daily-ish
daily-ish: not daily, not just two times a week, five times a week counts, in busy periods three to four times counts as well.
i have been listening to oliver burkeman’s ‘meditations for mortals’, daily-ish.
i hope that it has been daily-ish, i don’t know exactly when i started and won’t go back and calculate the number of episodes listened to over the past weeks. plus, there is oliver’s recommendation that one should only listen to one episode per day, so i’m unable to catch up on the quota anyway.
in this episode (to find out which one, you have to listen to the podcast daily-ish for about three weeks, i think), he explains the ‘seinfeld strategy’ for getting things done. mark a calender with a red X every day you did something useful for your creative endeavours. start a chain and don’t break it.
he then puts his own twist on it by allowing for life. in the end, marking up the calender isn’t the point, but working on (creative) output consistently.
why is this important?
there is no backlog, only today. it’s not about the X’s, it is about consistently showing up to do stuff. but not under pressure. allowing for creative pauses is also important. creativity needs showing up, but it also needs flow. flow is wonderful when it happens, but it can't be forced. some days it is there waiting, other days it only appears after you've already started. you sit down, move a sentence around, write a paragraph you'll probably delete tomorrow, or you reword it until it makes no sense anymore and you have to delete it today or tomorrow or sometime, you stare out the window at the oak tree for a while. sometimes that's all that happens, but sometimes that's exactly what is needed for flow to arrive.
just showing up is enough. daily-ish, without demanding that something extraordinary happens. giving creativity the space to appear, rather than trying to force it into existence.
did i say (write) ‘output’? so, do i have to ‘put out’ what i worked on daily-ish? output can mean two things. there is making something, and there is putting it out into the world. those aren't necessarily the same. daily-ish is about the first kind of output. writing a paragraph, making notes, sketching an idea that never leave the notebook. creating something, even if nobody else ever sees it.
maybe i should rethink or replace the word output. creating something for myself is different from creating something to share. the first is about exploring an idea, following a thought, seeing where it leads. the second is about deciding that it is ready for someone else. they are different moments in the same process.
so, let’s reword this: daily-ish is about showing up to do or make something, stuff. sharing follows its own rhythm. not everything needs an audience. in fact, if every creative session starts with the expectation that it should end in publication or serial production, it risks becoming a performance or a commodity.
