and against metrics in general. I’m now convinced, for example, that the notion of streaks is just failure waiting to happen, ready to bring us down as soon as we miss a day. I still can’t believe Apple’s Activity rings won’t even allow for a weekend break, or a holiday, or a cold. Just a pause. Catch COVID, and you’re back to zero—no medal for you kid, sorry. But it’s not just Apple: I once had a 275-day meditation streak …and then a tree fell in our yard, hitting the neighbours’ power line while they were away. All hell broke loose for an entire evening, I forgot to meditate, and the counter went back to zero; I never even tried for a milestone again.
But there is, however, such a thing as overcompensation, and as I wrapped up 2021 I realized I’d strayed way too far. I’d successfully convinced myself that I could create “organically”, without schedules or deadlines, unless a project absolutely required it. The pendulum had to swing back.
The reality of work
Inspiration isn’t something to wait for, it’s something to work at. We have to become lightning rods. So I’ve now reintroduced structure—not in the form of lists and endless to-dos, but as meaningful projects with actual deadlines. And they exist in a calendar, where I can see them, where I can mentally prepare as I wake up in the morning, instead of picking whatever comes to mind and feeling unmoored at the end of each day. I’ve reframed my approach through an app called TickTick, which I discovered (completely by chance) during the break. Yes, I know it’s easy to fall for the shiny-new-app-that-will-fix-everything, but this one actually offers what I’ve long wanted in a task manager: complete two-way calendar integration, with start/end/due dates AND duration. So I’m not just creating a list of items to be checked, but assigning time slots, all of it managed from a single workspace and accessible from any app with access to calendar events. Such as say… Craft?
But let’s keep that topic for another post.
After all, we’ve got a ship to sail…
