Your creative output spans several disciplines - a big reason why I enjoy your work - while a goal of yours is preventing multi-tasking. Can you define what unproductive multi-tasking looks like to you vs. what have you found to be a productive way to shift your focus from one discipline to another?
It comes down to scope and granularity. The ideal focused work to me is a session of 25:00 pomodoro. Undistracted, focusing on a single task, with a single tool, undisturbed. Then, throughout the day, the relationship between each of the pomodoros, would be done for a singular project.
An unproductive multi-tasking day, would include interrupted sessions of pomodoros, over multiple unrelated projects.
In your tracking, I like that you differentiate between focused input, like listening to music, and output, like performing music. How do you decide what is an appropriate output of something you are curious about and what's your process like to allocate the right about time towards it?
Ideally, I would like to optimise for concrete output, so output that yield the highest form of product, ex: releasing things, instead of endlessly tooling. But I can't simply chain days of hard concrete output, especially as my work becomes increasingly complex.
- There was a time when I would just draw all day, and release the finished lineart at the end of the day. But then I started coloring, animating, using these drawings as assets in games, and interactive experience, and into the context of larger project arcs and so on.. As the project got more complex, the more planning and tooling I had to do.
I have enough project histories, that when I am to start a new project, I can estimate how many hours will be required roughly based on a previously completed similar project, as you would with any task tracker. As for the day-to-day, I tend to follow the Horaire tools, as it calculates the optimal task(concrete output code), or my remaining concrete output "stamina", based on previous streaks of similar sequences of logs.
In the process of using the Horaire Log over the past years, what was the biggest adjustment you made (to the log, to your lifestyle) that paid off?
Making logging rapid and unhindering. The hardest thing about logging, is logging itself, and to keep doing it. Optimizing redundant logs, turning them into quick codes, like the fh/ch codes to generate the task/hour made this whole process a lot more fun. Giving instant feedback, through dataviz for instance, was excellent too.
The biggest adjustment to my lifestyle, that I made recently, that yeilded the biggest difference, was to record more data. I've recently pushed this further, and started offloading almost all thought that goes through my mind at all time onto this digital paper. It has slowed time, helped me with focus and mindfulness.