One of my personal maxims is “Make something every day”. This turns out to be easy as a programmer most of the time, since I get to output code at my day job, but lately I am finding that that “easy button” output is not meeting my own measure of satisfaction.
Luckily, I am a bit flaky when it comes to creative works. What that means, most of the time, is that I have a lot of projects going on. It’s kind of a bad thing, because it means I don’t finish much (as Lee often reminds me), but it’s kind of a good thing, because I have a lot of different places to “file” new output. If I listen to the Fisheries Broadcast, I can put stuff in Dynamite Harbour, or I can put it in the La Scie Project, or I can even occasionally put it in Canada: The RPG.
I don’t think this would work for everyone, but I’m not everyone. It took me a really long time to accept my creative flakiness, because I’m not what you might think of when you imagine a creative flake. I wear a shirt with a collar to work. I earn decent money. I often speak in TLAs. Heck, I even have a separate Twitter account just for things that relate to my day job.
But the fact remains, when it comes to creative work, I like to have many different ideas in play. I have found that I can be saturated as long as I keep a sufficient number of them in front of me, and I can use my “boring” skills to keep them fairly organized. I don’t know that I encourage people to try flakiness, exactly, but I can definitely say that if you find yourself distracted by shiny new things, it’s worth trying to keep a bunch of ideas afloat at once to see if it works for you.
This post is now my made thing for today 🙂