They say that creativity comes from chaos.
I agree. My room is a mess. I’m also full of new ideas. Unfortunately, I have almost no direction and respond instantly to stress. I have a hunch that it’s because my mind is also a mess.
I’ve got to give some serious props to my morning pages and The Artist’s Way. The morning pages are this: when you wake up, before anything else, write three pages longhand of the first things that come to your head. Don’t stop, or edit, or try to make it good.
Normally, I wake up, worry, and turn those fears into a todo list. Today, I woke up, wrote them all down, kept writing, and writing, revisiting the fears. Then, I put them away to be ignored. I meditated and exercised. When I got home, I felt better. Instead of diving right into the work I should be doing, I realized I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. I had never really planned out my life beyond putting out fires.
Last night, I had so many open tabs, my computer was slowing down. This was common for me. I thought of open tabs as a list of important information I couldn’t get to. That made me feel like a failure. Later, I would try to go through them, opening up another 20 tabs in the process.
Last night, I saw them as a long list of desires: things I found momentarily interesting, or things I wanted to learn for the future, but may not need right now. There was a video on how a specific programming function worked, a bunch of tabs on Tim Ferris, others on historical events I don’t care about.
I closed almost everything.
What was left were a few tabs with important info I was ignoring: potential jobs, important emails, applications to programs. Amid this open-tab-mess-of-my-id, were a few pieces of actual work. I still felt disorganized and didn’t know where to start.
I decided to do something super boring. I created a list of lists.
I went for a walk to the grocery store. On the way, I wrote down what I wanted to do with my job search and where I was getting stuck. ‘I want to find a job, apply for it, and interview for it. Okay, what are the individual parts? I haven’t interviewed yet, so I can ignore that. I want to apply for a job, but I want one I care about. Okay, I also need a job soon. Okay, I can find a bunch of jobs, put them in a list, and sort through them. Then, I can apply for them. Okay, so, it’s going to change how much attention I pay to them based on where they are in the list.’
This logic is mind-numbingly boring if you aren’t focused on getting a job. But it was important for me. I needed to map out, not the greater ideas I was going for, but the specific parts. I had opportunities where I could be doing a bunch of similar tasks in a row (which is usually faster,) but was spending half of my day figuring out what to do next.
My list currently has four parts:
-A list of places I can find jobs (companies, job boards, etc,)
-A list of jobs I have found and would like to apply to
-A list of resources I can read about the job hunt
-A list of networking opportunities or events
I want to make choices at the beginning of the week that restrict what I’m doing for the rest of it: “This is how I will organize my job search for now, so I can spend my week applying for jobs instead of worrying about how I am supposed to be applying for jobs. At the end of the week, I’ll look at how well that worked.”
I set goals which are restrictive in the same way. I will sit down and find just 20 jobs. Not 100, not 10. I don’t have to apply for them while I’m searching. When I’m done, I can do other stuff. Am I going to read a book while I do that? No. Grocery shopping? No. I’m going to find 20 jobs.
It’s a simple thing some people may take for granted, but for me it’s a huge step. Time is valuable, and I want to spend it doing something I have decided is valuable.
This is a far cry from what I used to do.
1) Wake up
2) Be consumed with fear and guilt
3) Turn fear and guilt into a todo list
4) Get a lot of things done maybe
5) Burn out and feel guilty
6) Not remember or understand what I did
Now I will
1) Wake up
2) Journal, Meditate, Exercise
3) Organize my goals and activities
4) Do them
5) Evaluate how well my day went
6) Have time to enjoy my life with friends
By planning out goals for the longer term, I don’t feel the same crushing emotional disappointment as I do day to day.
