Harnessing the Scatterbrain
I’m having one of those mornings where I feel like my brain is being pulled in a bunch of different directions. I guess in my third week of self-employed creator mode I have unsurprisingly found myself in a pile of potential tasks proving to be more substantial than I can calmly dig through. In an effort to combat this I’ve been attempting a new way of organizing some life stuff from a book I picked up called Building a Second Brain, and while I’m still reading through it currently, my first takeaway is that I may be trying to take on too much at once.
One of the essential pieces of this framework is to divide up your files, notes, data, everything basically into Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives. Only having four places to put things immediately piqued my interest and seems like a simple but super effective way to stash anything of use. So first up, Projects here are defineds as anything you are currently taking action on and has a clear finishing point. The typical number of open projects is 10-15, which honestly seemed rather high to me at first, but once I got sorted out I found I was way overloaded with nearly 30! So of course, I must add the 31st project to the list wherein I kill a bunch of projects. Either finishing up any easy/short ones as badly and quickly as possible, eliminating worthless ones, or putting some into a “maybe someday” pile.
I’m trying my hardest to also stop adding more crap to my to do lists, but it’s tough. I’ve gotten into what I thought was a pretty good habit of capturing random tasks in my brain onto paper or elsewhere to deal with later, but now in a bit of a bind where I have to really take some extra effort to prioritize whats next, or feel like I’m taking too much time to process these random scribblings and converting them into something useful. Plus a lot of my project ideas are a bit too vague without any clear action to take next, leading me to put off what is probably more important. I guess I need to prioritize that? New action item: make action items. Make a list of list of action items to take action on. Prioritize prioritizing. I don’t know, sometimes my brain gets into some kind of twisted productivity ouroboros where I just get more scatterbrained and overwhelmed and end up overplanning instead of actually producing results. There was actually a blog post from a few weeks ago about being overloaded, and while I have made some substantial progress I apparently still have some stuff to work on.
I guess that’s where I’m hoping this Second Brain system thing will help. Giving me more of a consolidated big picture view of everything and freeing up headspace to actually let my creativity run wild, and not have to use as much bandwidth figuring out the next step towards whatever goal I have at that moment. Plus the added benefits of being easier to repurpose things I’ve already made, recycling old workflows in new ways, seeing new connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. And I know one book probably won’t be the perfect solution for me, but like anything I will try and take what’s useful for my current needs and adapt them into something that seems to work.
One of my next steps in organizing is also to go back through a bunch of handwritten journal notes and brainstormed lists and distill those down into something digital and more succinct. I think that will help a lot when I’m dried up for ideas and I can just quickly pull from something I’ve already thought up. Reviewing old journals is always a bit eye opening as well, to get a glimpse of my past thought processes and feelings and see how far I’ve come since then. A good reminder that I’ve been through A LOT this year and deserve to be proud to have made it to where I stand. I’m hoping it will help me be more patient with my progress as well, reminding myself that building my creative output into something sustainable will be a very slow grind. All I can do is take one action at a time, learn from the process, analyze the result, and keep pushing forward. And exercise self care in the meantime.
I think that’s all the words my 1st brain can spew out today, again I hope these ramblings are somehow helpful to anyone else out there going through their own daily struggles of just getting stuff done. My own bit of output to share from this week was a 5 day run of daily short videos I made, reading the backs of NES game boxes and hamming it up a bit. They were fun to make and great practice at injecting some energy and chaos into my voiceovers. I may do more someday, but next week I am thinking of trying to release a proper scripted and longer video, along with starting a new game prototype (game dev being an area I’ve admittedly neglected since Cyberskull was finished). All while trying to get the project pile under control of course.
Hope everyone out there has a great week, thanks for reading!