inspirational

There’s no such thing as a Muse

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“Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.”

Dorothy Parker said that and, as a writer, I can both appreciate that she means get on with it and enjoy that she's just called me an ass. We writers do tend to piddle about doing anything but write and there is an argument that we have to but I prefer the argument that writers never stop writing, that everything we do is connected to this illness of ours. In which case, we've done and we are doing enough writing-while-not-writing so it is time to start hitting the keys. There's no muse, there is no waiting for inspiration, there is the hunt for inspiration and the work toward it.

But the reason to bang on at you about this today is an article on 99U – itself named after the idea that art is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration – about How to Be Creative Even When You Least Feel Like it.

It's an article linking out to more that you might enjoy too.

Beat this – the ‘proven’ ultimate workout playlist

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Sometimes you have to look at the data and just say no. That's not right. Spotify has released what it calls the ultimate workout playlist which has 20 songs scientifically proven to be the best ones to get you going and keep you exercising. There's a real scientist involved – Dr Costas Karageorghis, read his Brunel University bio – and the claim is that 6.7 million tracks were analysed.

You're unthinkingly assuming that there aren't 6.7m songs in the world, though you're not sure, and you're also unthinkingly presuming that it isn't that they listened to one song 6.7m times. There is no doubt in your mind that it'll be something in the middle of those two extremes and you're right. But possibly it's just a wee bit slanted toward the one song 6.7m times.

Easily the most respected and revered peer-reviewed science journal in the world, Britain's Daily Mail explains:

The team analysed 6.7 million Spotify playlists containing the word ‘workout’ in the title and compared the different beats per minute (bpm) to those used in certain workouts. For example, a person’s typical stride rate while jogging or running is 150 to 190 strides per minute. If these figures are halved it gives a range of 75 to 95 bpm – the beat range found most commonly in urban music, particularly rap.

There's your skew right there. They looked at the music of people who already go to the gym enough to make playlists and to give them names with the word 'workout' in them. It's not fair or statistically proven that the age of these people will tend toward the younger end of the scale but you know it's true and at least I used the word statisically instead of SCIENTISTS PROVE YOUNG PEOPLE USE GYMS.

And still I can't quite accept the findings of this research because Spotify has published the playlist. I'm 48 and I haven't heard any track on the list. I haven't even heard of any of the tracks on the list.

Tell me Spotify wants a playlist of current tracks, I'll believe you. But tell me that it is scientifically proven that no piece of music of any kind ever beats these twenty released since last Wednesday and I have my doubts.

I'm just not willing to go to a gym to prove it to you or to affect the statistics. Or listen to the music.

But other than that, we're good, right?

Now you shouldn’t focus on your goals

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Not that we’re winging it here, no. You may have heard that it’s good to focus on how productive/happy/fit/slim/sexy you will be after you do whatever masochistic work you’re putting yourself through. But the site 99U says nah.

By all means visualize your goals to help get yourself started in the first place, but once you’re underway, try to let your long-term mission fade a little into the background. Revel in the process and you’re more likely to make it to the finishing line.

I don’t really have a problem with that: the journey is the reward (as Lifehacker, which pointed me at this article, mentioned too) and that’s fine. That’s drama, really. Plus the rest of that 99U piece has some rather interesting points about how subtly people can be affected by the smallest things.

That’s rubbish: positive vs negative thinking

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I'm British and a journalist, cynicism comes to me a lot more readily than happy happy joy joy thinking. But the kicker for me is that it's quicker to think positively.

You know this already: when things are bad, you spend an awful lot of time brooding. That's too feeble a word: worrying, fretting, chewing, pondering, hating. When things are good, you get on to the next job.

I have also realised that it's true: I shouldn't make decisions and I definitely shouldn't act on them when I'm depressed. I still struggle with the concept of telling myself everything is wonderful all the time but I like the idea of head-down getting-on-with-it-all regardless.

Which is what I take away from this piece on The Simple Dollar about negative thinking:

You have to recognize when you’re telling yourself to make poor choices. For me, the best way to counteract this is to have a checklist of the things you’re working on and review it several times a day.

