Thanksgiving Give-Away from Artsyville

I told y’all to check back for a special give-away to go with Aimee’s podcast interview, and here it is:

Actually, there’ll be three winners. One will win the framed Doodle Print,

one will win the word magnets,

and one will win the image magnets.

Aren’t these just the ginchiest? (The image magnets are brand new in Aimee’s shop.)

So what you’ll do:  post a comment telling us what you like best about Artsyville. And tell us which one of these little gifts you’d like to have. Yes, you CAN enter for all three:  then you’ll leave three separate comments, with three different things you love about visiting Artsyville. It can be a favorite post, or a photograph you loved, or a particular doodle print. It can be a theme—your favorite kind of posts you find there. Or it can be a note about something Aimee posted that inspired you to do _______.

You get the idea.

Since I got a late start on this, I’ll let it go until Sunday. I’ll pick three winners then. You’ll check back, because—again—you don’t want to risk the wrath of The Irritated Cat.

Have fun!

Podcasting Artsyville

Today I got to spend a delightful little while talking to Aimee Meyers Dolich of Artsyville. We actually got to meet in person last spring in Austin, and she’s every bit as lovely as you imagine she is. Plus she’s a hoot. We did control ourselves and refrain from profanity, but you’ll still enjoy the conversation anyway.

[Or you can subscribe to Notes from the Voodoo Lounge via iTunes.]

To celebrate the podcast, I’m posting a special give-away tomorrow, so check back~~

So Let’s Get You Organized, Part III: How Do You Spend Your Time?

Today we’re going to do one of the most important things you can to do when you’re trying to get organized. We’re going to figure out how you spend your time right now.

Yeah, yeah, I know you don’t like this part. You’ve tried it before, and it’s no fun. I know this is the part where I’m going to lose a lot of y’all. I can hear you grumbling and clicking away from The Voodoo Cafe as fast as you can. But wait, please:  hear me out. And don’t take it just from m;, listen to what Pam RuBert says:

"It's hard to plan how you're going to spend your time if you aren't really honest/don't know how you TEND to spend your time."

In order to figure out how to get yourself organized, you’re going to have to take The Hard Look at how you’re not organized. Sure, you think you know how you’re spending your time, but do you? Really? If I were to ask you how you spend the first hour of every morning, you’d probably tell me you got up, showered, ate breakfast, washed the dishes, got dressed, and left the house. But would you count the ten minutes you spend staring into the magnifying make-up mirror over the sink, picking at your pores and wondering what in the hell is up with your eyebrows? Or what about the five minutes you spent standing in the middle of the living room in your underwear, remote control in hand, clicking through the channels trying to find out whether it’s supposed to rain this afternoon? Would you mention those?

No. You would not. Because you’re not even aware of those 15 minutes. Those minutes are just like the “and, uh” things we stick in our conversation. We don’t notice them because they’re not on our radar. And we won’t notice them unless we’re forced to.

[I notice them because that’s just what I do. And also because I spend a lot of time listening to recordings of myself and wondering why it sounds like I have a stutter.]

So here’s what you’ve got to do: you’re going to follow Roz Stendahl’s advice (remember, you listened to her here) and keep a record of exactly how you spend your time. I want you to do this for the rest of the week, and I do not want you to whine about it.

Oh, OK:  you can whine! You can come here and whine to us. I’ll listen, and I’ll sympathize. But I want you to DO it. OK?

You’re going to make a chart of your days, from the moment you open your eyes in the morning until you fall asleep at night, and you’re going to record what you’re doing in 15-minute intervals, just like Roz recommends. And because you may do several things in any 15-minute segment, you’re going to give yourself plenty of room. I suggest going to the store and buying some big, cheap-ass pad—some drawing pad for kids, maybe—and giving yourself a page for each 4-hour segment, maybe:  just something so you have plenty of room to write “Ate a candy bar, picked my teeth, checked Twitter, sent an e-mail to my sister-in-law about the turkey, stared out the window.”

That sounds tedious, and maybe you think it’s silly. But I promise you this:  if you see several 15-minute segments like that in your days at the end of the week, and you add them up, and you realize that you’ve got two or three hours worth of gazing into space and eating snack food, you’re going to realize that you’ve got time you didn’t ever think about, time you could use to start your novel, or practice drawing. Knit a sweater. Mix pigment. Two to three hours a week is a TON of time when you think you don’t have any.

So. Grumble and whine if you have to, but if you’re serious about getting yourself organized and finding more time in your life, you’ve got to do this.

You know, it might be more fun if you used colored markers or crayons.

Or not. Whatever:  Just do it.

