Thoughts on Harnessing Your Creativity During COVID-19 (Or Not….)

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If you’re like me, you’ve been spending a lot more time at home lately, which is both a good and a bad thing.

It’s bad because we’re missing out on a lot of cool stuff, including events, vacations, hangouts with friends, and even the simple pleasures of being in public spaces like restaurants, coffee shops, or (for me) the town library.  Being cooped up inside for too long can also have some pretty nasty effects on our mental health, and that’s not cool either.

On the flip side, more time at home is good because it gives you a lot more of that precious commodity known as Time.  Even if you’re working from home and telecommuting keeps you just as busy, you’re still eliminating your actual commuting time, which adds up fast.  So that should mean that Continue reading »

Once in a While I Get Really Depressed, and That’s OK

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I went through a pretty rough patch a few weeks ago—like, stay in bed until four o’clock on a Sunday rough, stomach’s so upset you can’t finish your lunch rough, harboring doubts about your entire life’s direction rough.  The worst of this miserable cesspool overcame me for two and a half days (about 54 hours by my count), but its effects lingered for the next two weeks as smaller problems that wouldn’t normally bother me started hitting me hard—and that was all kinds of not fun.

I’d rather not share the specifics of what set off this depressive episode, though in retrospect I’ve realized that it was caused by a lot of different factors, including Day Job problems, personal issues, Coronavirus risks, the fact that it’s fucking cold and murky during the Toyama winter, and Continue reading »

2020 Update: How Often Do I Check My Email?

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Back in the early days of this blog I wrote about my problems checking email too often during the day.  At the time, too much email checking was leading to all kinds of distractions while I dealt with the little replies and messages coming at me from all directions.  To solve this problem I set a strict limit: I’d check my email two, maybe three times a day, at set times of the day, and absolutely no more.

This worked pretty well for a while until I got a new office Day Job that left me with all kinds of slow time during the day…so I started pulling out my phone and checking email during work lulls hoping for some stimulation.  As you might expect, this led me to be more scatterbrained, less productive, and ultimately more tired during the day—which you can read all about in my second e-mail checking update.

The downfalls of too much email checking are numerous, Continue reading »

Sometimes I Procrastinate by Doing Something Productive

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I’ve been really busy for the last, I don’t know, seven or so years, and I’ve been trying to pin down why.  I’ve identified a few different factors that lead to my constant scrambling, which, in no particular order, are…

  1. Wasting time on social media/texting/phone checking when I should be getting shit done
  2. Taking on too many projects
  3. Keeping my schedule intentionally full so I can harness the extra energy that comes from being productive

Number 1 is clearly terrible and I’m actively trying to eradicate any lingering control that social media and my phone have over my time, while Number 2 is a mixed blessing, since more projects = more opportunities.  Number 3, though, can be pretty beneficial, since I feel better and more productive when I’m busy instead of bored. Continue reading »

Working on New Stuff Always Gets Me Excited: Miranda Reeder of Minyan/Harlevin Visual Novels

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Miranda Reeder writes and draws visual novels (kind of like graphic novels, except you play them on the computer) under the name Minyan and the label Harlevin, where she has over 1,400 followers on Itch.io.  Her VNs include Arena Circus, The Pretenders Guild, Mnemonic Devices, and Lilith Hall, and her current project with Fablesoft Studios, Twisted: A Dark Fairytale, raised over $2,300 on Kickstarter in October 2019.

I first met Miranda in Toyama, Japan, where she spent three years in the JET program teaching English.  After leaving Japan she returned to Ohio to pursue a master’s in Japanese translation at Kent State University, and over winter break we talked via Skype about staying motivated, balancing creativity with Day Job work, and sharing her passion with her family. Continue reading »

Here’s What I’m Working on RIGHT Now (Fall 2019 Edition)

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It helps me a lot to sit down and write about my current projects and creative goals (as opposed to just thinking about them), as well as what kind of progress I’m making toward them. This is a lot more helpful than keeping them in my head, where they swim around in the nebulous stormcloud that is my creative work life so I can’t see them with the proper perspective.

I try to be honest about my progress and setbacks on this blog because I don’t want to fall into a trap of pretending that I’m doing a kick-ass job if that’s not really the case. Pretending you’re doing better than you are is pretty unhelpful because 1) It alienates you from other people you can’t be open with, and 2) It hinders you from actually improving the way you organize your time because you’re living out a kind of fantasy where everything’s going just peachy.

