43 Folders

In the time since I gallantly announced what makes a good blog, I’ve had time to think more about the qualities of work that endures.

Not thinking just of personal blogs here, or solely in terms of the ways that we can improve online publishing and social media —although clearly these are areas that could stand some improvement. I’m talking about the extent to which some of those qualities that I mentioned in that article relate to broader ideas around all creative work and the process behind how it gets made well and consistently by an auteur who’s only incidentally a merchant.

And it’s especially got me thinking about how any thing we choose to make today can contribute to, for lack of a better phrase, an arc.

So, naturally, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Wire.

First, understand that I’m an unapologetic superfan of and evangelist for The Wire, which is David Simon’s epic, 5-season HBO drama about the life and work of a lot of very flawed characters in contemporary Baltimore. This is neither the first nor last time that I’ll quote Simon’s excellent description of the show’s theme, which is taken from his DVD commentary of the very first scene of s01e01:

[The Wire is] really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how … whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.

Much has been written about the dense, literary quality of the show (read Kottke for context and great links), so it may not surprise you to learn I’m one of the many people who consider The Wire to be the best series that’s ever appeared on television; my wife and I have watched the first (and, in my opinion, best) four seasons at least three times.

Yeah, that’s a plug for you to give The Wire a chance, but it’s not exactly my point.

Ok. So, why The Wire?

My point is that one big reason why The Wire was so good is its endlessly satisfying story arc, which is composed of many smaller, complementary arcs inside the big arc. That’s where a good story becomes a much more engrossing narrative that’s ultimately about more than itself.

Like any creative work that connects with the people who enjoy it, The Wire tells a story. And, to some extent, every story is about change.

Something happened. Or something is going to happen. Or something that everybody expected to happen hasn’t happened. But, it’s a change, and it’s having an impact on the lives of people we care about. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s basically the bones and teeth of every story from Adam & Eve through Harold & Kumar. Something changed, and now people have to deal.

How that dealing spins out over the life of a project, how the story is told, and what the story says about the world are the sorts of questions we’re only encouraged to ask about Big Important Things like very old books and Bergman films. Which, of course, is bullshit.

There’s no reason you can’t look at the lifetime of any good piece of story-telling — and, yes, why not, let’s say that could include blogs, Twitter accounts, and Flickr streams — and be able to see what the change is.

Yes: if it’s any good, I can look at one page or one photo or one 140-character post and enjoy it for its value as one independent thing in the world. But over time, all those potentially thousands of pieces can and do snap together, often without our even realizing it. The question is, what story is it that we’re telling? What is the arc?

And, that’s where I look to an example of middlebrow culture that falls somewhere between Bergman’s Death playing chess with Man on a beach and Scoble’s latest shaky video of a guy who likes golf speaking in press releases. But, The Wire is a piece of popular culture that beautifully illustrates how satisfying all those seemingly unrelated pieces of an arc can be — and how much richer they each become when the audience is engaged, challenged, and rewarded by the effort of giving the work 100% of their attention. Of course, it also helps if the creator is talented, tries really hard, and doesn’t treat the audience like a bunch of bored imbeciles. But, I digress.

Like any story, The Wire has characters, settings, and things that happen over time. Example? Let’s start with a single, one-minute scene from s01e05 — an episode called “The Pager,” that’s from right around the time when the series really started cooking. Which, not coincidentally, was also when the intersecting arcs started to reveal themselves.

The Scene

Meet Jimmy McNulty.

Jimmy’s a talented, politically deaf, pain-in-the-ass homicide detective and drunk who’s estranged from the mother of the two children he adores. One night, in the shitty little apartment he’s recently moved into, Jimmy’s too wasted on cheap scotch to properly assemble the Ikea furniture that he bought for his kids’ imminent visit. Jimmy is a mess, because he’s dealing with change. In his own inimitable way.

But, see, you don’t really even need to know all this to just enjoy the scene. (Please watch from 0:09-1:25)

One small scene of a guy who’s drunk and a little careless. There’s loud music playing in the next apartment. He has to make a few trips to get all of the stuff he bought into one room (bet he’s in a walk-up apartment, right?). Jimmy’s useless tonight, clearly more focused on the bottle than on assembling the parts of his new SÜLI. Here’s a middle-aged man whose bedroom contains a green plastic lawn chair. Plus, the whole sorry scene is grimly lit by a single high-wattage desk lamp — reminiscent of the unforgiving light flooding the interrogation rooms that Jimmy and his partner, Bunk, work every day. Painful already, right?

So, that’s just one very small bit of character, setting, and thing-that-happens. While it’s certainly not a story, in and of itself, it’s still an entertaining, well-made scene to watch. Not as famous as Jimmy and Bunk’s deservedly best-known scene from the previous episode (warning: very NSFW), but you get the idea. You can already tell a few things about this show.

It’s well photographed, the set is painfully realistic, and the man dealing with change seems convincingly Baltimorean and drunk (although the actor portraying him is stunningly British and, to my knowledge, mostly sober).

Even if you have no idea what else happens on the other dozens of hours of this series, past and future, you could watch this one-minute scene and think, “yeah, that’s pretty good.”

The Episode

But, if you were able to watch the whole episode — and it’s a good one — you’d see an atypically intense and complex police drama about cops in an understaffed bureaucracy trying to gather string about a case that seems impossible to crack. You’d see that some of the cops are brilliant (“Natural PO-lice”), some are dedicated, a couple are intoxicated by brutality, and a memorable pair with a Gaelic pun for a name are hilariously useless and corrupt. None is prefect, but none is without his or her interesting and redeeming qualities. End to end, it’s a very colorful bunch.