Scout and Jem

I love Artful Blogging.

Yeah, I hear you. I’m not much for frou-frou blogs, either. But I love the articles about how blogging has changed people’s lives, and every once in a while I’ll find a blog I just really love. Like Scout and Jem. Check it out—be sure to read this post. I haven’t gotten to read much yet, but I’m loving it so far.

Now if I just had some reading time. . . .

OK, So Let’s Get You Organized, Part II: Learning How Your Mind Works

I had something else I was going to talk about for Part II, but Deborah’s comment/question made me realize that this is something most people probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. Maybe it’s just me and Roz, you know?

Do you know how your mind works? Do you know what it likes and doesn’t like? How it likes to receive information? The things that intrigue it and pull it in, and the things that send it veering off in another direction?

Don’t know exactly what I’m talking about? Since I’m not a Brain Scientist—I don’t even play one on tv—I’ll have to use examples of my own brain. I haven’t always paid attention to these things, but once I realized that I am not my brain, that my brain functions separately from my will, my desires, my more amorphous, touchy-feely-ish self, I realized that figuring out how my brain works and catering to it as much as possible will make life smoother and allow me to accomplish sooo much more.

For instance:  because I think mostly in words, my brain doesn’t like to have words coming in while its working. What do I mean?

Do you know hypnagogic images? This isn’t the best explanation, but you can google from there and find out more if you’re interested. Basically, it’s imagery that occurs during the moments between sleep and wakefulness. More vivid than thoughts OR dreams, in my case. I have these all the time and can have them during meditation, when I feel fully awake but seem to be watching a movie inside my head. They’re endlessly fascinating to me, as they seem completely separate from me—the people in them aren’t people I know, the images aren’t things I remember seeing, the story line seems to be coming from somewhere else. You can see where people get the idea that they’re channeling something else or have had an out-of-body experience. It’s none of these, of course—just another example of the amazing things that go on in our brains all the time. The brain is absolutely amazing, and we have little clue about most of it. The more of it we can tap into, the more amazed we are.

The point:  these hypnagogic images often come with a script scrolling across the bottom, where I see words as they’re being typed. My brain thinks in words, often actual visual words.

So when I’m working, I can’t have words coming in. No talking, no tv or talk radio (god forbid!), no music with lyrics. It’s why I like to walk by myself—someone else’s chattering can chase away a nascent idea more quickly than anything. I refer to it as the words coming in getting tangled up with the words my brain is producing, ending up in a big, tangled mess of random words.

Now, if your brain thinks in images, words might not bother you, but you might need, instead, to limit visual input during certain parts of thinking. You might need to lie in the grass and stare at the sky. You might need to shut your eyes. You might need to do single-pointed meditation, where you gaze (with soft gaze) at a candle or simple object. Start here to find out more about soft gaze.

So that’s one thing. Another thing is: my brain likes to be busy. If it doesn’t have anything to think about, it worries. When I wake up in the morning, my brain starts going. Left alone, it will obsess about everything from periodontal disease to termite infestation (I’m not making up random examples here, either—my mother told tales of having had surgery for gum disease, and she worried about a recurrence of termites all the time—I learned my worrying topics AND style from my mother).

But! If I have some project underway, something intriguing and exciting and challenging, my brain will latch onto that first thing in the morning. The more problems there are to solve, the happier it is. It’s one of the reasons I don’t repeat things (well, except PAJAMA PANTS):  once I’ve figured out the challenges and mastered whatever-it-is, it’s of no use to me any more. Of course, sometimes I have to make a dozen before I decide it’s all figured out and perfect, but then? Eh.

Maybe your brain likes things to be spacious and empty, without a lot of puzzles. Maybe your brain functions best when input is kept to a minimum. Or maybe when you toss in lots of noise and colors and odors. Only you can figure this stuff out.

What does your brain notice? Patterns? Sounds? Colors?

My brain likes to plan things by looking at lists and grids, but it likes to brainstorm by looking at words arranged in the traditional brain-storming mind mapping style of circling a word and drawing a line to another circled word. So it likes things lined up and rigid when it’s planning, but loose and floaty when it’s trying to get new ideas. Very left vs. right, at least in this area.

My brain loves color—always. But it also loves odors, something I don’t much care for. I can remember odors of things I’ve long since forgotten:  the odor of parafinned ducks, for example. My brain notices how there’s a shared olfactory element in packaged taco seasoning and funky male body odor. There’s another shared element in popcorn and cat doot. Which may explain why I don’t eat a lot of popcorn, right?