Anyway, enough with the intro: here’s what I’m working on RIGHT NOW: Continue reading »

When You’re Busy, You Get More Done

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This week’s post is going to seem obvious, but it’s actually worth some thought.

Last week I had a few things to do, but not too much—my To-Do list was nice and short with no looming deadlines and plenty of time to work on long-term projects.  As a result, I took my evenings at a slower pace, didn’t work any late nights, and read a few hundred pages of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (a badass novel full of savage beatings and do-it-yourself abortions that makes The Grapes of Wrath look like a kids book).

It was a pretty chill week, and as it went on I found myself taking longer breaks, scrolling through more social media, and just plain staring into space when I could have been working—or at least doing something I enjoyed. Continue reading »

How I Think About Money Now That I’m Out of Debt

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Last week something happened that should have been a momentous, once-in-a-lifetime experience.  It should have led to endless celebrations and singing from rooftops and cavorting drunkenly naked through the streets in ecstatic glee at this thing I’d been looking forward to for well over a decade and a half.

I am now completely debt free.

Paying off that final loan should have caused me to get really excited, but it didn’t—it just felt like making a regular bank transfer.  Maybe the anticlimax was partly because I won’t get to mark the big zero down on my net worth spreadsheet until next month, or maybe it was because I made the payment Continue reading »

Six Factors I Consider When Prioritizing My Worktime

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In the real world of getting things done, we all have to make tough decisions about how we spend our time.  This involves sorting through a shitload of tasks, which I do by making To-Do lists and using my kick-ass new whiteboard system, and that others do by keeping Bullet Journals or using other systems.

Every workday, as part of my morning routine I make my bed and then write out a list of what I’m going to do that day, in the approximate order I’m going to do it in.  I’ve talked about this process many times on this blog, but there’s one crucial thing I haven’t yet addressed: how exactly do I decide what goes on the list???

More and more, I’ve noticed several distinct factors that affect how I choose to spend my time. Continue reading »

Whiteboard Visual Organizers Are Awesome: Part 2

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Last week I wrote about my new whiteboard organizational system and how it’s helped me divide my goals, projects, and daily life habits into different categories so I can keep track of what I’m working on.  In addition, by giving each category a rating from 1 to 10, I can easily see how well I’m doing in each category, and what needs improving.

The categories I made are going to look different than the categories you might be thinking about for your own goals and projects.  Several of mine are Japan-specific, and a few are specific to my goals as a writer.  I’m listing them here so you can get an idea of what I’m trying to improve in my own life, but also so you might get some ideas for how to sort your own future goals.  In no particular order: Continue reading »

Whiteboard Visual Organizers Are Awesome: Part 1

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Organizing your shit is hard.  I don’t mean your physical shit like papers or clothes or books, which I tend to do a pretty good job keeping track of—I’m talking about organizing your ideas.

Organizing my ideas is hard because there’s a lot of things I’m trying to keep track of on any given day, week, month, or year, ranging from big-picture shit like how in God’s name I’m going to get my writing out into the world to little things like remembering to get a haircut.  If ideas were physical objects I could see, line up, and sort using a predetermined system, I’d have an easier time dealing with them, but because ideas are non-visual and frustratingly ephemeral, I’m prone to forgetting them or not knowing how to bring them to fruition (lame…).

Writing my goals and tasks down on paper so I can visualize them has been a HUGE help to me over the years—I started keeping schedule books back in 2011 and never looked back.  More recently, though, I realized that I was still having trouble keeping track of the dozens, if not HUNDREDS of things I want to do, Continue reading »

I Used to Have This Weird Afterschool Addiction to Computer Minesweeper and In Some Ways I’m Still Dealing With It

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I haven’t played Minesweeper (or any preinstalled Windows game) in at least five years, and probably longer than that.  Back in the days of Windows 3.1 though, Minesweeper was definitely the shit.

This would have been back in the mid- to late-‘90s when I was in middle school and my computer use was restricted to the family desktop we kept in the computer room (which is itself a laughable concept now) and that I had to fight my younger brothers for on a regular basis.  This was in the days of dial-up internet when doing anything online required real planning and thought, so most of my computer use back then consisted of games and word processing.

…except that we didn’t have that many games because our outdated, clunky PC had trouble running them.  So I found myself playing Continue reading »