Same goes for the dealers and drug kingpins, who are struggling with their own related set of problems around bureaucracy, trust, and continuity inside a crumbling system. Theirs is a mature but increasingly vulnerable criminal enterprise that’s being menaced and robbed at will by a dangerous and unforgettable outsider with surprising tastes, ethics, and style.

Along the way you’d see a lot of beautifully shot scenes that show (without telling) why these people are so desperate. Plus you’d be introduced to secondary characters who are anything but stage dressing, such as a junkie informant who’s inked and filled-in with the complex texture of a Mercutio or a Fagin.

So, basically, if you gave this episode from June of 2002 about an hour of your time, and it was the only thing you ever saw of The Wire, you’d probably walk away thinking, “Wow, I didn’t understand almost any of that, but it was really interesting and well made. This looks like a great show that you have to actually watch and think about.”

But, here’s where it gets really good, and where we start to see a bigger arc that may not have been clear before.

The Season

Indeed, if you watched that whole first season of The Wire, you’d find yourself rewarded with a storyline — an arc — that I will not spoil for you.

But, you’d start to see that almost every character you meet ends up having some effect on at least a handful of other characters — even if they never knew the others existed. The decisions that people make early in the season have resonance throughout the story that plays out in unexpected ways. And the change that describes the generic arc of that first season (Antihero cops try to take down an antihero Baltimore drug crew) ends up telling a much deeper story than any typical police procedural that I’m familiar with.

Even in one season, we’re seeing a story that’s closer to Dickens or Zola than any styrofoam plate full of Law & Order. This is nothing short of a Greek Tragedy about broken people trying to stay alive in a broken system. Nobody’s perfect, and everybody is fucked in one way or another.

In my opinion, it’s a breathtaking set of 13 episodes. And if those hour-long TV shows were all you ever watched: again, you’d have enjoyed a real treat.

But there’s a lot more story, more change, and still more to the arc.

The Series

Finally, if you watched all five seasons of The Wire, you’d see a lot more going on than you imagined from one season, one episode — let alone one short scene of a drunk cop trying to build children’s furniture by lamp light.

You’d see each successive season turning to a different broken and dying institution: unions, government, public education, and print media, respectively. You’d see the same themes, and characters, and mistakes, and hopes, and horrible consequences brought back to life in different ways. Stuff that happened before still means something; possibly even more than you’d first realized.

This is a show that uses previous story arcs to deepen and expand on current stories. It uses things you’d never noticed from previous viewings as the centerpiece for a whole new story. It suggests grace notes that are barely audible unless you’ve been listening carefully for a very long time.

In sum, The Wire pays back the attention you invest in it like few pieces of art created in my lifetime. It’s vicious about telling every letter of the story with muscular precision — even when it chooses to do so at pace many would consider pointlessly deliberate: “dull.”

And, because the story rarely stops to explain what’s happening for the folks who just wandered in from the first segment of Family Feud, it demands that you bring the same care and thought to watching the show that its creators brought to making it. Thinking, on both ends of the art. That is engagement.

Like great literature, yes, you can return and enjoy this series on many levels and based on whatever you have to bring to it at a given time. It’s not only smarter than anything else that I’ve seen on TV, it’s also smarter than I am. Which I love.

Arcs Matter Because Writing Matters

I doubt that I’ll ever make anything one-tenth as intelligent, thoughtful, and engaging as The Wire, and, in all likelihood, neither will you. But, again, that’s not the point.

The inspiration you need to take away from this is the idea that every scene matters to some arc. Even the one minute with the drunk furniture assembly. Whether your given “scene” is in a screenplay, or an Excel spreadsheet, or the Tweet that you’re about to type about your flight delay: it matters. It all matters.

Like I said in the talk where I first brought up this thought about The Wire (video and slides of which below), if you think what you write about or otherwise choose to make doesn’t matter, talk to Stephen King.

He started writing a book I adore before he nearly died, then finished it in excruciating pain after it turned out he was still barely alive, let alone whole. The story he tells about what happened in-between may change your mind about whether this stuff is worth caring about. Just understand: it matters to the people who follow your arc and it really ought to matter to you — long before some idiot with a rottweiler hits you with his giant van.

There’s already one arc that you began the minute you made something, called it “done,” then put it someplace where people could see it. How that very, very large story gets told may be too late for you to completely control. Sorry, but that — as Omar would say — is all in the game.

But you very much do have the power to design the arcs you make, starting today. And even if you haven’t figured out how your final episode ends, consider how the pieces you want to lay down might fit together. And how the string that you gather might crack a case you hadn’t expected.

Who do you want to delight? Who do you pray gets your references? Who will you flatly refuse to explain your backstory to? What’s the one goddamned thing that only you can make today — and what arc might it fit into downstream? Which “average reader” are you prepared to find the courage to tell: “Fuck you.”

Above all: whose attention will you reward with the best thing you can possibly make today?

Good. Now go, and reward the shit out of them.

Supporting Material: “How to Blog”

kung fu grippe - How to Blog

Here’s the presentation I recently did in which I talked about this Wire stuff for the first time (that part starts around the 53:00 mark in the video)

Video

Tip: Sean’s a nice enough guy, but his introduction in this very choppy video will redefine your personal concept of “headache-inducing.” With respect, skip to 5:20 to get to where my actual talk begins.

Update 2008-09-25 11:09:18 PDT

I apologize. I cannot get this busted-ass video embed not to autoplay, and if I hear Sean screaming about a scavenger hunt on my site one more time, I’m going to lose it. Video’s here. So sorry for the extra click.

