Recently, I wrote the following on Google+:
Sometimes I feel like the constant chatter of social media is reducing my creative output. While I’m on G+ or Facebook or Twitter or IRC or even reading and answering mail, I’m not *producing things*. Somehow my education taught me to value so many other things over the talking about things. The creating of things. The reading of books. Hiking. Perhaps this devaluation of *talking about things* is not a healthy attitude. In addition to that, there’s the lingering doubt about my willingness to do these other things. If I did not have computers to connect me to all the people out there, would I *really* be doing these other things, or would I just play on my console, or sleep, or eat?
When it comes to role-playing games, for example: I see all those great pictures people are drawing, and great tables people are writing, and I nod my head and scroll down, and read and nod, and—whaaat, game in 2h and no prep!?
It’s totally true that I don’t see myself as a lone creative person. I need discussion, mutual enthusiasm, a little competitive outdoing, sharing, positive feedback and all that for my creative endeavors. Unfortunately for me, social media provides this, as well as backbiting, acerbic commentary, put downs, cynicism, banter, cat pictures, ranting, and more. I haven’t found a way to control this extra information, however. I need some to feel the bonds of humanity, to experience friendship and joy, to build that social net that will help me when I’m down, talk about my feelings such that I don’t bury them deep within me, but it also distracts me, takes away my ability to focus, allows me to procrastinate… So I think I need a structure like **The G+ Hour** or aggressive filtering, or a change in lifestyle to find a way out. No longer young enough, when my desires exceeded my ability to digest it all, not yet old enough, when hopefully my wisdom will put it all into perspective automatically…
#Web #Creativity
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Are you sure that the problem is distractions, and not the lack of motivation?
There is one trick I use to improve my productivity. I set goals like “do at least 1 change in project X every day”, and it turns out that it is quite effective. If you get distracted too much, by the end of the day you will remember that you haven’t done anything at all, so you open up your IDE or something just to do one tiny change like 1 character in the code, but then you fall into it completely and code all night. It is important to allow *any* changes, because the point of this thing is to motivate you to start working, it shouldn’t distract you from important stuff in your life.
That’s very easy to do on github, but if your work is not software-related then just get a calendar 😄
– AlexDaniel 2014-07-18 16:55 UTC
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This is a good point. I should set goals like “read at least a page from this book every day,” for example.
– Alex Schroeder 2014-07-18 17:21 UTC