J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Tag: productivity

Why Money Is Bad For Art

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On March 2

In Creative Work/Career, Culture Rants/Shares, Metaprogramming

How do you measure the value of your time?

How do you measure the value of your time?

As usual, I’ve been juggling things I need to do, things I want to do, and things I end up doing that are neither, and feeling like there isn’t enough time for all of it.

You might think that the “answer” to this “problem” would be to increase my efficiency (maybe using the Pareto principle, or David Allen’s GTD system). Or, I could reduce the number of commitments and activities in my life. I’m a dad, husband, database developer, blogger, music producer, label runner, event promoter, radio show host, and aspiring novelist — mostly by choice. Nobody is making me pack my dance card that full.

An alternate solution — one that occurred to me after reading Elizabeth Dunn’s essay “Why We Feel Pressed For Time” — is to instead consider and evaluate the conditions and assumptions that lead me to feel pressed for time in the first place.

One of these conditions in affluence.

Dunn hypothesizes that we feel pressed for time because of our high hourly rates (and/or high salaries). People who don’t make as much money feel less pressed for time, because they actually don’t perceive their time as “precious” like high earners do. They’re a bit more casual in the way they spend their time, and they don’t worry about “wasting it” so much.

In Western culture, the more affluent you are, the busier you get. This is a self-imposed psychological trap. Quoting Dunn, “simply perceiving oneself as affluent might be sufficient to generate feelings of time pressure.” (Dunn cites research by DeVoe and Pfeffer that backs up this claim — it’s worth reading her essay).

So why is this bad for art, as my title asserts?

Art takes time. Time where you walk in circles, explore blind alleys, and spend entire mornings working hard only to throw your results into a literal or digital wastebasket.

In my own experience, making art only feels productive about one session in three. In fact you are usually making progress (exploring blind alleys counts), but it doesn’t feel like it.

This feeling was easier to tolerate when I was young and broke. My time didn’t feel as valuable. What else would I be doing? Delivering pizzas? In college, when my part time work earned me about $12/hour at most, I would often spend six to ten hour stretches studying synthesizer manuals and plugging MIDI notes into the sequencer on my MacPlus computer. Now, as a professional freelance consultant and business owner, I find it much harder to dedicate large chunks of time to meandering creative work.

The way to escape this trap is to define my purpose in life explicitly. My chosen life purpose centers around creating artistic works, and I remind myself of this daily. It’s always “worth it” to pursue my life’s work, even if my efforts don’t lead to any kind of obvious gains (piles of gold coins, fancy cheese and wine, the respect and admiration of my peers, and beautiful women wanting me).

If you don’t define your life purpose, mainstream cultural values will seep in and define “value” for you. In today’s environment that means money. Valuing your time only in terms of money will paralyze you as an artist.

Working From Home – Six Ways To Bring Up Your Game

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On March 9

In Creative Work/Career, Getting Organized, Metaprogramming

One of the many break-time activities available to people who work from home.

As a music producer/freelance database developer/blogger, most of my days are spent in my home office. I love working from home, and I hope I never have to “go in” on a regular basis again, but I remember I had a rough transition year or two (in terms of working-from-home flow and productivity).

I went completely freelance (no employer) around 2001, at the age of 32. I left a good job as the database administrator for the San Francisco Symphony (though I continued to do contract work for them for a number of years). I liked my boss, my co-workers, and the organization, but at the time I was tired of reporting to a small windowless room, tired of commuting from the East Bay to San Francisco, and bored with the actual work. I wanted to spend more time writing music and working on Loöq Records. In addition, I wanted to take a shot a writing screenplays.

The Lost Years

Over the new few years I went through some working-from-home growing pains.

Read More

Creative Output — Setting an Effective Quota

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On May 15

In Creative Work/Career, Fiction Writing, Getting Organized, Metaprogramming, Writing

Ideal distraction.

Creative work is like sex.  If you always wait for the perfect conditions, you just won’t end up doing it very often.  Are you and your lover both incredibly horny, fully awake, and have unlimited time, a comfortable bed, and total privacy?  Excellent — you’ll have some great sex.  But if those are your prerequisites for doing it, you’ll have sex a lot less than the couple who goes for it even when one or both are sleepy, there’s a loud truck outside, somebody’s parents are stopping by any minute, and the only available surface is the kitchen table.