Slides

[“what is this?”]

Here’s something I wrote last week for this site’s new “About” page:

43 Folders is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Call it a motto, or a charter, or — if you have to — a “mission statement.” But, for both of us, it’s a stake in the ground that keeps me focused on what I feel best suited to do for you with this site right now.

I want to help you identify and remove any obstacle that keeps you from making things that you love. And then I want to help you figure out how to make those things even better. That’s pretty much it.

R.I.P., Productivity Pr0n

Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.

From now on, I’m going to talk about how people make stuff. Books, art, code, buildings, ballets, companies, furniture, whimsical hats, songs, or what have you. But understand: this isn’t just for fancy people and fine arts majors.

You’re already “creative”

If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then figuring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you’re already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn’t occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you’ve done something creative. Seriously. This does not require your wearing a beret.

But, then — and this is really important — if you want to actually make something out of all that insight, and if you have the will and desire to polish and improve the execution of all the things you produce, then we’ll have a lot to talk about.

But, if you want a “site about GTD,” “a blog about index cards,” or a wide-mouthed sluice of recycled links to lists of geegaws that will keep you momentarily distracted from how sad you are, then you’re wasting both of our time here. So, go. You’re stinking up the joint.

This is now a site for people who want to finish things that they care about — but who still occasionally need help, inspiration, and the courage to push all the bullshit off their work table. This is about clearing that space every day, and then using it to do cool stuff that makes you proud.

So. What, then?

Does this mean that Inbox Zero, Time and Attention Management, or advice on reducing noise will be going away from 43 Folders? No. Freaking. Way.

If I may say, that’s all great stuff, and you’re still going to need it if the mind is willing but the attention is occasionally weak (or under attack). No, if anything, you’ll be seeing more articles targeted at how to do this stuff well so you can get back into the studio faster.

You’re also going to see more material about the habits and patterns that have been demonstrated to work for makers who have had long-lived careers in the creative world. In itself, this is the direction I’m most fascinated with right now, and it’s likely one I’ll be returning to often in the coming months:

How do you fire your muse and learn to rely solely on working your ass off every day?

As I’m learning, it definitely can be done, but there’s no secret or silver bullet; it’s just work, work, work, combined with a personal commitment to editing and improvement that produces the best results of which you’re capable as often as possible. It’s the kind of productivity that’s about applying your time to frequent, high-quality “releases” — not laying in a hammock while people in Bangalore update your website.

But, what about all the cool notebooks, links to lists of “GTD resources,” and ponderously detailed tutorials on how to label a file folder? Yeah. From now on, maybe don’t expect a lot of that here. Unless I feel it has a direct link to helping you do things.

So, we’re going to talk about what goes in the notebook; not the fact that it’s pretty and has a little bookmark. Then I want you to leave here.

That’s the basic idea. We’ll see what evolves.

And, there’s these other things

I’m also working on some other stuff for the site that I hope will please more people than it annoys. In any case, they’re each important to me. Here’s the shape of the map.

1. Less noise in general

Less chrome, less noise, less blah-blah, and less unnecessary anything. On a given day in the future, you may notice this as fewer ads, lower (but higher-quality) post volume, and an ongoing attempt to make the site fast and easy to use. I’m working on this. With money and people and new relationships and so on. More as it develops and becomes worth highlighting.

2. Walking a truer productivity walk

It’s important to me that we both try to stay focused on the real goal: which is being done with a project that you care about. It’s not about hanging out, smoking cloves, and chatting about “Différance” late into the Paris nights. I want you to visit here, get what you need, then get the hell back to work.

So, if you occasionally notice me smiling, and putting a firm but gentle hand between your shoulder blades as we begin a walk toward the door, it’s because that’s closer to where your work is. It’s not here, it’s not in your inbox, and, with all due respect, it’s probably not in a list of 5,000 links.

Like I said recently, if you’ve crossed the river, you should quit carrying the boat. And while I very much hope and desire that you make 43 Folders your first stop when you need to feel inspired and confident about making decisions that support your best work, I truly do not want you to waste time here. That would make me sad.

So, yes, please read this page: How to Use 43 Folders. It’s a new page that provides basic guidance on finding fast answers, and ultimately, on helping you figure out why you’re here.

I imagine the how-to will evolve as the site evolves, so I would be honored if you would trust me enough to bookmark that page, then consider making it the place where you begin your visits here. With any luck, it can also frequently be the page where your visits quickly end here. And, although I have to imagine it will vex the nice people who are kind enough to sell ads for my site: that’s okay by me.

3. Mostly firewalled self-promotion

While it’s my site and will always be used to promote my ideas and my business in the way that I think is most appropriate, I also don’t want it to turn into a glorified billboard for me — especially to the exclusion of the writing and ideas that make it theoretically useful. And, especially in the articles and content well. That space is getting more sacrosanct.

With much sadness, I’ve recently watched some of my most beloved and respected friends’ blogs degrade into a depressing slurry of pimping, random affiliate linking, paid (or pseudo-paid) placement, idiotic traffic boosters, and wholesale ego boosting about every bakesale, state fair, or mall opening that its authors plan to chopper into.

Here, except for The Monthly Pimp, I want the content well to stay clean, focused, and worthy of your trust and my credibility. Ads go in the ad zones, and anybody can buy one for pretty much anything. But it doesn’t buy placement in a 43 Folders post, and it shouldn’t buy my association or endorsement elsewhere. Maybe for a truly paid, public endorsement deal; but not for a banner ad buy. That’s just weird. Plus I don’t own a chicken suit.

