Category: Productivity

How to Make Giving Up Work for You…?

WTF? Succeed by giving up? Win by losing? Or is “giving up” really a way to keep from losing?

by Matt McCue

Growing up, I had a Winston Churchill quote on my desk: “Never, never, never give up.” It served as a daily reminder to continue pushing forward, especially when things were rough.

Persevering against all odds certainly helps in the creative industry where you have to convince art directors and brand managers to buy your abstract and experimental ideas and bring them to life in the real world. However, looking back, I realize that the mentality to keep going at all costs can be an inefficient approach to work. In other words, there are merits to giving up. read article

Does Your Writing Suck?

You want to be a writer. More than that, you know you’re a writer – you just haven’t been discovered yet. But others don’t share that optimism…what do you do?

For starters, you read this:

Found at Dreamstime.Com
Found at Dreamstime.Com

by Joleene Moody

When I was in college, I wrote a farce for the stage. It was weak, at best, because I couldn’t come up with a decent ending. I don’t want to destroy my reputation here, but the first ending had an alien kidnapping the protagonist during Christmas Eve dinner. (Please don’t delete me from your network. I was only 21 and likely under the influence.) read article

We are the Writers of our own Lives

…Which behooves us to put at least as much thought into our very real choices as we do into the fictional choices of our characters. Think about it, as you watch this:

Another well-crafted Ted Talk read article

Care of the Writer’s Instrument

thepinchy
Xena going straight for the instrument!

by Kathryn Graham

What’s a writer’s most important instrument? Is it a pen? A notebook? How about a laptop? Or is it your butt, the proverbial ‘butt in seat’ thing?

Bottom line, yourl butt is you, and you happen to be a physical body on a physical plane.  I know my body is my most cherished instrument because right now I have a crick in my neck that’s making this article tough to write. It’s like Xena cut off the flow of blood to my brain except that instead of Xena, it was a shitty mattress, a flattened pillow, and a 40 hour a week desk job.

Many people, myself included, don’t treat their bodies right. Writers are more susceptible to this because of the nature of writing. If you’re sitting for long hours pounding away at a keyboard, you’re likely hurting your spine, potentially not eating or depriving yourself of sleep, and any other number of vices in the name of the written word. read article

Procrastination, Impulsivity, TV and Thou

Yes, it’s true. All the problems we have not getting our work done – postponing, and postponing, and postponing again – would be solved if the TV and film writers who do indeed finish what they start would stop oversimplifying everything, dammit!

But don’t believe just us….

Now-Later-2532203You Don’t Have a Procrastination Problem, You Have an Impulsivity Problem
by Eric Ravenscraft

Procrastination is like bad signal or crappy Wi-Fi. Everyone deals with it, but most of us don’t understand how it works. Here’s the key: It’s not that you have a problem saying yes to the thing you’re supposed to be doing right now. The problem is you can’t say no to everything else. read article