When I walk in the evening, my brain loves trying to figure out what people are cooking for dinner. I myself couldn’t care less, since those odors are almost always meat odors, but the puzzle of deciphering olfactory clues makes my brain happy. It adores this. One of its happiest memories are the two times it was able to tell a couple of colleagues were having an affair just from the way the parties smelled. It loves this stuff. And a happy brain isn’t telling me about financial ruin, mortality, crippling arthritis. You know. So I let it play with odors and their associations. Cat doot and sex seem to provide a nice diversion for it, so who am I to quibble?

Starbucks has this kit that has tiny bottles of odors of things—they use this sometimes in coffee pairings. My brain loves this—the puzzle of figuring it out, the fun of pairings and matchings. It longs for the scent machine in Harold and Maude. Remember that? On my own, I would avoid odors because so many of the manufactured ones give me a headache or make me sneeze. But I give them to my brain sometimes—I’ll go and smell candles in a store, sometimes, just to let it see if it can figure out the individual components. Or sniff spices with my eyes closed.

Maybe all this talk about me and my brain is baffling to you. Maybe you are certain that you and your brain are the same. I am just as certain that we are not. I am certain of this because my brain so often puzzles me, or surprises me or delights me. It’s like a fraternal twin:  someone who’s been with me my whole life but is enough unlike me to always be a little surprising.

I think of it as a daemon. You can start to find out more here. I first began to think of it this way when I read Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works, one of the best books I’ve ever read.

(And oh, my:  you can get a used copy for only $1.95.

What does your brain notice? Mine pays little attention to faces—I fail to recognize almost everyone. But I can recognize handwriting, and I can recognize body shapes and movement. So while I might not be able to remember someone from talking to them face to face, I might be able to know who they are if I see them walking away from me. I’ve told the story of recognizing one of our nephews in the store just from seeing the back of his calves as he stood in line at the check-out counter. I do not know why this is—I don’t study body parts. But there it is:  one of the way my brain notices things seems to be: shapes in motion. That somehow triggers something. So if I were working on a project, I might need to have all the pieces in front of me and then move them around in different configurations. See? This is where you can go with this.

OK. So those are some things to start you on the path to figuring out how your brain works. Pay attention this week. Take some notes, as if you’re Jane Goodall observing a particularly fascinating gorilla. In Part III, I’ll talk about. . . oh, who the hell knows what I’ll talk about? It’ll be something, though—I seem to have plenty to say about this.

And isn’t that a surprise?

 

OK, So Let’s Get You Organized, Part I: How to Keep Track of Things You Need to Do

I keep hearing more and more and more about how people want to get organized, they need to get organized, they’d have time for being creative and making art and writing if only they could Get Themselves Organized. So I, in my infinite wisdom and complete organizational fabulousness, am here to help.

Snort.

Hee. I am, seriously, laughing out loud here. Cos you know the reason this is a topic I adore is: it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about pretty much my whole adult life, trying to figure out how to get myself Perfectly Organized so everything about my day will flow smoothly.

It’s something we all want, and it’s one of those things, like Diet Advice, off of which enterprising marketers (read: snake oil salesmen) make a TON of money.

OK, so I don’t have all the answers. Hell, I may not have ANY answers. But I also am not going to charge you any money, so what’s to lose?

The first thing you’re going to have to do is exactly what Roz Stendahl said you need to do when I talked to her, here. Remember? She said you have to know how your brain works. And that’s exactly right:  it’s impossible to figure out an organizational system if you don’t know how your brain thinks about things.

Do you need to be able to see  a day at a glance, in chronological order? Or do you need a list, down a page? Or do you need to see a whole week, or a month, or a year? Do you need a white board with a chart?

Do you do best when you have a big calendar grid in front of you? Or a To-Do list for each individual day? How does your brain like to have information presented?

What I need:  I need to be able to see a month at a glance, on one page. And I need a list for each day.

[Hell:  I need someone to follow me around with a clipboard, reminding me from moment to moment why exactly I came into this room carrying a roll of paper towels and hat.]

For that reason, I have calendar pages posted in various places around the house.

There’s this one on the refrigerator that The EGE and I can use for things we both need to know—like when the meter reader comes (we have to be here to unlock the door so he can get into the back yard), or when school’s out—stuff like that.

There are these calendar pages taped to the bathroom door that we use for keeping track of our weight, because we’re people who do that.

(I keep track of the days when I drop below 125, since I tend to get sick when that happens. Which is what has happened now. Duh. But at least I know this, right?)

Then there’s the main calendar I use for everything I need to keep track of:

Yes, I know it would be fun to read all this. I would LOVE to be able to read other people’s calendars. Alas, mine has names of people in it. Hence the blurriness. Sorry.