This doesn’t mean that I won’t link to my own work and my other sites and projects whenever I think it’s appropriate. It also doesn’t mean I’ll stop linking to Amazon for products or A2 for web hosting when it’s germane to what I have to say. But, I do already have a site that’s purely self-promotional. And that’s where I’d like most of that that stuff to live now.

OT: If you’re a blogger I know and love, maybe at least consider joining me in your own overdue Superfund cleanup to the extent that you’re comfortable and able. Too much money can easily buy you a very dumb audience and an astoundingly influential cohort of ex-readers.

4. No more fake “conversations”

I’ve loved so many of the comments and forum posts on 43 Folders. But, for an endless number of reasons that you’ve probably seen for yourself across the web, the quality and care of visitor contributions everywhere has hit what I truly hope is rock bottom.

Stupid, venal, ignorant, self-linking comments from people who couldn’t be troubled to actually read the article. Angry forum posts full of personal attacks, giant avatars of Manga characters, and 4-vertical-inch signatures about which Golden Girl you are. Nonsense tagging, meta-commenting, ass-kissing, trolling, and…oooo!…video responses….neato! Please. It’s nuts and it’s pointless and it’s really cynical on the part of almost every publisher that allows that crap to go on.

“Conversation,” like “friend,” is a word that has a meaning to human beings with faces and brains. I will not abuse it as code for the surplus page views produced by someone with an afternoon to kill.

5. This is my site. There are many like it, but this one is mine

43 Folders is now, once again, about what I have to say about things, and I want that to be the sole reason that the idea of a visit here either attracts or repels you.

Yes, there will still be occasional guest posts, open threads, and of course, I’ll be linking to and quoting widely from the work of others. But I’m taking a cue from John, Andy, Jason, and anybody else who wants to own every pixel of their site. I’m buying back my own stock, even if it incurs a short-term writedown.

If you have comments about what I say here, post about it on your own blog. That’s what it’s there for, and it’s a place where owning your words will have gravity and, in most cases, will be associated with the name of a real person who doesn’t pinch loaves on their own couch.

And, then, there’s everything else

Over the next year, I’m going to do lots more speaking, more of my own independent video and podcast projects, and, yes, in all likelihood, I’ll finish one book and make progress toward a second.

N.B. In the case of that last thing, it’s likely to be the sole public remark I’ll have to share until I have a release date, an Amazon page, and a sample chapter for you to download. But, that’s getting ahead of myself. We’ll see what happens. Do wish me luck.

So, “hi.” Again.

I want you to know that I’m back. I’m here. And I’m thinking very much about how 43 Folders can become a focused resource for people who do work that they love and make things that matter to them — but who just want to do it better and with less bullshit and existential overhead on every conceivable front. And, if it’s not clear, I really want that same lack of bullshit and surplus of polish to be evident in my own work as well. It’s the goal, anyhow.

We’ll see how I do. As ever, it’s going to be mostly letters to myself. But, the material is out there, and as much as my schedule for other work and the time I set aside for my family and friends will allow, I want this site to be really consistently good. And, where it’s able, I’d love for 43 Folders to help you make your stuff even better.

So, that’s it for the throat-clearing and metatalk for now. Thanks for hearing me out, and I hope you’ll stop by sometimes if you think 43 Folders can help you make something cool today.

Now: back to work.

[“what is this?”]

Four years ago last Monday, I started 43 Folders with a TypePad account and no idea what I was doing.

The obsessions that brought me here struck me as fascinating and under-reported — if almost entirely unrelated, one to the other. And, talking about the stuff I was really bad at often made me feel less awful about it. Sometimes it even helped me to rehabilitate the triggering, sucky behavior. On a number of levels, this felt really good.

Even though I never really knew where I was heading, I tried to remain candid that the primary reason the site existed at all was because it helped me — a strident preacher, clutching the pulpit in one hand and a book about Next Actions in the other. But, by even a week in, I realized I was writing to a growing audience and found myself daring to hope for a little dough to come my way as a result. Someday.

But, to this day, almost everything I’m proud to have written on 43 Folders started as a letter to myself. No shit.

I also realized from the beginning that the real life hacks were about making your way from a place that’s chaotic and depressing toward someplace where you feel more competent, stable, and alive. A place where you eventually may not need the life hack any more. I wanted to figure out why this stuff did and didn’t work by living inside of it, and by filing real-time reports about what I learned — effectively operating on myself in public with a keyboard, a handful of index cards, and an infinite IV of French Roast coffee.

Some days, it helped me. I’d feel a real sense of purpose and focus that made my new job about writing about my new job seem less weird, fractal, and self-involved. But, on just as many days, it felt like I was allowing myself to be tossed around by a menacing Rube Goldberg device of my own design. On more than a few days, I wondered what, precisely, I was trying to accomplish. Some days, I thought I might be losing my mind. One blog post at a time.

Only on the web could a zero-budget, one-person project about such random shit hit the kind of hockey stick curve 43f rode in late 2004.

People I idolized were suddenly saying they enjoyed what I had to say. People like Andy Baio, Danny O’Brien, Dan Gillmor, and Ben Hammersly each said things about 43f that made me feel really good about what I was doing, making a case that I swear by to this day: producing something that’s enjoyed by the people you admire and respect is the greatest reward a writer can imagine.

But, in no small measure, it was Cory Doctorow’s surpassingly generous linking and encouragement that shot my crummy little site to its cruising altitude, where (for now at least) it remains. Some days, I’ll admit, Cory drives me crazy — and I’m far from the Boing Boing fanatic that I was at the beginning of this decade. But, until the day someone in a smock sets my corpse aflame and pours the remains into a big, red Folgers can, Cory will have my deepest gratitude for using his considerable whuffie to almost singlehandedly put 43 Folders on the map. Thanks, man.

