I can’t get into the zone
There have been some posts recently on Creating Passionate Users and a few others linked from there about dealing with interruptions.
I'm really identifying with some of the themes.
One is that I really can't get "into the zone" on anything now days. There are various reasons for that, but some of it's because...
I can't seem to disconnect myself from the information stream. I recently pruned my blog list, I'll probably prune my comics list again (though I try to keep it fighting trim), and I'm going to have to find some way to manage the Strobist.com Flickr group. It hit 4000 members, and the owner has no experience managing a community, and says, "I want off-topic posts to be okay"... which means 150 posts a day and very little useful information.
I'm really suffering from the problem of the information on the net doubling what seems like every other day. A couple years ago, I could count game design theory blogs on one hand. Now I can't begin to count them. So I quit reading nearly all of them, because they keep linking to each other and I can't avoid getting sucked in. There's more photography information on the net than you might believe. A guy can spend all darn day just reading crap, trying to find something useful. What what's really aggravating about it is that when something is useful, it usually gets set aside for serious consideration later, but it doesn't happen. And all of that really just keeps me from developing my own ideas.
Ironically, I'm just adding to the noise here.
But I can't just disconnect. I'm extremely bothered by the idea of missing out on useful ideas if I unsubscribe from Treasure Tables (I did) or Pyramid Magazine (I did) or the Strobist.com Flickr group (I'm seriously considering it).
And the problem isn't so much that these things take up a lot of time in themselves. That brings us back to the CPU post... all this net stuff allows me to chop up my time in into lots and lots of useless chunks. I look back at my day and wonder where the heck all my time went... how did a bunch of blogs and a handful of mailing lists take up eight hours? They didn't, but they facilitated my pissing away eight hours none the less. I spend most of my time flitting from task to task (laundry, blogs, email, blogs, organizing my desk, blogs, fiddling with thinking about what I ought to be doing, blogs, etc). And I know that if I'm going to, say, write or podcast, I need two or three hours of uninterrupted time to be productive. (Some don't, but I do. It's the ADD thing and needing to get into the zone to really be creative.)
I think some of the behavior has developed because I'm rarely alone. I have a six-year-old in the house who can't seem to comprehend when I need to be left alone. (I work from home on Friday mornings and not even, "Daddy's at work, pretend he's not here," stops him from interrupting me ten minutes later.) And now that he goes to bed at 9 PM and I go to bed at 10:30, I have very little personal time during the week when he's in bed.
I share the computer room with my wife, and she'll interrupt me with whatever random junk she's reading on the web. I really need to get back into the habit of wearing headphones... I get into the zone much more readily. It seems like just about anything can be a distraction.
So I think there's a plan in this post and the first post the other day. The idea of "sacred time" and the need to be (virtually) alone in order to get into the zone... I need to look at the weekly schedule and find my "personal" time and carve out chunks that are purely mine to do with as I please (instead of finding myself with a four-hour afternoon and saying, "I really ought to upgrade this software," not wanting to do that, but being unable to do anything else serious because of guilt), and find a way to be really alone... either chase my wife out of the house, or put on headphones and tune out the world.
I also need to prioritize my hobbies... there are too many things that are purely hobby but all of which require some serious attention to get them where I want, and I can't figure out what to work on. Working on one neglects the other, and I end up neglecting them all because of that.
I'll focus on that Friday afternoon I have off first. Nathan's in school most of the time, and I can get Karen to leave me alone if I'm clear about needing the space. But eventually, when we find a new house and move, I need to have my own personal space as well. This sharing an office isn't working out so well anymore because we're just interrupting each other too often.
WeeklyShot is the predictable
Along the whole photo theme, I follow a few photo blogs, including WeeklyShot.org. It's a cool deal... they have a different theme every week, and only artists who have been invited can post pictures. And they have a high bar, so the photos are all very high quality and tasteful.
Last week's theme was "Curves" and, predictably, that brought out more than a couple nudes, which isn't very common for WeeklyShot. But they were high quality and tasteful. A far cry from Flickr's "picture of my girl friend with her shirt off in the living room with a can of beer on the table and the TV in the background."
This week's theme is "Look Up". And the moment I saw that, I thought, "If this were a Flickr group, we'd get twenty 'up the skirt' shots in the first six hours." Apparently, WeeklyShot isn't immune. But being WeeklyShot, it's actually got an artistic look and hardly even borders on being sexy.
Lions at the zoo
After that "life sucks" dump, let's say something positive... another reason for firing up the personal blog was to post pictures from my new camera. So here's my favorite animal picture from a recent trip to the zoo. (We were there to shoot portraits of my son, so my favorite shots aren't of animals.)
I got a Canon Digital Rebel XT for Christmas, and this was taken with a Sigma 100-300mm zoom. Hand-held... but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to try out the long lens. It's a bit soft, but you can't tell at this size. I had it blown up to 11x14" to hang in my office and it looks pretty good.
The day was cool, and the fake rock mother and cubs are lying on is heated, which encourages them into photogenic poses.