When I’m in a fallow period of my life — that is, when I’m not productive (in the literal, semantic sense of the word: when I’m not producing) — for a prolonged period, either deliberately or accidentally —, I don’t need too many tools to get by (read: to fool other people into thinking I am a functioning adult — ha! joke’s on them — in our fast-paced modern world). And I’m lazily haphazard about the ones I do use. XD

Because I don’t need to produce or perform, having tools that support productivity and performance doesn’t matter. When I’m in Fallow Mode, I consume content with no specific goal of creating anything from it. I just let whatever I read, watch, listen to, or hear from others come into my brain. Whatever manages to stick, sticks through no particular effort of my own; whatever doesn’t, I don’t even notice.

Well, okay, I notice the mess. ‘^^

The note to myself that I idly scribble on a piece of paper immediately gets lost in the disaster that is my desk. Multiply that for every stray thought — at least the ones I bother trying to save even momentarily by scribbling down —, and my desk looks like the aftermath of a mini tornado. Eventually I get tired of the detritus, and I pitch all of those scraps into the wastepaper basket — for that is what they have become: waste paper.

The same thing more or less happens with files on my virtual desktop — except that, unlike physical real estate, virtual storage is cheap, virtually infinite, so I don’t even bother to throw away my digital scraps of paper. I just dump them all into a folder — a shoving of everything unsightly out of sight — that I then hide from myself by losing it amongst a whole bunch of other folders. . . .

That kind of “organisation” just does not work when I need to be productive — because it’s not productive in the least. Then again, let’s be clear, it doesn’t need to be. And that’s okay. That’s the point of letting a field lie fallow, after all.

However, when I do need to be in Productive Mode, especially when that mode is on the High Output setting — such as when I crazily commit to shooting for successful authorship, ahem —, my haphazard ways bit me in the ass. ‘^^ I need some structure to save me from myself. XD So, to get to my destination of successful authorship, I’m going to have to have some kind of vehicle to carry me there.

I’m gonna hafta build a car.

Naturally, a metaphorical car needs metaphorical means for steering (strategic direction planning), accelerating and braking (applying momentum or stopping momentum on decisions, as needed), and, perhaps most importantly, converting fuel into power (processing raw material — books read, conversations overheard, life lived — into writing) — otherwise known as the engine. In short, it needs to help me be more productive — that is, more creative & generative in more efficient & effective ways — in my writing life across the board.

Now, to be clear, I have been productive in the past. It’s not that I don’t know how to organise myself, how to plan, how to make executive decisions and all that. It’s just that, in the past, most of that work was done on paper — for no other reason than because I have an unholy love of stationery ‘^^ and felt perfectly justified in feeding my addiction said love by acquiring and using all the accoutrements that planning on paper inevitably requires.

However! This time, my creativity car needs to be paperless because an analogue system, while lovely, is much less functional and sustainable than a digital one the more mobile a person is and becomes. And I want to be able to write from anywhere (well, anywhere that has high-speed internet XD). (Not to mention I’ve moved quite a few times in my life and seeing as how I may not be done with moving around just yet, I have become less and less enamoured with having a lot of physical stuff.)

So, to start the process of manufacturing this digital car — to stretch this already absurd metaphor even further XD —, I am now turning my attention to learning about — and, of course, optimising on (because I’m an engineering nerd =P) — modern productivity systems (some of which may just be older systems remade digitally). Now, my default approach to learning anything is to start by reading a bunch of books — because of course it is XD —, and so I have just recently finished reading Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain and am now reading its companion, The PARA Method, as well as David Allen’s Getting Things Done. Once I finish those, I think I’ll have a better sense of how I want to go about building out this baby.

We’ll see how it goes.

(If you don’t hear back from me in a month, send help. My baby may or may not have grown into a monster and swallowed me whole. ‘^^)