Anti-Email and Phone Checking Challenge: How Am I Doing?

Comment

Ever since the birth of this blog I’ve been grappling with how best to avoid electronic distractions, since it comes with the territory of managing a creative life.

In a damning scourge of anti-productivity, the same laptop, smartphone, browser window, and email account that we use to take care of productive work tasks also lead to horrible distractions.  How many times have you gone on Facebook to check the spelling of someone’s name and ended up poring through old photos?  How many Wikipedia rabbit holes have you wandered down when pausing for a quick fact check?  And worst of all, how much time have you burned through watching YouTube videos during work time because the algorithm Continue reading »

A Fond Farewell to My Old Office…

Comment

Last week in General Ian Life News: I moved to a new apartment.

The move itself was a fairly easy one, and one I’d been planning for a long time, to an apartment in the same town close to where I was living before.  The move itself went incredibly smoothly, since I had plenty of help and the new apartment was so close to my old place that we could easily shuttle things over using multiple car trips.  This was in sharp contrast to previous moves, where I’ve had to scramble and dash around to be out of my old place by a firm deadline.

While I’m very much looking forward to having my own place again (especially once everything’s finally set up!), in this post I want to say a warm goodbye to my old office, where I had a lot of good times and did a lot of meaningful work.
Continue reading »

Getting Back on Track After Being Sick…

Comment

For the past few years I’ve found myself getting a nasty sinus cold around the first week of April—two years ago after a long day of exploring a cherry blossom park in Joetsu, Japan, and last year when I was preparing the pre-orders for MFA Thesis Novel.  And this year, the same thing happened again.

I’d been getting a bit of a sore throat in the mornings and at night for a week or so, but it never lasted long.  Last Wednesday, though, I found myself with a bad runny nose that got worse throughout the day, and after crashing hard that night, I woke up the next day too tired to do much of anything.

I write about this in detail not because I want to share a play-by-play of being sick (because not only is that gross, but it’s unnecessary storytelling-wise), but to emphasize that sickesses come up unexpectedly, often at bad times when we have other things going on, creating real repercussions for how we deal with them.  Charging forward with your regular routine even when you’re sick is rarely if ever a good choice: not only will you not be at your best and likely make mistakes, Continue reading »

Fixed Mindsets vs. Growth Mindsets: A Way of Looking at the World

Comment

Have you ever noticed how some people tend to persevere through challenges by doing their best, while others see challenges as beyond their reach and give up?

Think about the last bad day you had.  Maybe you got chewed out at work, something went wrong with your computer, you made a mistake at home, or you had a fight with a friend.  Maybe you found yourself in a situation where there seemed to be no way out, or where a solution seemed completely outside your reach.

When the bad day was over, did you think about ways that you could actively work to improve your situation?  Or, did you simply accept what happened as inevitable, as being completely outside of your control?

The difference between the two lies in Fixed Mindsets and Growth Mindsets, a concept pioneered by Stanford social scientist Carol S. Dweck about how ingrained patterns of thinking affect our ability to deal with challenges Continue reading »

The Freelance Life vs the Employee Life Part 2: The Drawbacks

Comment

Last week I dove into the differences in mindset that separate freelance workers from regular full-time employees: things like how you view your job, how you schedule your time, and how you relate to coworkers. (If you missed that post, definitely check it out before you read this one!)

I had a lot to say (and the post title definitely grabbed people’s attention!), but I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about the negative aspects of working for yourself as well, since it’s not all wine and roses.

Interestingly, when I talk to full-time employees about differences in our working lives, a lot of them are quick to point out the cons of self-employment, which they’ve clearly given a lot of thought to.  In some cases, though, I think they focus on the cons because they don’t know how they would handle them if they were working for themselves.

I recently heard an entrepreneur on a podcast say that even though starting a business in the internet age is easier and involves less risk than at any point in history, people still feel scared to try it.  That’s because they’re stuck in a pre-internet mindset, where working for yourself involves a lot of start-up capital and could cause you to lose everything Continue reading »

The Freelance Life vs the Employee Life Part I: The Benefits

Comment

Since coming back to the US last year after three-plus years of living abroad, I noticed a lot of things had changed.  And one of those things was the people around me.

More specifically, I noticed a lot of my friends complaining about their jobs.  They talk about problems with their bosses, suffering through boring meetings, dealing with checked-out coworkers, and even worrying about layoffs.  My friends who work for big companies in particular talk about things like salary negotiations and jumping ship to make more money at a different company.  They also talk about retirement like it’s the end of a long, harrowing journey where their work will finally be over.

These are all things I don’t deal with in my own work, so I often feel left out of these conversations with little to add.

That’s why I wanted to write this post about what makes a Freelance Life different from a Regular Employee Life.  I’m less interested in technical details like taxes, getting paid, and how freelance workers get jobs, and more in the mental experiences that separate regular employees from freelance creative workers like me Continue reading »

How to Get the Most Out of a Creative Work Break

Comment

I’m at an odd point in my work routine, and thought I’d reflect on why.

On Wednesday, March 1st, I finished Draft 3 of my Secret New Novel, which I started in January and have been working on four days a week (give or take) ever since.  This development came after finishing Draft 1 in August and Draft 2 in December, which means I’ve been working continuously on this novel for almost a full year.

