📙 #039 - How to be productive, actual advice.

Plus some stuff about my next generative art project, zine making and mild bank irritation.

Once again I’ve recorded an audio version of this newsletter, the player should be up there somewhere (depending on how you view this newsletter), there’s also a video version (https://youtu.be/hXEWwVy4o-o), which is the same as the audio version, but you get to see me move a bit I guess 🤷‍♂️

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# MONZO

My bank, Monzo, thinks this is a good supportive message.

Meanwhile, the old studio sale saga drags on, dragging all my savings with it. So, no shit I’ve been spending less, thanks for that positivity, Monzo.

[Edited to add: Some things-are-starting-to-move noises are coming from the solicitor, so perhaps things are looking up!]

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#PRESEED - DIGITAL/PLOTTER ALERT

On Tuesday, I published a follow-up to my "YYYSEED" project called "PRESEED." It's set to open next Tuesday (the 16th of July). It's another generative/pen plotter hybrid, which means if you spam the "variations" button until you see one you like, you can then hit the "open" in new window button and then either press 's' to save a PNG or press 1-6 to save the SVG files needed to plot in A1-A6 size.

Again, the aspect of NFTs I particularly like is that anyone can "Right Click Save" to keep a copy of an artwork, explore the whole range of generative outputs and even plot their own on a drawing machine, but should you choose, you can "own" an official one with the NFT acting as the Certificate Of Ownership/Authenticity. I still think this is one of the valuable parts of Web3, which will somehow just get rebranded as digital ownership. Anyway, this isn't the place to rehash that whole argument, so instead, I made a video about the project, which you can find here...

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#PRODUCTIVITY

This is my number four top productivity tip, and it works for me better than most. I'll explain why it may not work for you in a moment or why it might. Here it is...

Notice when you're productive and notice when you aren't. Call the productive times "flow-state" if you like. Then schedule your main top priority project in the times you're productive and all the other admin and crap stuff when you're not.

By this, I mean I've read many productivity books, and they all have different advice. One that often crops up is this...

"Get up at 5 am; the morning is the best time; you can get work done before the world wakes up. You can get 5 hours of work in before 10 am, and then you can stop and get on with other stuff."

I tried this: I got up at 5 am, when all the productive, smart people got up, and I could not focus. By 10 am, I'd done nothing at all.

"Eat that frog!!!" - do the hard thing you don't want to do first, then everything else is easy.

Also didn't work.

I'd try and do the most challenging thing first to get it out of the way so I could get on with all the other stuff. But that didn't work; I felt like a failure like something was wrong with me.

Worse, I'd start each day with a bunch of admin to do and some project work. I'd try to get the project work done first, which I'd struggle with until after lunch, at which point, just as I finally got going, I'd realise I still had a bunch of admin to do and would have to switch to that, telling myself I'd try again tomorrow.

When I started journaling, and Kitty (the AI PA) asked me what I was doing throughout the day, I noticed something.

I always didn't get big project work done in the morning, but from 1 pm to around 4–5 pm, I'd move into a flow state, the hours would melt away, and work would get done.

This is the thing that annoys me about productivity advice...

Say there are ten different productivity books with ten different ways of doing things. One of those books applies to you; it has all the advice you need and will help you; the other nine don't. Then, you shuffle the books and are given them one at a time.

Pretend productivity books for the video version

Some people will get the correct book the very first time.

Meanwhile the correct book will be at the bottom of the stack for other people, and they have to plough through nine other books first. It takes a strong person to read a book, try the thing, find it doesn't work, read the next book, try the thing, find it doesn't work (again and again) and NOT decide it must be something wrong with them.

You see this a lot on YouTube: a godawful thumbnail and a "This productivity book saved my life" title. The person says, "I picked up this book, and it was amazing, and now I can do everything!!"

Say there are 10,000,000 (way less than reality) people reading productivity books. If 10% of them hit the book that works for them the first time, that's 1,000,000 people going, "This is the best book ever!!"

Imagine a different video script: "I tried all these books, and none worked until I tried this one!" It doesn't mean that book is better or it'll work for you; it just happens to be the first one that worked for them for their own reasons.

And while clearly the books work for those people, millions of them, the same books may not work for you.

It can get frustrating when things that other people say work just don't for you.

NONE of the advice was suitable for me when I tried it in the morning!!!

MOST of the advice worked for me when I tried it in the afternoon!

It took me far too long to work out that it was WHEN I was applying the techniques that made the difference, not really WHAT those techniques were.

Eat the frog (first thing after lunch) 👍—Get up at 5 am, sure, but I don't expect to get into the zone until eight hours later.

So my advice to you is this. If you notice there's a time in the day when you get into a flow state, do your main project/work there, then do admin, social media, YouTube watching, shopping, walking, and everything else in NOT that time.

Unless you have ADHD, then all bets are off, sorry.

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#VIDEO MAKING

I've been thinking about the above because I fell into the trap the other week. I had a couple of videos to make, and I had those tasks defined as "MAKE VIDEO" when each video is really four tasks;

1. Outline the script & shot list

2. Write the script

3. Shoot the video

4. Edit the video

I found myself doing those one after the other over a few days, which ended up with me trying to edit the video in the morning, which DID NOT WORK, not until the afternoon. I was annoyed because editing that video took me a whole day.

The same goes for writing the script; it took me the whole day.

In reality, both took me just an afternoon and whole wasted mornings of failing to do it.

Interestingly, though, outlining the script, which I do on index cards, and shooting the video, which involves moving the camera around and taking a bunch of A & B-roll, fit perfectly into the morning. Doing that in the afternoon is a waste of flow-state hours.

I've made a mental note: Afternoon for writing scripts and editing video—mornings for outlining and shooting. Things are working a lot better now. To reiterate, productivity for me isn’t a how, or a method, it’s mainly just a when.

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#ZINE

I've been chipping away at the zine code, which can now layout pages in the correct order and number, then generate a table of contents and plot them out.

Each one has a "seed hash," which controls how it "randomly" picks what goes on which page and also gets fed into each design. This means each is unique and different, but I could use that seed if I needed to redraw one.

It's still ongoing because I want a pool of designs it can pull from, and at the moment, I only have around eight designs, but I'm pretty excited about how it's going.

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#THE END

Oh, just in case, my top three productivity tips are this...

1. Get good sleep; if you need eight hours, get eight hours.

2. Screens off (except for Kindle) two hours before bed, one hour if you want to push it.

3. No caffeine eight hours before sleep.

It doesn't matter what productivity "hack" works for you. You could have the best one in the world, but it will only be effective with the above in place.

I've met people who put so much time into making filing systems, sorting to-do lists, trying out different project management tools, and zero effort into getting to bed on time. And hey, if you work best from 11 pm until 3 am and your bedtime is 4 am until noon, that's fine; just don't try doing important work any other time.

You could have the most efficient method of filling a bucket with water, but if your bucket has huge sleep holes, it won't work. Sorry.

Bonus obvious tips: eat well and exercise.

Good luck out there,
Love you all
Dan
❤️

PS. You'll receive my next newsletter around the 25th of July.