Through 2005 — even as poor Danny and I struggled to finish an unfinishable book through a Kafka-esque process that redefined my notion of “irony” — 43 Folders continued to grow in traffic and in whatever passes for stature on the internet. People seemed excited that blogs were finding a sweet spot in which niche topics, passionate writers, and devoted readers could form a long-distance relationship that was satisfying to everyone in a way that print media increasingly was not.

At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, “very.” But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web’s glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, did these guys love to post and post and post.

Over the years, “productivity blogs” of unbelievably varying quality shot up like hothouse kudzu — many baldly hoping to capitalize on the low-cost, high-return business of theoretically useful self-help publishing — mostly without affecting even the vaguest patina of wanting to help another human being solve a real-world problem. Some of these folks continue to make a living (and draw a considerable crowd) by producing material that I personally find transparently dumb and useless.

Thus, in time, phrases like “life hacks” and “GTD” became associated with everything from printing your own graph paper, to taking a nap, to making a living by pinching off lists of links to lists of links to Firefox extensions that help you use Facebook to more efficiently pretend to like people whom you’ve never met. At this juncture, I formally apologize and wish to atone for any role 43 Folders or I have had in popularizing “hack” as the preferred nomenclature for unmedicated knowledge workers dicking around with their “productivity system” all day. 43 Folders regrets the error.

Plus, as the “Top n” style of shoveling context-free horseshit to an undemanding audience became the new way of “blogging,” I started to wonder where the hell all of this stuff was heading. And, more importantly, I wondered whom any of this stuff might actually be helping. Besides the bloggers, of course. Bloggers love that traffic. Even when it contravenes the basic goddamned tenet of every post their addict-readers are mainlining. But, then, nobody ever said gold mining was going to be good for the environment.

As I continued writing regularly for 43 Folders — and it was very hard to keep up with the pace I’d set in the first months of the site — I often had a gut sense of when I was doing well. I knew when the material was working, because I felt good about the results, less crummy about myself, plus I was still occasionally hearing thoughtful, non-ass-kissing feedback from people whom I respect and admire. Somedays, I fundamentally got it. Other days, I just typed and hit “Post.” Just like the gold miners I despised.

Along the way, I got dubbed “a productivity guru” and was repeatedly reminded by almost everybody that 43 Folders was “a site about Getting Things Done” — period. Which certainly came as a surprise to me. Still does.

By improbably (and I’ve often thought, mistakenly) landing a brief berth in the Technorati Top 100, 43 Folders was also “discovered” by an unspeakable black mildew of PR people who, on their clients’ behalf, “reach out” to bloggers with the gruesome goal of getting them to trade their credibility for access to free crap and “embargoed” press releases. Mm, pinch me. And, somewhere in there, I heard somebody say, “Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable,” and I dreamed of having that phrase printed on a giant hammer.

As I experimented over the years with sundry ways to make money with my site, I tried (and mostly abandoned) a dozen different small trickles of income, before eventually settling on a relationship with a dependable ad company whom I still work with today. They’ve been good to me.

Of course, I occasionally still find myself on the receiving end of an astonishing array of paid promotional offers — a few of which have been the web equivalent of being asked to stand on a street corner, wearing a chicken suit, while spinning a giant red sign that promotes computers I’ve never used. I’m proud to have said “no” to all but a couple of these — I refuse all of them today — although I do regret not having purchased my own chicken suit. Because, that’s steady work that you can do anywhere, you know?

By 2007, an increasingly large number of mornings would find me staring, dead-eyed, at del.icio.us or Digg or reddit, feeling queasy as I wondered what possible role, how ever small, my stupid blog might have had in helping inspire 1,000 hucksters to try their hand at half-assing a living from pretending to help strangers — while providing their quarry an unapologetically infinite source of pointless procrastination in the bargain.

On those days, I rarely even bothered to type. I sulked and wondered what the hell “productivity” meant to anyone who wasn’t peddling some flavor of online addiction or, basically marketing a personality-based cargo cult.

One particularly gifted arrival on the productivity and self-help scene authored some of the most profoundly useful advice I’d ever heard about attention management — but, then followed it up by showing how those extra cycles could be used to game the system so efficiently that you can sit in a hammock for 164 hours a week while people in India write birthday cards to your friends. That one became a runaway bestseller and, perhaps unintentionally, formed the new template for how to market productivity as an extreme lifestyle. I also have to imagine that it singlehandedly revived our nation’s sagging hammock industry.

Finally, when I had the opportunity to really go off the grid last fall to be with my wife and our new daughter, I watched over the hill as my best-known site faded into an XML-enabled cacophony of voices that weren’t my own. Guest bloggers (albeit great friends and good writers); random forum posts; inane, self-linking comments; a wiki that greeted me with freshly replenished v14gRa spam each morning; my own sporadic non-content posts, containing more self-promotion and advertising than I liked; plus a handful of weird, legacy attempts to make an extra hundred bucks a month that, in retrospect, were frankly embarrassing.

My blog about making your life a little better suddenly had more chrome than a Chevy and more bullshit than a limo full of lifestreamers.

The brutal Catch-22? At about the point when I realized my site was no longer about what I really thought or really cared about, I also worried whether I had anything new and substantial to say. And, what I did have to say, I usually self-edited or watered-down, for fear of either adding to the noise, infuriating the dopamine-deprived “TL;DR” crowd, or provoking an exhausting internet feud with one of the web’s countless retardate man-children.

