This week I do creative work
I’m not sure why, but I think I’m going to feel better for sharing the following with you. I’m writing a book. But here’s the thing. I was commissioned almost a year ago. It’s due next month. But, oh my, I’ve not written a word. At least not one fit enough for print.
Seriously, a whole year has passed as Henry David Thoreau once said (about life in general),
“frittered away by detail.”
That is, getting back to people, paying parking tickets and working through bottomless to-do lists. And that magical day when I “finally get on top of things” and can focus on creative outpouring keeps getting pushed back and back.
I think it’s a fact of modern life that no one gets anything done anymore. Anything of worthwhile, creative value.
Productivity expert Jason Fried spoke at TED.com recently about how work doesn’t happen at work now; it gets done on the train, on weekends and when we come in two hours early before the email avalanche descends. I was talking to my friend Kerry, a CEO of a charity organisation. “I need a long plane trip to come up soon,” she said. “So I can get my mid-term report finished.”
This is how we get our meaningful work done, because our “working days” are completely shredded up by interruptions and meetings and we never get the momentum and locked-out languid space required for creative stuff. But it’s the creative stuff we’re all crying out for, isn’t’ it!