Posts tagged as:

rhythm

slices of slife

by John on September 30, 2008

Welcome to Creativityist -- a blog devoted to finetuning your Mac, your workflow, and your soul to develop your creativity. I hope you'll consider subscribing to the free RSS feed.

Last week, I mentioned the Slife review I wrote for MacSparky. If you haven’t read that, I hope you will, because I want to talk a little bit more about how Slife has been helpful for me.

The short version is this: “Slife is a free program that runs in the background and measures how you spend your time. After it has been running for a while, you can go back and evaluate what you’ve been up to. It gives you a visual breakdown of what apps you’ve been working in, hour by hour.”

Most meaningful for me is a feature called activities. Slife allows the user to cluster different apps, documents, and websites into defined activities, so you can track how you are spending your time in larger segments. I have defined four different activities to see how I am spending my time: creating, collecting, connecting and planning/maintaining. I don’t see any of these as being superior or inferior to the others, but my goal in tracking this is to see how I can spend more time producing and creating.

I only define my activities based on apps. To break it down to webpages and documents would take more time than it is worth. But, here are the apps I used to define each activity:

  • Creating - This category includes anything where I am producing or developing ideas through a transition from mind to ‘page’. Among the programs would be the iWork suite, the Adobe CS3 suite, Scrivener, Yojimbo, CSSEdit, and MS Office.
  • Collecting - This is information gathering mode. It is sometimes hard research and sometimes just engaging with the ideas of others. Apps include Firefox, NetNewsWire, my Bible software, and Stanza (which is a beautiful ebook reader).
  • Connecting - Mail.app, Twitterific, iChat. I think that list speaks for itself.
  • Planning/Maintaining - iCal, OmniFocus, Address Book, Slife.

The biggest hangup with this system comes with the Collecting activity. My web browser gets used for a lot and so this activity is bloated in its stats. For example, a site like Facebook fits better in connected, but, as easy as it may be, I don’t want to spend that much extra time setting up Slife.

So what is the use of all this? First of all, as I mentioned above, my goal is to increase how much time I spend in Creating mode. Slife offers some accountability for how well I am doing with that. (Guilt isn’t included, but I’m able to produce that on my own.)

More important, Slife is helping me see my daily rhythms. The chart above shows how much active time I have spent on my laptop today, broken down by hour. The red shows how much time I have spent in Creating mode. By paging back through previous days, I can look to see the trends for what times of day I am finding the most creative energy.

Give Slife a look. I think it will be worth your time…or at least it might help you remember what your time is worth.

Popularity: 19% [?]

{ 3 comments }

rhythm vs. routine

by John on June 30, 2008

For the past few weeks, I’ve had not a sense of rhythm or routine. we’ve been in the midst of packing and moving our family from Seattle to Austin. My life is literally stuck in boxes, and I can’t wait to get out.

This is all helping me to see that creativity doesn’t just happen when I make space for it. I’ve had a few chunks of space in the last few weeks where I thought about doing some writing or brainstorming on a few projects, but I just haven’t had the impetus to do it.

Even though I talk a lot about making space to be creative, I’m aware that creativity doesn’t just happen when I make space for it. It builds over time to make that space productive when it comes. A few times over the past few weeks, I’ve longed for a return to some kind of normal routine. But, I don’t really like the idea of routine. The word suggests a cycle that doesn’t require much intentionality.

I think what I am really longing for is a return to rhythm. A cycle of input and output, rest and work, reflection and action. There is an intention that comes with the idea of rhythm that better prepares one to take a hold of those moments of creative opportunity.

Popularity: 20% [?]

{ 0 comments }