The ad money was still consistent, so I didn’t need to sweat niggling details like why the site still existed. But, by as recently as this past winter, I just wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

The site that had used to make me feel so good about my place on the web felt dry and brittle, and I started avoiding it like an oncologist’s waiting room. This feeling fundamentally sucked, and I had no idea what to do about it.

Then things got better. A lot better.

Tune in later this week for the next thrilling chapter in Merlin’s weird-ass bildungsroman, which series is explained in concept here.

Reserve Reading: kung fu grippe - “Better”

In light of some new directions I’m taking with my work, 43 Folders is changing focus and approach from being the “blog about productivity” that many readers may view it as today.

So, this week, I’ll be presenting a few articles that touch on where I’m heading with this stuff, and why.

By way of prologue, if you’ve been enjoying the stuff I’ve had to say over the past few weeks, I think you’ll find the course adjustments wholesome and useful. If you haven’t so much cared for that stuff, I’m not sure what to tell you. Except there’s a strong possibility this won’t be the site for you. Which is always a risk, anyway.

If you’re wondering about a rough heading on why I’m doing what I’m doing — and what that means to you as a reader — please read this post I wrote the other day for my personal site.

Notwithstanding the fact I stuck that article on a way less visible site mostly out of fear I’d freak people out by putting it here on 43f, I now realize that little essay ended up being exactly what I needed to say, and in exactly the way I needed to say it. Think of it as a first draft of a blueprint.

Put differently, if something like “Better” is not what you’re looking for on 43 Folders in the future, I can’t guarantee that this will continue to be a site you’ll enjoy in precisely the way you did before.

As of today, the menu’s changing, and the snack platter is gone.

While I’ll leave it up to you to decide the degree to which the changes I have in mind will improve 43 Folders in a way you find useful, I hope you’ll at least give it a throw, on the strength.

And, if you share my feeling that real “productivity” means a lot more than index cards, lists of links, and endless, free bus rides for bored tourists, I think you’ll enjoy and benefit from the change.

I want to take your attention seriously by sharing ideas that help you focus on the hard work of making something that you love — and making it better.

A very simple guide to leaving here quickly so you can get back to making something awesome.

Ask yourself…

Why am I here right now instead of making something cool on my own? What’s the barrier to me starting that right now?

This is not an insult or put-down. It’s a useful question. Please, think about it, then search the site to see if we have anything that might inspire you to make something awesome today.

What Sucks?

Looking for specific answers to what sucks for you today?

• “My email sucks.”
• “My attention management sucks.”
• “My compulsive web browsing sucks.”
• “My resolve to put my art first sucks.”
• “My procrastination sucks.”
• “No, seriously. My procrastination really sucks.”
• “My fiddling with ‘productivity systems’ sucks.”
• “My to-do list sucks.”
• “My blog sucks.”
• “My band’s stupid site sucks.”
• “My meetings suck.”
• “My PowerPoint presentation sucks.”
• “I suck.”

More ideas

Still sucking? No problem. Here’s more places to scratch around.

Popular now — Here are the hottest articles on our site (right this minute).

Title	Recent
"Right Now, What Are You Doing?"	1578
Getting started with "Getting Things Done"	722
Introducing the Hipster PDA	542
Ubiquity: Firefox Gets its Quicksilver On	437
Recap: 43 Folders' Corvette Summer	403

Our Most Popular Posts — Okay, technically, it’s the most popular from Januay 2007 til now. But, you know. You get the gist.

Title	All-time
Getting started with "Getting Things Done"	666308
Introducing the Hipster PDA	523584
Writing sensible email messages	181239
How I made my presentations a little better	173121
Video for Merlin's "Inbox Zero" talk	164173

Still lost?

Try a mental sweep, do a shitty first draft, or consider a modest change.

Maybe just get away from the computer for a while by taking a nice walk. Without your phone. We’ll still be here when you come back. Promise.

Welcome back, friend. Per what I wrote in your yearbook back in June, I hope you had a nice summer and stayed sweet and cool. You look great. Did you lose weight or something?

Somewhere along the way over the past few weeks, I seem to have got my game on again here at 43 Folders. I wrote a few items that I’m proud of and that lots of people seemed to enjoy. I’m once again posting about stuff that means a lot to me, and I’m feeling good about the site and where it (and I) will be heading over the next year. (More on that soon)

But, if you were tanning on Ibiza or building houses with Jimmy Carter and missed out on my wordy comeback season, here’s a few articles I hope you will enjoy.

It’s nice to have you back; I found the Vette, and I’m pumped for Fall.

Making Time to Make Series

Link: Making Time to Make

One of the reasons I’ve started really enjoying writing for the site again is best summed up in my favorite thing I’ve written recently — a three-part series on public attention management for creative types that I called, “Making Time to Make.”

It’s been a while since I’ve had such clarity about what I need to do with myself (and, perhaps, more importantly, what I need to be okay with not doing with myself). And these three posts captured what I wanted to say.

If you’re in a big rush and only have time to read one thing out of all these links, jump to the third and final article in this series, Making Time to Make: One Clear Line; that’s got lots of tips and what have you.

Here’s links to all three:

• Making Time to Make: Bad Correspondence - Aug 4 2008 - “As I read all this, I hear a man saying (at least in my words), ‘I can either be a guy who writes novels, or I can be a guy who answers email. Realizing I cannot be both, I’ve made the decision, and now I live with it.’”
• Making Time to Make: The Job You Think You Have - Aug 5 2008 - “Thing is: if the amount of time you devote to lite correspondence with individual people exceeds the amount of time you spend on making things, then you may be in a different line of work than you’d originally thought you were.”
• Making Time to Make: One Clear Line - Aug 6 2008 - “For myself, I think it’s critical to set reasonable expectations about how, when, and where people can expect to have authentic, honest-to-God contact with us…”

Rest of the Best of the Summer

And here’s a few more of the posts that people seemed to like over the past few weeks.