While there are plenty of possible reasons for regretting having sex, lack of perfect conditions is rarely one of them.  You’re almost always happy you did it, right?

Same thing with creative work.  If you wait for massive inspiration, a giant stretch of free time, complete funding, and a perfect workspace, you’re going to reduce your productivity by 99%.  Waiting for all the stars to align is a crap strategy.  To produce on a regular basis, you need to be able to push through less-than-ideal conditions (both external and internal).

Hemingway -- mirror boxer and quota user.

Work Ethic

Ideally, you’re so inspired by your idea that you lose track of time and the work flows like a cold mountain brook.  You wake up at 6am, get right to work, and are pulled away from your desk only by loud grumblings of your stomach or a fierce need to pee.

That happens to me a few days a year, but more often I have half an idea that I’m halfway interested in, and I need to push myself to poke around the space of possibility (to see if there’s anything in there worth pursuing).

Why push myself at all?  Why not take the path of least resistance and work only when I’m totally inspired?  After all, it’s not the like the world needs more electronic music, or novels, or blog posts.

The answer is simple and selfish.  I feel better when I produce.  Creativity is part of my identity.  It’s part of who I am and who I want to be.  Also, when I go too long without doing any creative work, I go nuts.  I become less fun to be around, and less fun to be.  I get irritable and cynical.

If you’re happy and fulfilled without pushing yourself to do the art (whatever it is), well, lucky you.  For the rest of us, it’s worth coming up with a system for not going crazy.

Creative Quotas

I’ve been experimenting with a new quota system for personal creative output.  Is it jarring to see the words “quota” and “creative” in the same sentence?  Many artists and writers use a quota system to help motivate themselves and set a standard and expectation for daily production.  Stephen King has used a 2000 word daily quota.  Hemingway’s was only 400 to 600 (but with his terse style that was enough).  Other writers (and artists and musicians) set a time quota — work for x hours a day.

I’ve tried both methods, and for me the productivity quota works better than “time worked.”  For a couple months I carefully tracked how many hours I was spending writing and working on music.  The result was interesting (I wasn’t working as many hours as I would have guessed), but not motivating.

In terms of music composition and production, I’m capable of spending many hours on a track making minor edits and tweaks, while not getting any closer to a workable draft.  On the other hand, if I have a clear quota to meet, I’m motivated to make the major changes that need to be made (writing new parts, working on the arrangement).  Even if the end result isn’t usable (I don’t publish everything I write), at least I can call it done and move on to the next project.

My current creative quota is to finish or draft a track or chapter a week, plus one blog post.  I’m in between novels at the moment (I’m outlining, but not yet writing), so my main focus is music.  My current project is a solo EP with apocalyptic and transcendent themes.  I’m also finishing up a Momu album, and working on some dance singles with Spesh.  Each week, either a rough draft or final master of a track gets done.  It’s a fairly easy quota to meet, but so far it’s been effective.  It helps me both in terms of getting started, and also not engaging in endless noodling once I have started.

A good guideline for setting a quota is to consider how much work you can get done under ideal circumstances (abundant inspiration, plenty of free time, a great studio with no interruptions) and then cut it in half (or one-third, or less).  Don’t set your quota at your maximum output — it’s unsustainable and you’ll just end up feeling discouraged when you don’t hit it.

Put in your time.

The Other Side of the Equation

A quota system will help on the quantity side of things, but a quota does nothing for quality.  How to keep the bar high?

1.  You might find that you make better work at a certain time of day.  Work then and only then.  Neal Stephenson noticed that his writing was good in the morning, and crap in the afternoon.  He stopped writing in the afternoon.

2.  Don’t make crap and try to fix it later.  Make it as good as it possibly can be, from the very start.

3.  Shoot for great, not good.  You may not hit it, but you may manage to avoid making crap.

4.  Show your work to just a few people with impeccable taste.  Pay attention to what they say.  If they note problems, those problems are probably real, and you need to deal with them in your work.

No One System

This post isn’t meant to be prescriptive.  Quotas may not work for you.  There are a million ways to kick yourself in the ass.  It’s also perfectly legitimate to refuse to game your own motivational system, and simply work when and if the urge strikes.  You may get less done, but maybe you’ll make better work.

The risk of waiting for inspiration is that the gears do get rusty.  If you work every day (or at least multiple times a week), then everything is lubed up.  It takes less time to get from a blank page (or sequencer, or canvas) to something halfway cool.

