by Naomi | Dec 8, 2016 | Creative Life
If you’re like me, you have more than one priority.
Now, I’ve read Essentialism and The One Thing, and heard many experts discuss why focusing matters. I don’t disagree, but I’m also a creative thinker. When I tell myself to stop exploring options, to stick to what truly matters, my world closes in around me. I wonder: do you feel this way, too? Do you hear people talking about focus, and wonder what’s wrong with you? Have you labeled yourself as undisciplined or unfocused after failing to stick to a short list of priorities?
Let’s take a look at an example.
Which is more important to you: a healthy body or your relationship with your best friend?
There are a lot of books out there that urge you to prioritize your own physical health over your relationship with your best friend. Logically, they’d claim that if you’re not healthy, you can’t be a good friend anyway. However, in a real-world scenario, most of us would choose our best friend over our health. Say our best friend calls us in crisis at the exact moment when we’ve suited up to go for a run. It’s not just any run. We’ve been putting off our exercise for weeks, and we know we need to get ourselves back in motion to get back on track. We’ve finally motivated ourselves to do it … and now our friend is hurting. Even though exercise is important, most likely we’ll delay our run and spend time talking with our friend.
Or consider the end of our lives. When our health is no longer in our control, which will matter to us more: our health or our best friend?
My point is this: your health and your relationship with your best friend are likely both important to you. Forcing yourself to put them in an ordered list creates a false choice. You likely have goals for both of these important areas of life … and those simultaneous goals don’t cancel each other out.
A priority is singular.
The reason people have begun talk about priorities, plural, is because life is complex. We need a word to describe the categories in our lives that don’t get checked off a list by a certain completion date, the way goals do. I’d like to propose a writerly word to fill this gap: theme. A story generally has an overall theme, with related motifs woven into it. I think our lives have a similar structure. Let’s explore a practical application. The overall theme in a life might be connectedness. If so, what actions must I take personally and with others to live into this theme? By considering theme, I avoid forcing myself to make a false choice between my friends and my health.
As we’ve been discussing recently on the Writerly Play blog, the questions that we ask inform the answers we discover. By asking a more expansive question, we avoid losing our way in a question that may be splitting hairs rather than helping us live our most fulfilled lives.
Why does all of this matter?
If you struggle to create an ordered list of priorities, perhaps it might help you to think about your life’s theme. What motifs weave into that theme? Which ones fit now, in this season, and which might fit later? Which are lifelong habits that deserve ongoing attention?
Pursuing your life’s theme is a marathon, but the most effective way to meet goals along the way is to think of them as sprints.
We will never check off a box and no longer need to brush and floss our teeth, to eat healthy food, or spend time with loved ones. Similarly, if we want to play an instrument, participate in a sport, or maintain a creative skill such as drawing, creative writing or improvisation, we need to carve out a certain amount of regular time to practice.
Here’s where the idea of a sprint becomes so useful. Most of these practices can be done in a few minutes a day. However, developing the foundational skills can take many hours. If you set out to learn to draw and do it in five minutes a week, you’re not going to have much fun with your drawing for quite some time. You’re likely to get frustrated and give up, honestly, because your progress will be so slow.
The best way to make true progress on one of these kinds of projects is to set a goal, focus tightly on that goal in a “sprint,” and then once you’ve achieved a certain level of skill, maintain the practice at a more steady pace. It may be that for a week, you set aside all of your practices so you can develop a new skill. But after that week, you can pick them all back up, adding the new one.
You don’t have to give up everything you love in order to try something new.
If you need a kickstart for a project that’s been calling to you, try a sprint. Give yourself room to experiment and find the ways of working, creating and living that work best for you. Your life’s theme is expansive, and will continue to play out in surprising ways. Allow yourself room to grow.
by Naomi | Dec 5, 2016 | Tools & Apps
My playlist is an eclectic collection of tools that help me approach my work as play. My hope is that they’ll do the same for you.
Object: Having the right tools at hand for the project at hand.
What Didn’t Work: Trying to remember the tools I had for various tasks, scrolling through iPhone screens filled with apps and getting frustrated or distracted, spending more time finding apps than using them.
My Aha! Moment: One day, I took out my bead kit, opened it up, and started working on a bracelet. There’s something so satisfying about a kit with compartments to hold each type of bead and each type of tool. Rather than spending time running around the house looking for scissors, thread, or the findings, I could clear the table, relax, and create.
As I worked, I began thinking about work projects, such as making the social media rounds. If I could have a kit for those tasks, how much more effective might I be? I imagined putting various apps in a basket, laughing a little at the absurdity of the idea. But as I kept thinking, I realized the idea wasn’t out of the question. I finished my bracelet and started researching. Finding the iPhone app, Launcher was a delight. This app allows you to create customized widgets that you can access from your notification screen. Abra-cadabra … little baskets for my apps!
How I Play:
- I started by thinking of activities that require a number of apps as well as focused attention.
