Creative Cogitation

Update June 23:  I came to real­ize I had a strong urge to cheat on my plan using my mobile (Black­berry) . I found myself reach­ing for it every­time I saw the red light flash­ing.  It was unintentional/automatic.  I have had to delib­er­ately not touch it.  So right now it is sit­ting face down so I can’t see the red light flash­ing, although I know it is…  The exper­i­ment con­tin­ues.  I think check­ing my com­mu­ni­ca­tions 2 times a day should be enough. I have just read in a blog  by Lisa Baron ethat I may want to put off the morn­ing check in until after I get some stuff done as part of a time man­age­ment strat­egy.  OK… Maybe I’ll give that a whirl or not.

The first cou­ple of days were bad.  I was def­i­nitely going through with­drawal.  I didn’t get any­thing done-I just sort of laid around and felt my way through it.  Like the urge to respond to the Black­berry, it felt odd not to enter my office even as the lap­top bea­coned and to limit the amount of time I spent doing the com­mu­ni­ca­tions thing.  I mean there is stuff going on… you know?  But the world did not explode because I did not find out about this or that immediately; I con­fess, I love twitter-I find out about so much faster than the eye-witness new­clones can relate it to me on the idiot box.

So yes­ter­day I actu­ally got some work done.  And my mind is now think­ing in terms of pri­or­i­ties instead of let­ting this machine move me around my day.  I will be launch­ing the project I started this week­end 100 paint­ings in 100 days soon.  But first I need to get some other stuff taken care of. 

(is the inter­net slow today or what?) Wait­ing for a page to load so I can copy stuff from it…

Cindy Lou Who, con­stant com­pan­ion in my office, who knows she can always get ran­dom atten­tion from me in here.

Any­way, you got any time man­age­ment tips that can be assim­i­lated by the artis­tic heart?  Have you made peace with your elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion junky mon­key?  Love to hear from you. 

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.

UPDATE June 21:  I sur­vived a week­end of push­ing myself away from the com­puter.  I wish I could say I got a lot done, but I didn’t-I felt like I was miss­ing some­thing.  It was hard-I admit it I am now a social net­work­ing junkie.  I logged in once on Sat­ur­day and then by Sun­day I had a whole bunch of stuff that I had not seen before; one per­son com­plained it was hard to fol­low my tweets as they did not remem­ber what I was respond­ing to a day later.  But on Sun­day I only logged in one more time and got off within 10 min­utes or so.  I have decided 1 time per day is not going to be enough to keep up with my stuff.  Today its busi­ness as usual.  But I am see­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties…  So the exper­i­ment will con­tinue.  Dur­ing the week I need to work on my com­puter, but Iwill only check my social media and email 2 times at most and I will only be on the com­puter when I have to.  Of course all that free time gave me another idea about how to spend more time on my com­puter.  Eek.    More later. 

June 19: OK. I am in com­mu­ni­ca­tion over­load.  I find myself in front of this device all the time.  I spend so much time in my office that I grow cats who get very com­fort­able on me while I am work­ing.  It is not easy to work with a 15 pound feline demand­ing atten­tion, which I guess is their way of say­ing, “Step away from the box…”

Me, work­ing at my com­puter with a help­ful feline in my lap and another on my desk gen­er­ally knock­ing crap over.

I have come to feel like my desk has a grav­i­ta­tional pull that stronger than the rest of the earth.  I am in orbit around it reg­u­larly and it is very hard to pull myself away from it-and I always seem to wind up right back in front of it.  Sure my day job forces me to be here at least part of the time, but more and more I find myself drawn into email, blog­ging, online mar­ket­ing, social media and other elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tion to the point where I believe it is tak­ing too much of my time. 

Resolved, I will start bud­get­ing (limiting) my time in front of the glow­ing screen so that I can get out  and do stuff in the big blue box too.  I was think­ing I would try to stay away from the com­puter all week­end, but I think that is prob­a­bly not real­is­tic so I may just need to get a timer or some­thing to limit the amount of time I sit here.

We’ll see how it goes.  Step­ping away from the com­puter… as soon as I post this, link to it on my web­site and post it to social media-see what I mean?

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.