Pattern weeks – part 2

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I'm still fiddling. Previously on Pattern Weeks… I was working to bring some kind of structure to my typical or pattern week, chiefly because every week was changing and I knew I wasn't getting enough done. For a detailed previously and maybe reasons why you might like to think about it too, see Pattern Weeks.

Now I'm embarrassed to say that I wrote that and was planning all this back on 31 December and we're now a fortnight further on.

But I do have the plan, at last, sort of.

I ripped up lots of versions and settled for working out a list of things that I really have to get done. I used OmniOutliner for that; lots of bashing in things as I thought of them, as a search of my calendar and To Do list brought them up. And then lots of juggling around. A fair bit of realising that this bit or that was quite similar to something else on the list, I could save some time by doing them one after another.

I ended up with tent poles in the week: inviolate times when invoiolate things have to be done inviolately. They won't be. But they will be more than if I weren't looking out for them.

And that's nearly where I am now. I've got the list, the kind of super-list, the overall no-details-but-big-picture list and I have these tent poles. Certain few of these things have to happen at certain times and I know the things, I know the times.

The intention is to end up with wallpaper on my Mac with this pattern in my face. I'm about a quarter of the way through producing that image in Adobe Illustrator and it's a Tetris-like calendar kind of image with big red boxes, little green ones and some yellow 'uns too.

I'm trying to work out how I'll show that to you when it's done and all the boxes have all their text in – without you being able to see that the big red box that stripes across the whole week at the same time is really just breakfast.

But I'm getting there and it's proving useful plotting and pondering. So I wanted to share that with you, even as I can't yet share the plan.

A four-day week with pay

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If you’re British and are old enough, the phrases three- or four-day week are not happy ones. They were borne of bad times when the economy was rough and companies were in trouble. That never happens now.

But it’s a term with bad connotations because it was a time when firms couldn’t afford to pay people for a whole week so they had to work three or four days instead. And there’s another way.

Hopefully there’s another way. Ryan Carson of the technology firm Treehouse proposes that maybe we can work four days a week and do more with it. He’s not trying to save money: you get paid your full, normal salary, you just don’t work five days a week. It sounds like he’s a productivity guru looking for a startling yet appealing angle, but the fella has his reasons and he’s put them to work: this is genuinely how his company is run.

What’s more, he wrote about it in his company blog, The Naive Optimist, more than a year ago and they sky hasn’t fallen under the weight of all that pie. I learnt of this through 99U which singles out his particular post about why he does this and specifically what has happened because of it.

There is a part of me that shudders at the notion. I love working, I don’t understand how to relax. But I am also very much an advocate of spending the right time on something: working for the sake of it is a waste of time, time that you could be spending working on other things. So I’m drawn to this and I admit you that I am persuaded by his reasoning and his results.

Small moves, Ellie.

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You already know that making too big a statement at the start of the year ain't going to work. I will go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back and sell it. Or even just I'm going to lose three stone in weight by Tuesday. But there are also apparently small resolutions that you give up on because they are out of your control: I will get an agent this month, that kind of thing. There is a huge amount you can do toward getting an agent if that's what you need and you can do a gigantic amount of it right now, but the final step requires them saying yes and offering you a deal you want. You can't control their schedule, therefore you can't control yours. Not in this one case.

But if you pick smaller goals and ones that are within your control, you aren't just making life easier for yourself, you're helping to convince yourself that resolutions are achievable. If we never did the bigger ones we'd never do anything, but having small, concrete, possible resolutions that we then actually do and actually stick to, it helps a mile.

So says an article in Pick the Brain anyway.

Hat tip, as so often, to Lifehacker for spotting this.

The surprising truth about what motivates us

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It’s money, right? Apparently no. Which is good, since there seems to be a lot less of that around. This is a short lecture accompanied by animated annotations that are absorbing and ultimately rather hopeful about what we do, why we do it and what we can do next.

You will want the video to pull back out to show the entire animated board and it doesn’t. Sorry about that.