And the Moleskine Page-a-Day I use for To-Do lists:

Now, for next year, I’m consolidating these:  I spent The Big Bucks on this:

a leather page-a-day

that also has a section with each month at a glance.

I want to have everything in one book that I can carry with me. Forking out the money to have it in orange leather is going to guarantee that I use it every day. You betcha.

What I do is to sit in bed in the morning with coffee and go through these. I check to see what I need to do that day, and then I go over the previous day’s to-do list and cross off what I got done and move the rest to the current day. And then I add whatever I need to do that day.

The things that are vital—appointments, interviews, things with a specific time—those are put onto iCal, the calendar shared by the MacBook and iPhone. I set email alarms for two days before and the day before. I get email on the phone, the laptop, and my desktop PC, so, in reality, I get 6 email notices for every appointment, even though I actually read my email only at the PC.

I’ve got some duplicates there and have to work on getting that straightened out—still haven’t gotten the MobileMe and manual sync figured out entirely and am getting duplicates of stuff.

If something comes up—say I’m out somewhere and agree to meet someone the next day at noon (not something I’m likely to do, since I work during the day and don’t make appointments until after 4 pm, but let’s just say), I can use reQuall, with the voice recorder app on the iPhone, and it will email me a transcript.

I short, I realize that I have a lousy memory—I should realize this, as I’ve had it all my life, and it’s only getting worse—and have figured out ways to get around it. I like getting reminders by email—I check email many times a day, and this is the best way for me to be reminded of things. I’ve found the applications that will remind me that way, and I use them.

If you need some other form of reminder, you need to figure out what it is and then arrange to get it. If you need a visual reminder, perhaps you can do this:  whenever you make an appointment, at that very moment, write a reminder on a sticky note (either real or virtual on your desktop) and take it and stick it where you know you’ll see it:  your monitor, your briefcase, your bathroom mirror. Whatever you do, it has to be something that works for the way your brain likes to receive information.

Even if you’re young, you have a fabulous memory, you think you can trust your memory—if you find yourself double-booking, or realizing something starts an hour later than you thought it did, or whatever:  if you find that your once-perfect memory is overwhelmed by too much to do, too many people’s schedules to mesh, whatever:  do your brain a favor and don’t expect it to remember everything. The creative brain has other things to do besides keeping track of appointments and meetings. Figure out a way to remember those that works for you and give your brain room to do something more fun. Keeping track of meetings isn’t the sort of thing your brain was meant to do.

OK. It’s a place to get started, right? Think about it, make some notes. Next time we’re going to talk about organizing your day:  how to figure out when to do what. In the meantime, be thinking about the way Your Own Personal Brain likes to work with information.

 

Hey, Nona!

It’s past Friday, I haven’t heard from you, your blogger profile is private so I can’t try to get in touch. I know several people named “Nona,” so no clue there. Hello?

And The Winner Is~~

Man, this was tough. I read all y’all’s comments—TWICE. I went through and made a list of the ones I thought really need this book, but that didn’t help, because everybody Needs it. Whew. Y’all made me work.

Finally, though, I picked Nona as the winner. So, Nona, send me your address.

And I decided I’ll have to do another give-away of another copy of the book here soon. It won’t be next week, because I’ve got something else cool lined up for then. Well, hell—I’ve got several cool things lined up. But keep checking back (you’re going to be hanging out here with me anyway, right?), because there’ll be another book give-away soon.

And I realized what kind of suggestions I need to offer—ideas and tips and things for all you really busy people, and then other tips and ideas for those who have time but just can’t pull themselves up out of the chair in front of the computer. So I’m going to be working on those. If you’re doing Facebook or Twitter, you can hook up with me there—I try to offer little bits throughout the day. You can find the links over there on the right.

So. Thanks a bunch for the comments—the things you tell me give me ideas, and I think of ways I can maybe offer some support. I have no idea what it would be like to have a full-time job and kids and a partner who maybe wasn’t the most supportive person in the world and then an extended family who made demands and aieeeeeee! But I know what it’s like to be really busy.

Anyway, I’m going to try to put together a post about organizing—some of the things I do to organize my time. With photos, I hope!

In the meantime: Congratulations, Nona! And thanks again to everyone who came by and left a comment—y’all are fabulous!

XO

Desire & Determination

You’ll remember when I talked to Tom Braxton, who’s spent years in both teaching and music, and he explained that there’s desire, and then there’s determination. This distinction seems so important to me that I wanted to talk about it some more as it applies to creativity, goals, dreams, etc.

