Yesterday I finished the second volume of Shelby Foote's The Civil War: A Narrative, and as I did, I made an important realization. Or rather, I read two things that made something click for me.

What I read was first this (emphasis mine):

"Foote is a novelist who temporarily abandoned fiction to apply the novelist's shaping hand to history: his model is not Thucydides but The Iliad, and his story, innocent of notes and formal bibliography, has a literary design. Not by accident...but for cathartic effect is so much space given to the war's unwinding, it's final shudders and convulsions.... To read this chronicle is an awesome and moving experience. History and literature are rarely so thoroughly combined as here; one finishes this volume convinced that no one need undertake this particular enterprise again." —Newsweek

and then this:

"Further afield, but no less applicable, Richard Lattimore's translation of the Iliad put a Greekless author in close touch with his model."  —Shelby Foote

What those passages made sense of was Foote's tendency to use certain phrases to decribe the same thing again and again. At first I ascribed it to an author running out of interesting synonyms over the course of a 3,000-page narrative, and frankly, I found it a little annoying. These two passages made me realize, however that when Foote repeated descriptions like "the Father of Waters" (the Mississippi River), "the red-haired Ohioan" (William Tecumsah Sherman), or "his taterdemalion army" (Lee's Army of Northern Viriginia), he intended them as epithets in the Homerian sense. And somehow, by knowing this, I didn't mind those repetitions. Instead I started to read them with an almost poetic cadence.

It's funny how a little context can change how you see something.

I worry too much about bursty creativity. I've told myself that I shouldn't make more than one blog post a day, for example, because what I really want is a steady, sustainable flow over time. So, I would write down a little note to myself to post about it tomorrow. Tomorrow would come, and I would find that my passion for the idea had faded, and I would end up posting nothing.

No more.

I've talked before about the fear of "running out of awesome;" how in roleplaying games I would hold onto my cool ideas until exactly the right moment out of fear that I wouldn't come up with new ideas. Improv taught me that those fears were groundless, that awesome begets awesome. A year ago I did my "12 (or 14) Days of HG,WT: FAFGM-mas" experiment. Looking back, it was both the extreme in bursty creativity and probably the best work I did in that format. So, while I'm not a fan of New Year's Resolutions (at least of the behavior-changing-accomplishment variety, for reasons that really are their own post), in this new year, I'm going to strive to make hay while the sun shines, creatively speaking.

So I'm standing in the shower this morning1 when I catch myself falling into old trap. I had been reading about the Pomodoro Technique, and it seem like a good match for my current organizational/productivity habits2. I thought to myself: "Yeah, so instead of allocating a certain number of hours per week for projects like I do now, I could use Pomodoros. How should I split them up? Hmm. Well, if I had ten a week for personal projects then I could..."

And that's where the trap was. Old me would have assigned a certain number of Pomodoros to each of the things I'm working on, and then tried to find time to get them done.

New me knows better. I've been immersed in Lean Software Development and Agile practices for the last several months, and as I've started to internalize their principles, I've seen how they apply to everyday life, too. The applicable precepts here are:

1. You don't know what you can do until you measure what you are doing, and
2. You have to limit work to capacity.

It's so tempting to construct an ideal plan that will let you get everything you want done and then try to impose that plan on reality. That's exactly what the old me tried to do. What I've learned that I know will work better is to start using Pomodoros to start measuring what I'm doing now and not to start planning with them until I know how many in a week I have to work with. It's like the old carpenter's dictum of measuring twice and cutting once. You need to at least measure once. Otherwise, you might find your board isn't big enough.

Let the measuring begin.

 

1  See, I told you.

2 It's an odd mashup inspired by Getting Things Done, First Things First, and Trickle Lists.

I am still uncertain of the best way to mix a Martini, but I'm pretty sure it involves Hendrick's Gin.

Also, there's a distinct possibility that the best Martini is actually a Gibson.