- I created a widget for each of these activities and added the apps so they quick-launch when I tap their logos.
- I played with the custom timing so that when I go to the notification screen, I see the most relevant widgets based on the day of the week and the time of day.
Player’s Notes:
- There are many options with the Launcher app. Some apps have supported actions. In this way, you can shortcut key actions. Explore options, but don’t be overwhelmed by them. Don’t feel the need to be a power user … use what helps you most.
- If you’re not an iPhone user, there are likely similar apps for other smart phones. Explore and share if you have great options!
Take it to the Next Level:
- Consider how this concept might relate to other parts of your digital world. I’m exploring ways to use my Macbook dashboard in a similar way. My goal is to be able to open a screen and see all the tools needed, but none of the ones that might distract me.
- Consider how this concept might relate to other parts of your non-digital world. What kinds of “kits” might you make yourself?
by Naomi | Nov 28, 2016 | Creative Life
Creativity often shows up at the intersection of various thoughts. Here are three to ponder … what do they spark for you?
“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
― Henry Green
“In each of us lie good and bad, light and dark, art and pain, choice and regret, cruelty and sacrifice. We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion fighting to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there is a lot of grey to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.”
― Libba Bray
“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”
― Jalaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi
by Naomi | Nov 23, 2016 | Creative Life
They say courage is feeling afraid and acting anyway.
The trouble is, when we feel afraid, our hearts race, our adrenaline spikes and our prefrontal cortices give way to our amygdalae. Depending on the intensity of our fear, we may completely lose access to our logic and reasoning. And while some situations call for a “get out of here now!” type of response, many do not––particularly those situations that call for courage.
How can we fight back when fear threatens to swallow our courage?
We can name the people, the situations, the moments and the beauty for which we give thanks. Giving thanks is even more powerful when it is made tangible … in spoken or written word. In image. In musical notes or in movement.
While today is a day on which we collectively give thanks, I’m pausing to remind myself that thanksgiving is not a box to check off once a year. Thanksgiving is a daily practice.
Today, I’m thankful for
The Society of Young Inklings
And the passion of young writers
The powerful way they express their vision of the world around them
The questions youth ask
Which challenge and stretch me
How they turn ideas on their heads and teach me something new every day
The dedication of SYI’s staff and instructors
Who endlessly seek ways to give, inspire and empower
The commitment of our Youth Advisory Board
Giving back to the writers coming up after them
The expertise of our Board of Directors
Who are willing to ask tough questions and dream big
The generosity of our donors and patrons
Who give of their time and resources
All in service of a vision
A world in which stories are shaped and told
In which stories are heard and valued
In which stories help build connection and understanding
Solutions where before there were only obstacles
Solutions where they are desperately needed
I’m thankful for the way that the SYI community
Encourages me to wake up every day
Filled with hope
by Naomi | Nov 21, 2016 | Teaching Strategies
There aren’t many things in your life that you only do once. However, most of us don’t take the time to consider how we might streamline routine activities. For instance, how often do you:
- Sort the mail
- Do the laundry
- Go grocery shopping
- Pay bills
- Pack your bag for the next day’s activities
These activities are only the tip of the iceberg. Research shows that on average people spend one hour a day looking for stuff. Those little frustrations add up, and make the difference between a settled or scattered day.
We know there’s a better way, but we feel so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the little issues to solve, that we decide to ignore them. Or, we shrug our shoulders and figure this is just the way things are. We have no vision for how our days might go differently.
Now, imagine that you worked for Disneyland, and you were assigned to do a routine activity, such as help people board a ride, serve people lunch, or remove litter from the sidewalk. Would you do your job differently each time? Absolutely not. Not only would you have a system, you and your supervisor would have given thought to how you could not only make the task efficient and manageable, but you’d consider how you could add a little “magic.”
What if you used this approach in your daily life? What if you asked yourself: “How could I not only sort the mail more efficiently, but with a little magic?”
Try this:
- Choose one routine task you’d like to revise. Give yourself permission to choose one, even though you’re sure to have a number of options. Start with one, and use your success to move on to the next.
- Seek out an inspiring process to study. Many times, unusual connections can yield helpful results here. Rather than trying to find someone else who has the perfect mail-sorting routine, you might find inspiration in the way a Kindergarten teacher helps students organize take-home papers, or in the way a librarian sorts returned books.
- Identify the key steps of the process. If you’re a visual thinker, consider drawing a diagram.
- Consider why the process works. How might you apply the success of the process to your own task?
- Sketch or write up a template for your new process. Experiment and stay open to revision as you try out the new approach. Aim high. Don’t stop until you achieve inspiring results.
- Build on your success by working on a new task.
Writerly Play offers a framework for creative thinking. In each mental room, we tackle different thinking tasks. This activity is a tool for your Library, where we analyze resources, identify strategies for specific solutions and play with them until we make them our own.
