July 2013

There were 2 posts published in July 2013 (this is page 1 of 1).

Nobody mention writing

After announcing to the world last week how excellent I was at writing every day, I’ve not written anything at all this week. I certainly found that little anecdote funny. It’s almost as though by acknowledging the magical writing process, I immediately invalidated it.

What I have been doing this week is re-visiting the somewhat-laboured joy of my Android 4.0-running HP Touchpad, which I picked up nearly two years ago after that time when HP sold off all their Touchpads for not much money that time. I’ve been waiting for the new generation of Nexus 7s to (finally) make an appearance, and I wanted to get re-familiarised with the whole Android tablet experience, and boy it’s good.

I’m a huge fan of two reading apps on my phone: Pocket and Flipboard, and their tablet equivalents are seriously nice. They link together very nicely, creating a very smooth content-browsing and content-consumption experience. Even my mum gets how Flipboard works. If you’ve not checked ’em out, I’d definitely do so.

Pic is from somewhere near Burling Gap, West Sussex, where I went earlier on.

Write every day

I keep seeing the “don’t break the chain” productivity hack being mentioned again and again as a way of getting things done. The premise is fairly straightforward; to make sure you do a certain thing you want/need to do, you do it every day, keep track of it and don’t break that chain of doing-ness.

I can see it working in some situations, but especially with creative work, there’s dubious value in doing something sub-standard for the sake of it. Do you, for example, absolutely have to do your thing? What if you’re doing something else? Out with friends! It seems to have the potential to dominate other activities.

On those grounds, I would generally never consider taking on such a scheme. Whilst I’ve kinda tried it on a smaller scale before (oh hey, blogging here at least once a week), writing every day? Meeeh. Not really one for me. Routine has a habit of becoming mundane.

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