• Free Books for your Amazon Kindle - Jun 6 2008 - My favorite places to find free material for Summer’s favorite new toy
• NYT: Businesses Fight the Email Monster They Helped Create - Jun 14 2008 - Big Companies are starting to get the email problem. Now they’re just trying to figure out what to do about it.
• Guide to Better Napping - Jun 17 2008 - Link post to a fantastic infographic on ad hoc snooze-taking.
• Kurt Vonnegut on Writing Better - Jul 14 2008 - Writing advice that’s as practical and down-to-earth as the guy who offers it - a humble man who obsessed over every page he ever wrote.
• On Peanut Shells and Email Archiving - Jul 24 2008 - A controlling metaphor that helps explain why I advise people not to save their peanut shells.
• Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking - Aug 08 2008 - Simple formula for distilling any mystery meat need into a Project + a Next Action.
• Ideas, Execution, and the Rare Auteur - Aug 11 2008 - More thoughts on why ideas are just a multiplier of execution.
• What Makes for a Good Blog? - Aug 19 2008 - I still owe Six Apart a list of favorite blogs, but, weirdly enough, this list of things I look for in a good blog was the most popular thing I wrote this summer. Go figure.
• Social Networks: The Case for a “Pause” Button - Aug 26 2008 - I love you, but sometimes I need “me time.” And I need you not to know it.
• Deciding Whether to Read a Book: Some Wildly Reductive Heuristics - Aug 27 2008 - My snarky (but honest) shortcuts on quickly sussing out whether a book is worth your attention. (Hint: most don’t make the cut.)

Like I say, welcome back. In case it fell out of your pocket on the train to Paris, here’s our site’s free RSS feed.

See you in study hall.

Right Now: What Are You Doing?

I’ve started to become a lot pickier about where my attention goes as I observe what it means to my work when it drifts. But, I still have a long way to go. Long way.

Like a lot of people I have a bad habit of CMD-Clicking tab sets in my browser, which then spawns a dozen or more new panes of potential distraction, pointless horseshit, and 10,000 excuses not to focus on what I really want to be making right now.

I whipped up this (rather plain and inefficiently coded) page this morning, and stuck it into every tab set that I tend to abuse: as the first tab I see.

It’s not a new idea, it’s not particularly interesting or sophisticated, and it’s certainly not anything you couldn’t whip up for yourself (and better) in about 30 seconds. So, why share it?

Because, your brain needs a Dad. If this can help you, awesome. If your immediate reaction is to think, “Oooo…I know how I can add way more features like a social network and procrastination stats!” hang it up; you’re already screwed.

Catch the drifting as it happens, refocus, then repeat as necessary. That’s it.

Happy Labor Day, friends, and may you find yourself seeing that little page as seldom as possible.

People send me lots of books, so I have to decide rather quickly whether one should be added to the ambitious pile of stuff I already really want to finish reading.

On the off chance that you care or find it useful in developing your own filtering, here’s my insanely reductive, mean-busy-guy way to make a 90-second decision on whether to read a new non-fiction book from an author I’m not familiar with.

It does not matter whether you agree with these; that’s how you know they’re personal heuristics. Also, they are almost uniformly unfair and unkind. So.

For each question, my preferred answer would be “No.” Few of these are dealkillers, but they do quickly aggregate to make the decision easy and obvious for me.

• At the highest level, is this book’s topic based on the typical “zeitgeist” product that gets greenlit by someone who watches lots of golf on TV and who seldom finishes reading the 1,000-word “features” found in in-flight magazines?
• Does the book have one of those irksome, “Everything You Know About Everything is Completely WRONG!” titles?
• Is the author’s large, whitish face the primary feature of the cover?
• Does the cover art contain high heels, Mistral, or any reference to either Oprah Winrey, Joel Osteen, or “Dr. Phil?”
• Can you find the word “secret” anywhere on the cover of the book?
• Is the book published by a company that you’ve never heard of — or, far worse, does that company appear to share the last name of the author or his yacht?
• In the event that this is a book by a “famous” person: if the book were written by someone you’d never heard of, would your interest in the book or its topic wane significantly?
• Are there a very large number of “intentionally blank” white pages at the beginning and end of the book? Are there an astonishingly large number of pages that have been provided for “Notes?”
• Does the Table of Contents lack at least 10% stuff that sounds kind of familiar to you (and at least 30% stuff that does not)?
• Does the first non-front-matter material in the book (often a “Preface” or “Introduction”) seem like a damp hotel room towel that’s matted with the author’s self-congratulation? Is it primarily a sales tool for persons who will never read any further? Does the author seem more arrogant than confident?
• Does the book’s body or heading text suffer from careless or illegible typesetting? Does the book look like an unfinished government manual? Should the designer be horse-whipped for choosing a bold display face for body text?
• Does the book suffer from the overlarge margins, giant type, two-paragraph pages, and “inspiring quotations” that often suggest a rushed, shoddy, or lazy manuscript?
• Have you already found erors and misspelings?
• Does the book’s index seem weak or does it not contain entries for the topic or person whom you most associate with the book’s theme or title?
• Does page 69 bore, vex, or annoy you?
• Can you imagine a future in which closing this book on the last page will make you angry that you didn’t just go back and re-read A Confederacy of Dunces instead?
• Now that you know about this book and have thought about all these horribly petty little things, can you imagine not reading it this week?

