Active Recall!

I’ve been thinking about how to create a publication schedule. A lot of days I just don’t know what I’m going to work on in the morning. I’ll wake up and have a block of time in the morning.

I know that I want to do the morning creativity routine. After that though I know that I need to have a better idea of what I’ll work on.

I’ve read that it can be a good idea to separate writing and editing. I was doing some brainstorming for a schedule. This is a first draft and I can already see that it probably isn’t a good idea to work on four posts in a day. It should probably be more like working on two posts on any given day.

I’ll revise this to reflect. You can bet that I’ll share as I go along.

I listened to Pat Flynn with the creators of the 5-Minute Journal. A few years ago they were thinking about all the things they’ve learned from reading about gratitude and wanted to make it easier to apply the principles. What came out of it was the five-minute journal.

I’ve been thinking about that this year quite a bit. I read a lot but a lot of the time reading would be better spent applying what I read. It reminds me of Eric Barker’s post where he says you should probably spend 30% reading and 70% applying what you learn.

I started outlining different timescales of planning and mapping them to books I’ve read that would be helpful while doing that phase of planning.

It goes from planning your year all the way down to the planning your day and time blocking.

At the extremes it goes beyond a year to where you are evaluating what you value. What are you planning to achieve in the first place and is that worth it? It goes down to kind of a minute level meaning being present for the most part. You can build an awareness and control over your mind and your attitude.

That’s the outline. I would love to expand on this in a proper post.

It took me three tries to remember his name has two Rs. I drew this while listening to Will Farrell’s appearance on the BS Report with Bill Simmons. I really liked this and it’s just another example of someone working very hard for many years before becoming an overnight success. From what I’ve read, I don’t think you end up on SNL without a ton of work. In Smartcuts, Shane Snow writes about how Jimmy Fallon became a cast member young relative to most cast members. Even he had to go through rejection and work very hard at it.

There was a sale on Audible the other day for books from the Great Courses. I bought one before and returned it because I got a little overwhelmed because it was dozens of hours long.

I bought six books of time without intending to finish them entirely. I’ll treat them kind of like buying a podcast a season at a time. I’ll listen to them one chapter at a time and I won’t start one if I no I won’t be able to really finish it. Similar to how you wouldn’t walk out of a lecture a quarter of the way through and expect to come back to the same point a few days later.

Then when I finish a chapter I’ll try to do some active recall. It’ll be a constant source of inspiration for the morning creativity routine. You’re looking at an example that right now.

One of the books I got is How Great Science Fiction Works. So far it’s explaining what science fiction is in the first place. Frankenstein was one of the first science fiction books. Not all monster books are science fiction books and many of them to that point and even today or still in the fantasy genre or horror. The gist is that science fiction has to be somewhat plausible if you took the current state of technology and stretched it forward.

While looking up the title in my Audible library I saw that it comes with a 220 page PDF. Now I’m kind of wishing I bought more of these books. Six is probably a good start.