What’s the big payoff?  For me it’s that feeling when I look at or listen to what I’ve created and I’m surprised.  I made that?  Really?  Chasing that feeling is worth a little auto-ass-kicking.

The Inefficacy of Using Physical Objects as Reminder Flags

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On February 28

In Metaprogramming

Last week I stayed at my friend’s place in Seattle — a sort of writing retreat to work on my novel.  I made huge progress on the book, took long walks in some of the area old-growth forests, ate fantastic food, and relaxed — a good week.

My friend, in addition to being a gracious host (he might even qualify as a patron of the arts — we’ll see how my book turns out), is one of the neatest people I know.  Not neat as in neato, but neat as in meticulously clean.  His house is spotless.  Granted, I arrived minutes after the housekeeper had cleaned the place, but it’s obvious he’s organized and keeps his house in order.

Really?

This is something I aspire to.  Coming home, I immediately started cleaning our place — after you’ve been away you see your own abode (and its grime) with fresh eyes.  With a toddler in the house, cleaning feels like running up the down escalator — as I’m scrubbing the countertops she’s scattering playing cards on the floor; as I’m picking up the playing cards she’s leaving a trail of cheese crumbs in another room.  Still, at the moment, the house looks and feels pretty clean.

All this got me thinking about stuff, and how we process stuff in our lives.  The idea in particular I was thinking about — I think it’s from David Allen’s book Getting Things Done — is that it’s almost always a BAD idea to put or leave something on your desk or workspace as a reminder that you need to do something about it.

Unless you have a freakishly low number of things that you need to do in your life (that makes me think of Doris Lessing’s creepy story “To Room Nineteen”) then using the “put it there so I remember” method will lead to nothing except a messy desk.  In the more severe cases, this method can lead to a kind of personal geology; strata of object/to-do-item matrices teetering in unstable stacks.  After the initial layer becomes visually obscured, the “reminder” function ceases to operate and the entire layer devolves into undifferentiated junk.

Not my wife's desk.

What is the alternative?  My wife, frustrated with her own less-than-orderly workspace, happened to ask me that very question this morning.  (As an aside, I’ve been trying to get her to read the David Allen book for about seven years.  Periodically she’ll accept the book and place it on her desk, where it will sit, unread, until buried by other papers and items.)

Since I’d been thinking about the subject for the last couple days, I had an answer ready: don’t use stuff as a reminder; instead put the thing (whatever it is) away, and put whatever action is required on your to-do list.  Kia immediately understood and implemented the idea, and within half an hour her desk was transformed into a postmodern minimalist’s masturbation fantasy.  Okay, not quite, but it looked clean and organized, with only one pile of papers.  The rare book she needed to return went to the bookshelf.  Her passport (which needs renewing) went to the drawer.  And so on.

Most of the time I accumulate things to do faster than I can do them.  This imbalance is reconciled by the fact that some things never get done.  I’m fine with this reality — there will always be more possible actions than actual actions in life.  If it’s not going to get done, I’d rather have the doomed to-do item be represented as a line of text in my calendar software than a piece of crap on my desk.  The extra typing is well worth it.

Find the little kid.

In some cases, putting the object away (like returning a book to your bookshelf) may not even reduce the chance that you see it and remember to do something with it.  This comes back to the zero percent chance that the visual reminder trigger will work if you put anything on top if it.

The Joys of Throwing Out Long-term Plans and Lowering Quotas

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On January 22

In Creative Work/Career, Fiction Writing, Life Purpose & Goals, Metaprogramming, Writing

This year, instead of making New Year’s resolutions or making a list of goals for the year (something I’d done since 2006, with mixed success), I decided to take on one big goal for Q1, and leave the rest of 2010 unplanned.

My planning/goal-setting horizon has been getting shorter and shorter over the years.  I remember having grand life-arc type plans in college, and even as a child.  Once I entered the working world and decided I that I basically liked what I was doing (having my own music business and doing freelance database consulting), the “future-vision” shrunk to two or three years, and finally to one year.

Why shorten my planning horizon to a mere 3 months?

A big part of it has to do with reading Tim Ferriss’s blog and, more recently, reading his book The Four Hour Workweek.  Ferriss makes the point that long-term plans often function as dream deferrals.  Why start something now if it’s on the agenda for 2015?  The problem is, it’s too easy to defer those large, difficult, potentially life-changing actions indefinitely, perhaps so long that we die before we try.  This is true even if the deferred plan of action is a central part of our identity.  I’ve been thinking of myself as novelist since approximately age six, but it took me another thirty-four years to actually write my first novel.  Talk about procrastination.  Anything you’ve been putting off for thirty-four years?

