A fixation on maximizing productivity kills creativity. In so many ways, productivity and creativity are at odds.
Productivity is all about getting stuff done more efficiently: completing tasks and projects to meet your obligations and be successful. Capitalism relies on ever-increasing levels of human productivity. It always asks: What is the most value you can bring with the least amount of time and effort?
Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.
– Dr. Katie Mack with a wakeup call to any of us lulled into a sense of trust that the machine’s giving us the right answer.
Stronger after the break. I started lifting weights about 6 months ago as a complete beginner. Once a week I meet my trainer for a strength workout. On a few occasions I’ve had to miss a week or two, for different reasons. Every time I walked into the gym after weeks off, I was sure I lost all my progress and was starting again from scratch.
In reality, the opposite was true. Every workout I do after time off, I break personal records for weight lifted. My trainer tells me that unlike cardio, that’s how strength training works. When your muscles get time to fully recuperate, you come back stronger.
This is counterintuitive to a cardio type, so it surprises me every time. But rest precedes leaps in certain creative and professional endeavors, too. You come back stronger after a break.
Blogging is fun, so I’ve started again. Winnie the Pooh said, “I always get to where I am going by walking away from where I have been.” What I’m doing here now on this site has a lot to do with where I have been.
One thing [director Kip Williams] said on the first day of rehearsals was: you can only eat an elephant one spoonful at a time. I was like, okay yeah sure. I’ll do it that way. Now I’ve got to eat the Broadway part of the elephant.
– Sarah Snook on bringing The Picture of Dorian Gray from the UK to Broadway. This weekend Snook won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress for her performance in the one-woman show, in which she plays 26 characters. Here’s my review.
Cashkey. I made a new little app for fun. Cashkey is an easy way to visualize and share how money comes and where it goes. I made it because:
Try it and enjoy. Let me know what you think.
Kind of Blue. My favorite color is blue, but I can’t easily visualize or describe the differences between common shades of blue, like cornflower or cobalt or electric or navy. There are many different kinds of blue! So I built an interactive blue color palette to reference, that I can also quiz myself with to learn.
This was my first jaunt into coding a little tool with AI and it was both fun and frustrating. It didn’t take long to grab the wheel and get into “I’m just gonna finish this myself” mode. Worth the running start, and the world still needs programmers.
Take notes, not tasks. I’m a big todo list person. I run my life on my todo list. I love writing down tasks, putting a date on them, and then checking them off. Deadlines are motivating. I am a productive person! I GET STUFF DONE!
But I can’t todo list myself through this liminal space, this being in between the past and future.
I really tried. I put every passing interest on my todo list, because hey I’ve got time to do it. The problem is, when I assign myself the task of exploring a curiosity: it becomes a obligation, with weight. A great way to kill a lighthearted interest is making it into a project with deadlines.
So except for necessary run-our-lives things one must do, I’m clearing the todo list. Very scary. I’m trying something new, which is to take notes, versus assign tasks (no “I should” allowed). Notice the things that catch my interest, and literally take a note. That’s it.
Then, trust the stuff that I’m really interested in will emerge and move me to action, without a deadline or a checkbox.
Do things without a deadline or a checkbox?! Very very scary. Let’s see how this goes.
I’ve been preoccupied with how to make the most of what little time we get here in this life for as long as I can remember, and it’s only increased with age and brushes with illness. Over ten years ago, this Wait But Why piece by Tim Urban on visualizing the entirety of your life as a finite number of weeks (versus years or months) made a big impression on me.
A week is a short enough time to hold in your head, and long enough time for big things to happen. Then there are eras of your life that span collections of weeks.
A friend is considering taking a sabbatical from her job, and is weighing all the considerations: finances, healthcare, job market. She put out a list of questions to a bunch of us, and I wound up writing a little bit about my current, in-progress sabbatical.
Spent what felt like a dumb amount of time looking at money stuff at the start of the year, summing up what we spent in 2024 and on what, and making what basically everyone calls a “budget” for 2025.
Boy do I hate that word.
Try easier. My new mantra for 2025: Try easy. No more over-striving, no more perfectionism, no more gritting teeth and grinding through because of some misguided notion that the hardest worker wins. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.)
This year, there will be more relaxing into tasks, letting things take as long as they take, paying attention without judgement to how they are unfolding, more flow, more ease, more deep focus time with fewer distractions, more openness, more delight in the doing versus the outcome. It’s a new and wild and weird way to live. Happy New Year!
I often get asked, “What would you tell your 16-year-old self?” I’d tell her to get over the perfectionist thing. Stop trying to be a straight-A student. We think striving for perfection is an accelerant but, in reality, it makes you risk-averse, emotionally bound to your scorecard. It’s too hard to live under that.
– Sarah Friar, saying a helpful thing for my my 40-something-year-old self.
Someone asked me to do a thing. It was a nice someone, and an optional thing. A thing that’s generally a nice thing to be asked to do.
It would be an easy thing to do, if not an exciting thing. It was the kind of request I felt good about getting–not because I love doing this thing, but because getting asked made me feel important. The request came from someone I want to like me, and to feel like I am there for them. The thing wasn’t something I was thrilled about doing, but it felt easier to say yes than no at the time of the request. So I did say yes, even though it was a very neutral yes.
Cultivate the taste gap. The novel I’m currently reading reminded me of this useful concept for creatives called “the taste gap.” It’s the idea is that there’s a difference between what you want to create and what you are able to create. It’s the reason why a lot of creative projects stall and never get made. Most people give up trying when they see how vast and disappointing and insurmountable the gap seems.
All of us who do creative work get into it because we have good taste. But there’s a gap. That for the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t good. But your taste is still killer. And because of your taste, you can tell what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. A lot of people at that point quit.
Glass’s advice? Do a huge volume of work. Keep practicing, and your abilities will start to catch up to your taste.
I like Mandy Brown’s twist on this: that practice increases your competence which in turn elevates your taste. Therefore, making things cultivates rather than closes the taste gap–and that’s where the joy of making stuff is.
As you build your craft, whether it’s writing or radio or glass blowing or leading a team, you develop ever more ideas about what’s possible in your work. As your skill grows, so too do your ambitions, such that your taste always and forever outstrips your abilities. For every increment of improvement, you extend your desires out that much further. This is not to say you will never be satisfied with your work—although, that is a not uncommon scenario, and not necessarily as dreary as it sounds. But rather that as you become more capable, you are wont to find as much joy and satisfaction in the process of developing your skill as in the outcomes of it.
The work of creativity, at the end of the day, is the work of creativity—not what you create, but who you become in the act of creation.
Emphasis mine. Who do you become in the act of creation? More you. A more true you.