I want to let Draft 3 sit a bit before diving back in, so part of my work plan for March involves pausing active novel revisions so I can type up the revisions I’ve already made on to the computer, which I estimate to be a 30-35 hour job.  Most of the heavy revisions were in the opening chapters (which thus take longer to retype), and now that those are over with, I’ve settled into a routine of typing out two chapters a day with the goal of finishing by March 17th.

However, typing is different from revising: I like to do it at the end of the workday while listening to music, and it requires a LOT less mental energy than sitting down to actively edit a draft.  This means that while I still have a big typing project to work on (in addition to all the other things on my backlog list!), the type of work I’m doing has changed significantly Continue reading »

March 2023 Novel Update: Third Draft Complete, Typing in Progress…

Comment

The title says it all: last Wednesday at approximately 11:00am Eastern Standard time, I finished Draft 3 of my Secret New Novel.

This comes after several weeks of careful planning, when I counted out the number of writing days necessary to finish Draft 3 if I edited at the rate of one chapter per day.  Though my initial plan was to be finished on Monday, February 27th, some extra difficulties with the final chapters put me behind, so I needed the extra two days to bring the ending up the level I wanted.

The February 27th deadline wasn’t a firm one by any means—it was more of a way to keep myself on track so I could plan the weeks leading up to finishing (which included mostly writing days) and the weeks after I finished (which will include mostly typing days).  So, I made sure to build in a few extra days where I could write in the mornings if I needed to.

Draft 3 is REALLY important because it’s the draft I’m going to send to beta readers (basically, readers who’ll take a look at the full novel draft with an eye for giving feedback).  It also represents the point where I’ll finally, at long last, reveal what the Secret New Novel is actually about on this blog, which is pretty exciting (stay tuned!). Continue reading »

Can Commuting Help You De-Stress?

Comment

One of my all-time favorite blog posts is about how much I hate commuting—both because of the cost of the gas and the time spent on the road that basically counts as unpaid worktime.  I felt this most painfully back in 2011, when I was working an office job and driving 46 miles per day round trip.  When I did the math, I found this was costing me $33.50 in gas per week, which came out to 84 cents per hour, or 7% of my total paycheck.  Yikes!

There was also the matter of time: because I was going in early to beat rush hour, my 8 hour workday turned into a 9.5 hour day total, adding an extra 7.5 hours per week that I could have spent on other things.  Double yikes!

Though I’ve also spent time commuting by train and bike, the experience made me think more about where my time and money were going, and how much more efficient it would be if I didn’t have to spend so much of both on commuting.

Though I wrote this post back in 2016, in the post-pandemic age, I and a lot of other people work from home and don’t have to commute at all.  This has given me a lot more time during my workweek while also drastically lowering how much I spend on gas, which should mean Continue reading »

February 2023 Novel Update: Making a Plan, Getting It Done…

Comment

It’s been a while since I updated you on my Secret New Novel progress, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been hard at work.

Back in December I reached a crucial point with my novel: I finished the Second Draft that I started back in August.  The Second Draft solved a LOT of the problems that were plaguing the First Draft, which was really rough and full of holes.  The Second Draft, in contrast, eliminated some unnecessary scenes, fleshed out a lot of vague ideas, and ironed out some major issues that made the rough First Draft, well, rough.

After finishing the Second Draft I took a two-week break for Christmas and New Years, which I also spent getting caught up on miscellaneous projects, tasks, and cleaning.  This was also important because it gave me some space away from the novel and helped me come back to it in January with a fresh perspective.

And that fresh perspective was incredibly helpful. Continue reading »

Doing More With Video as a Creative Person

2 Comments

I think a lot about some advice I got from the Youtuber and speedrunner Karl Jobst during our Day Job interview: Everyone in a creative field should be using Youtube, because whatever you’re doing, it can only help you build your platform.

There’s a lot of truth to this.  On one level, people watch a lot of YouTube—like, billions of people watching billions of videos racking up zillions of views.  The YouTube algorithm also drives viewers to keep watching, to check out new YouTubers, and to watch videos related to what they’ve already seen.  So, not only is YouTube a HUGE outlet for sharing your work, but it can also help you reach people in new ways that can potentially be fun and natural.

Plus, YouTube advertising is like, an enormous industry that helps creators earn real, folding money, if that’s the direction you’re headed in.

On my end, though, I want to be a writer, not a YouTuber, so a big part of me doesn’t want to get wrapped up in the process of prepping, filming, editing, and hyping videos all the time, since I’m already busy enough as it is.

This begs a really important question: Is there a way for creative people to do more with internet video without it becoming their main focus? Continue reading »

Working Out of the House Can Improve Your Mood

2 Comments

I’m writing this from a coffee shop in my town where I sometimes go to do work in the afternoons. For the price of a small (or sometimes large) drink, I can grab a table, set up my laptop, and work on editing, emails, miscellaneous tasks, or even this blog, like I’m doing right now.  Sometimes it’s crowded, but usually it’s not, so I can work in a relatively quiet atmosphere.

But an ideal workspace for me is about more than just quiet: sometimes I like being around other people, and I need to change up my surroundings to freshen my outlook.

I wrote about this in an earlier post about working in family restaurants in Japan, but for me, spending so much time working from home at the same desk in the same surroundings day after day can start to feel repetitious: I love my workspace, but sometimes I want to get out and work somewhere new. Continue reading »