Already a novelist in his own mind.

There’s a natural tension between identity and intention; some parts of our identity evolve out of performing the related actions (if you play soccer enough, you might start to feel like a soccer player), while in other areas the identity and intention come into being first (a high-school student decides to become a doctor and starts planning their academic path).  The distinction has less to do with the profession than it does with the character of the agent.  You could just as easily decide at a young age to become a professional soccer player, or, in your adult life, fall into practicing medicine (perhaps a weak example — of course you can’t just start practicing medicine without a medical degree — but many people do learn a great deal about human physiology as a hobby and end up giving informal health advice to their friends and family).

It’s the intention-related parts of our identity that are vulnerable to deferral, as opposed to the professions that sneak up on us.  For myself, writing is in the former category; computer programming and music production are in the latter.  Who knows why.  What about you?

EASIER SAID THAN DONE

I decided to take on one big, potentially life-changing goal in Q1 of 2010, and that was to write a first draft of my second novel.  It’s a big enough goal to get me excited and motivated, and simple enough to keep in my head every day without constant review (if you have fifteen goals for the year, it’s hard to remember them all — not to mention that by August half of them are irrelevant).

At the same time, I threw out any preconceptions about what the latter three-quarters of 2010 might look like.  Maybe Kia and I and our daughter will spend a few months working remotely from somewhere on the Mediterranean coast (I recently ran the numbers, this option could potentially be less expensive than our current lifestyle, especially if we can get in on some of that free European pre-school — you parents of young children living in the Bay Area know what I’m talking about).  Or, depending on the availability of Spesh or Mark Musselman, maybe there will be a new Jondi & Spesh or Momu album in the works.  In any case it’s exhilarating not knowing.

So — back to my grand plan.  I came up with what I thought was a fail-safe strategy to bang out novel #2.  I whipped out (or rather, clicked on) my digital calculator and figured out approximately how many words I would need to type every day in order to have a more-or-less novel length manuscript on my hard drive by March 31st.  I gave myself weekends off, as we don’t generally have childcare on the weekends (you try writing a novel while a two-year-old is clambering onto your lap demanding to look at pictures of choo-choo trains on your computer) and also planned on taking several “creative sabbatical” weeks where all I would do was write.

1150 words per day, on the regular working days.  That’s what the calculator said.  Okay, no problem.  My work was cut out for me.  Here’s what the first few writing days in January looked like, in terms of actual output:

Day 1: 297 words
Day 2: 402 words
Day 3: 351 words

Ouch.

I wasn’t spending eight hours each day in front of the laptop — nor was this ever the plan.  I still needed to eat, after all, and running Loöq Records takes some time.  I was hoping to hit my quota after two or three hours of focused work, first thing in the morning.

I liked the material I was coming up with, but at this rate it would take me all year to get a draft.  I kept thinking of Stephen King’s observation that after three months, “the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave radio during a period of severe sunspot activity.” Nope, don’t want that to happen.

It was my favorite goofy-hat-wearing vloggers, Tim Ferriss (again) and Kevin Rose, that came to the rescue, with this video post.  It’s long and (as the title warns) random, but somewhere towards the end Tim makes a reference to a story of how IBM achieved the highest sales by setting the lowest quotas.  The idea was to boost productivity by removing pressure, and in IBM’s case it worked.  Tim Ferriss is currently applying the low quota idea to his own writing project, with the goal of writing “two crappy pages a day.”

That sounded good to me.  I needed less pressure.  The 1150 word quota was looming over me every morning like a flying Nazgûl.  I reduced my quota to 750 words a day.  The next two days my word counts were as follows:

Day 1: 1147 words
Day 2: 1120 words

Go figure.  This was just two days ago, so we’ll see if the trend continues, but at the moment I’m feeling the lower quota.  I think the point of a quota is to get one’s ass in gear, and to have a minimum standard of productivity.  Quality is more important than quantity, but you can’t get to quality unless you produce something. Ideally, you get started and catch a wave, you achieve flow … then you hit your goal before you know it.  But for me having a quota is useful; it’s a guardian against sloth and inertia.

Did Rodin have a sculpting quota?

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