One
Sunday July 2009 16:55 Filed in: Personal | introduction
The first blog entry, and introduction to what I’ll be writing about here at THINKING IN INK
It’s a hot summer sunday in Valencia, Spain. 32º and the city is quiet.
I am going to spend the next 30 minutes writing.
Writing is so valuable and yet you have to get through the first however many minutes before anything actually happens...before your brain clicks into it. Actually, you know the more I think about it that’s probably appropriate to anything and everything in life. You start the physical work and the mind clicks in later.
Usually 10-15 minutes later for me.
So if I spend my day doing things 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there I’m really going to have a very fruitless day. I’ll get to the end of it and think: “I’ve done NOTHING all day!”
Oddly though, once you do something that you commit to by grinding through the first 15 minutes and your mind ‘clicks in’, you can accomplish a LOT in a relatively short time. Doing eight things a day one hour at a time is everything. Doing 36 things 15 minutes at a time amounts to nothing. ...at least for me.
Thirty minutes if writing is kind of like 30 minutes of thinking except maybe its more like ‘guided’ thinking. Or structured thinking.
When you think in your mind, you drift down a beach with a current and eventually realize that you have drifted far from where your beach towel is and you never even realized it and you have no sense of how you got there. On the other hand, writing the thoughts down is more like leaving a breadcrumb trail where the end goal is the trail itself...not so much the destination.
I can step back and look at it later and shape it. Quantify it. Refine it. Reflect on it. Study it.
‘Thinking in Ink’ (or in this case thinking in type) is a phrase I saw on a postcard one time and I’m hereby appropriating for this page.
I have taken the summer off between the two years I just spent in London and my move back to Sydney, Australia. I am trying to use this time to re-assess everything in my life.
I am feeling...a little lost, a little overwhelmed with a lot of decisions to be made. I have a lot of little things in my life and I’d like to do a bit of a stock-take. I want to make sure everything is going in the right direction and trim the things that aren’t working, or adjust them. Introduce new things. Completely eliminate others.
That’s what this blog is going to be about. It’s a personal journal of a personal journey. It is a larger canvass than my own head because I feel that I need the space. Its somewhere to externalize, and thereby diffuse a lot of issues in my mind which may be imagined. Those issues that are real will get dealt with here too.
But it isn’t just a bunch of rambling musings.
For me it’s going to be a tool. And there will be outcomes and concrete changes inspired by it and recorded in it.
That’s 30 minutes right there. Didn’t hurt a bit
Doug Suiter,
Valencia, Spain.
Sunday, 5 July 2009.
I am going to spend the next 30 minutes writing.
Writing is so valuable and yet you have to get through the first however many minutes before anything actually happens...before your brain clicks into it. Actually, you know the more I think about it that’s probably appropriate to anything and everything in life. You start the physical work and the mind clicks in later.
Usually 10-15 minutes later for me.
So if I spend my day doing things 5 minutes here and 5 minutes there I’m really going to have a very fruitless day. I’ll get to the end of it and think: “I’ve done NOTHING all day!”
Oddly though, once you do something that you commit to by grinding through the first 15 minutes and your mind ‘clicks in’, you can accomplish a LOT in a relatively short time. Doing eight things a day one hour at a time is everything. Doing 36 things 15 minutes at a time amounts to nothing. ...at least for me.
Thirty minutes if writing is kind of like 30 minutes of thinking except maybe its more like ‘guided’ thinking. Or structured thinking.
When you think in your mind, you drift down a beach with a current and eventually realize that you have drifted far from where your beach towel is and you never even realized it and you have no sense of how you got there. On the other hand, writing the thoughts down is more like leaving a breadcrumb trail where the end goal is the trail itself...not so much the destination.
I can step back and look at it later and shape it. Quantify it. Refine it. Reflect on it. Study it.
‘Thinking in Ink’ (or in this case thinking in type) is a phrase I saw on a postcard one time and I’m hereby appropriating for this page.
I have taken the summer off between the two years I just spent in London and my move back to Sydney, Australia. I am trying to use this time to re-assess everything in my life.
I am feeling...a little lost, a little overwhelmed with a lot of decisions to be made. I have a lot of little things in my life and I’d like to do a bit of a stock-take. I want to make sure everything is going in the right direction and trim the things that aren’t working, or adjust them. Introduce new things. Completely eliminate others.
That’s what this blog is going to be about. It’s a personal journal of a personal journey. It is a larger canvass than my own head because I feel that I need the space. Its somewhere to externalize, and thereby diffuse a lot of issues in my mind which may be imagined. Those issues that are real will get dealt with here too.
But it isn’t just a bunch of rambling musings.
For me it’s going to be a tool. And there will be outcomes and concrete changes inspired by it and recorded in it.
That’s 30 minutes right there. Didn’t hurt a bit
Doug Suiter,
Valencia, Spain.
Sunday, 5 July 2009.