Systems
Posted on November 15, 2008, by Jacob Sam-La Rose, under Work.
I’m spending this afternoon and this evening clearing things out, reviewing the next 12 months, planning, and catching up with myself. I do this (to varying degrees of depth) at least once a month, and I’d say a few times a year I end up changing or further developing my organisational systems because as a result. Today I’m thinking about the best way to document projects and archive supporting notes. Until now, I’ve been a real fan of Journler to organise notes, but I’m starting to feel lost in Journler. Although you can search Journler by tags and titles (and just about anything else in the entry or its metadata) I’ve got just under a thousand entries in there now, and it’s starting to get a little more difficult to find “that little note that I know I made but forgot to tag and can’t remember the title of”.
My next best solution is to store basic notes for projects in the project description field in Things, but while that seems to make sense, I’m not sure how well that’ll work. Maybe I’m just feening for a new app to play with. Maybe I just need to fashion a sensible solution from the tools I already have…
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On flow…
Posted on November 15, 2008, by Jacob Sam-La Rose, under Work.
Guilty admission: I have an ever-growing pile of books that I’m supposed to have read, books that I mean to read, but that I haven’t yet got round to. The pile includes Paul Beatty’s ‘White Boy Shuffle’ (which was bought for me as a gift in 2001…); Milan Kundera’s ‘Unbearable Lightness of Being’; Ayi Kwei Armah’s ‘Two Thousand Seasons’; Nietzsche’s ‘Human. All Too Human’; and a range of other texts. There’s a shelf next to the bed that’s dedicated to all of the books I’d currently like to read so I can select one easily when leaving the house, and a few other shelves in the front room dedicated to the ones I should read at some point but that I know I won’t get to anytime soon. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ‘Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life’ has just been promoted to the bedroom shelf, and may even become active reading for the next week or so.
I just got through watching his TED presentation, and while there’s nothing that’s completely new to me there, it really got me thinking about the work I do, why I do it, how I do it, and how some of his thoughts can be applied. It helps to explain why many of my basic human functions (sleep, eating etc) get pushed to one side when I’m wrestling with creating something, or simply engaged with whatever work I’m doing to the point of ‘flow’. It’s got me thinking about the fact that I’d like more flow– a reminder to be more discerning about the projects I take on. I’m also thinking about how thoughts on flow can be applied to poetry workshops in schools.
Consider these:
Flow (in other words, a desirable working state) comes when you possess the appropriate skills to deal with a challenging task. Many of the students I work with don’t think/feel they have the skills required to write creatively let alone write engaging poems, thus the very notion of a poetry workshop is undesirable. And of course, what they often consider as poetry is a million miles removed from anything they want to be involved with. In that sense, my working process breaks down their perception of the challenge (what are we doing, why are we doing it, and is it something that we can enjoy doing?) and gives them appropriate skills to handle the challenge that they’ve been set within a limited amount of time. Giving them appropriate skills often works as a combination of two different strategies: raising their awareness of things they already know how to do (encouraging them to value and trust their own abilities) and introducing them to new ways of working (ways to generating new work without judgement or fear, guidelines for editing and critique, tools for writing that they may not be aware of or may not have considered using).
Again, none of this is rocket science. It’s your implementation that makes the difference. And I guess I’m thinking about the students that aren’t turned onto poetry in the first place here– the ones that would be described as “challenging” or “difficult” or even “problem” kids…
I’ve had to lead a series of masterclass sessions for poets working in education recently. Lots of pedagogical discussion. Hence the auto-analysis.
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Grrr…
Posted on November 10, 2008, by Jacob Sam-La Rose, under Tech.
No G1 today. I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about wack customer service from telephony companies, but I’ve never had such a hassle upgrading a phone as I’ve had this time round. The saga started in August when I heard about the Blackberry Bold. I was due an upgrade, but my E61 was still functioning, so I waited. And waited. And called T-Mobile to see what was up with the release date. And waited some more. Wash, rinse, repeat, until late-October, when a customer service rep says that he has no idea when the phone’s coming out. Granted, it sounded more like an RIM problem than a T-Mobile issue, but the bottom line is that no one could give me a proper sense of what was happening. Me customer. Me want new phone. Why new phone not here, when I see other people on other networks with it? I saw a lady on the train with it and had to ask– any problems? No, she said. It works fine.
Fast forward. Last week, I saw Avery in Chicago with a T-Mobile G1, and figured it was time to give up on the Bold. Went to Carphone Warehouse yesterday and… well, the short version is that after a few hours of back and forth between T-Mobile and Carphone Warehouse yesterday and today, the G1 isn’t available in black from T-Mobile. Carphone Warehouse has plenty in black, but won’t allow them to be given over to T-Mobile customers on upgrade, only those signing up for new contracts. Excuse me? Have you seen the white G1s? They look like they were made by Fisher-Price!
So I’m still waiting. And now it looks like the Bold is going to be available sooner that a black G1. In the meantime, I’m going to practise making small growling noises to frighten the next customer service rep that knows less about the phones I want than I do.