Desire, as Tom said, is the easy part. You want to be a musician. You want to be an artist. You can imagine the work you would do and the life you would lead, the happy hours on stage or in the studio. You imagine what it would be like to see your work in a gallery, to learn how to carve, to be so proficient at your craft that you’d be asked to write a book about it.

You dream about, oh, let’s say it’s painting for you. You dream about painting. You have books about painting. You go to exhibits of paintings and spend hours online looking at flickr sites that have photos of paintings.

And, sure, you paint. Whenever you have the time, you pull out the paints and work at it. You take a class whenever you can work one in, and you can see some improvement in what you’re doing.

Mostly, though, you dream. You dream, and you wish, and you desire.

Maybe you’re one of those people who believes, as many people do, in the power of Putting It Out There in The Universe—letting that vast, amorphous, sort of ethereal presence out there know that, gee, you reallyreallyreally want to Be A Painter. There are many, many people who believe this will work:  that you’ll let it be known that this is what you want, what you desire, and The Universe will set it all in motion for you.

Perhaps you let The Universe know that, gee, it would be really helpful if you had more time, and if someone else would clean the cat boxes and fix dinner, and if you might, maybe, win the lottery and have a studio built in the backyard.

Skylights and surround sound would help.

You have the desire, all right. You want to be a painter, you love painting, you try to make time to paint. All you need is a little help.

From The Universe.

What you don’t have, alas, is determination. What exactly is determination? It’s what keeps you forging ahead toward your desire, no matter what. Determination is what pulls you out of bed at 5 am so you can paint for an hour before you leave for work. Determination is what propels you out into the worst snowstorm on record in your little town so that you can attend the lecture about plein air painting being offered—for free!--at the college. Determination is why you give up your regular afternoon venti triple-ristretto caramel mocha frappaccino so you can save enough to take that workshop in the spring. (You’ll probably save enough for new brushes, too. Maybe a bigger house.)

Determination is what:

--keeps you from spending 3 hours every evening on the computer, surfing, chatting, IM-ing, checking up on the latest gossip.

--gets you into the studio even when you’re dog tired and don’t want to do anything but pour a glass of wine and check TiVo.

--makes you send out those slides even when your sister-in-law has ever-so-gently suggested that your last painting, the one you shyly showed her but now wished you’d cut off your right leg instead, looks exactly like what her kid, your holy terror nephew Ralph, did last week in kindergarten.

Determination is a lot like discipline, except that determination has as its root “determine,” which means “to fix authoritatively or conclusively.” Which means, in case that’s way too many words to think about right now, that determination is what sets the outcome of something. With “desire,” there is no end in sight. Nothing is guaranteed.

With “determination,” you’re determining what is going to happen.

Now. Does this mean that if you’re determined to Be A Painter, you will automatically become a famous and respected, very highly paid painter? Will you become, god help you, Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, and reap the rewards of unlimited marketing?

No. All it means is that determination will make you A Painter. You will paint. If you want to be a good painter, you’ll have to be determined to do that, as well.

Now don’t you DARE get all silly on me here and ask, “So, Ricë, does that mean that if I’m determined to fly, I’ll sprout wings? Snort.”

No. But if you’re determined to fly, you’re going to find a way, even if it means that you’re going to climb up on some cliff at some ungodly predawn hour and let your nephew strap you into a hang gliding harness and quickquick shove you off into space. What determination will do for you is help you find a way to get where you want to go.

Dreaming will tell you where you want to go.

Desire will ensure you want to get there.

Determination is the thing that drags you along the path, no matter that it’s sometimes rough and muddy and sometimes you just want to sleep in:  if you’re determined to do it, you’re going to do it or die trying.

Because here’s the deal:  some day you are going to die. It might be sudden, but it probably won’t be. You’ll probably have a while to look back over your life, kind of check up on what you’ve done, what you wish you’d done, what you remember most happily. What you do not want, in those peaceful days of lying in bed, surrounded by your loving family, is to be going, “Goddamnit! Why in the hell didn’t I paint more? And what are all you people doing in my bedroom?”

So think about it. Are you content to dream your life away, wishing for good things to come your way, via the generosity of The Universe? If so, great! You’re excused—you can go get that glass of Chablis and park your butt on the sofa.

But if you don’t want to be the one lying there when you’re 98, snapping at the great-great-grandchildren about how they’d better not waste their lives the way you did, then it’s time to sit down with a notebook and a pen and figure out how you’re going to determine your future. If you’re determined to paint, you will paint. And if you’re determined to get good at it, well—what are you doing still sitting here? Get up! Get busy! It’s never too early to start, and it’s never too late to get your butt in gear.