No on all counts? Good! You’ve found your book. Happy reading.

And, a propos of nothing, here’s my current non-fiction pile. If you wanted your book to earn a spot, you’d need to beat this competition (some of which do break at least one of these rules, but all trump on quality and great writing).

• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
  • This is the second-best non-fiction book I’ve read this year, after the amazing On Writing
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert Mckee
• When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris
• A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Richard Lannon, and Fari Amini
• Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky

Noted in passing: all the books on the list were purchased by me with actual money. One data point on how many freebies currently make my cut.

Aza’s Thoughts » Ubiquity In Depth

Take a few minutes this week to look at the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox. So far, I’ve spent just enough time with it to have my mind blown by the Quicksilver-like interface it wants to bring to web browsing.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

And, like our favorite OS X launcher, Ubiquity also has an ambitious mission: to move beyond onesie-twosie key shortcuts by using user-extensible commands to intuitively hooked together bits of information like model train cars:

Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do.

[…]

We aren’t there yet. Instead, we have the rudimentary systems of structured natural language commands. You can select something and Ubiq “translate this to French”, or “email it to Jono”. In both cases, Ubiquity is smart enough to realize what “this” and “it” refers to, as well as knowing who Jono is (by talking with my web-mail’s contact list). It’s also smart enough to be able to understand commands like “map Chicago Comics” and “yelp Tapas near SF” and give you rich previews and search results to get you where you want to be quickly. Even better, both of those commands let you insert results directly into, say, an email you’re writing so that you never have to interrupt your chain of thought.

Install it, try it for yourself, and, as you get started, do make liberal use of the Key Commands page (only available after install). There’s also tutorials (that I have not looked at much yet) that show how to make and share new commands.

Every quarter or so I’m sorely tempted to experiment with The Big Move from Safari to Firefox. It’s never stuck before, but Ubiquity makes it damned clear that the latest experiment starts right now. This looks amazing.

[Ubiquity link via: Waxy]

Jason Kottke (via Rex, via TechCrunch) points to a new feature on FriendFeed that allows users to “fake follow” people:

That means you can friend someone but you don’t see their updates. That way, it appears that you’re paying attention to them when you’re really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity.

As duplicitous and sad as “fake following” sounds — and let’s be honest: the whole idea’s pathetic on a number of levels — for a certain kind of user, I can see why there’s a desire for this functionality. Especially on a site like FriendFeed, which has quickly become the platform of choice for the web’s least interesting narcissists — and the slow-witted woodland creatures who enjoy grooming their fur — this is a major breakthrough in the makebelieve friendship space. Yes, primate culture may be primitive, but it is not without its evolving needs.

Thing is, “fake following” is also not so far off from a more wholesome feature that I’ve been begging for on social networks for years now:

Any application that lets you “friend,” “follow,” or otherwise observe another user should include a prominent (and silent) “PAUSE” button.

I think users of apps like Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal, Delicious, and, yes, FriendFeed, would benefit from an easy and undramatic way to take a little break from a “friend” — without inducing the grand mal meltdown that “unfriending” causes the web’s more delicately-composed publishers.

Here’s how it would work.

• “Friends.” There are entities in the world that, for whatever reason, do or make things that theoretically interest you. Let’s call them “friends.”
• “I need a break.” Occasionally, for any variety of reasons (new baby, SxSW, flight delays, adjustment to mood meds), your theoretical interest in the friend wanes, and you dread their next update. Perhaps you even find yourself wishing them some sort of non-permanent physical harm. Such as a hangnail or a bad haircut.
• “Hit ‘Pause.’” You visit the temporarily-annoying friend’s profile or home page for the service, and hit their “Pause” button.
• Break time. For the next n [hours|days|weeks] (would be great if this were configurable), you will not see items from this friend. Nothing new, nothing old, no comments, no nothing. It’s like they’re on the moon.
• “Sssssshh!” No notification of the change is ever shown to the user whom you paused, and there’s no way for anyone to detect your pausing; you’re still “friends.” Yay. “Friendship.”
• “On second thought…” If, at any time before the end of the pausing, you decide you’re interested again, you could choose to “UNPAUSE” (“PLAY?”) the friend. Or, of course, you might find you love the break too much, so you can fully “unfriend” them any time as usual.
• “Hi, again.” After the pausing ends, any items you missed would be available to view in whatever location functions as an archive on that given service. But, you and your “friend” have a fresh start with minimal unnecessary drama. Now you can enjoy them again.

You can pause your newspaper delivery, and the newspaper never complains. Unfortunately most people online haven’t figured out that they’re just another publisher in a crowded space. Which is kind of a shame, because I think accepting that mantle of “publisher” might improve many peoples’ contributions as well as add a useful layer or two to their epidermis.

If you’re an adult who’s at a place in life where you need to pretend you’re interested in people whom you are not actually interested in, then “fake following” should be more than adequate for your needs. But, if you’re here to actually read things and to enjoy the thoughts, photos, and opinions of actual people who have good and bad streaks, it wouldn’t hurt to have an easy way to hit “snooze” for a while.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, either publishers or their readers just aren’t hitting on all cylinders, and a flight delay’s a terrible reason to lose a real, non-air-quoted friend.

Plus, everybody hates hangnails.

My quote of the week comes from a comment by Eideteker in this Metafilter thread on multitasking:

Multitasking is the art of distracting yourself from two things you’d rather not be doing by doing them simultaneously.

And, for what it’s worth, here’s what I had to say about the myth of multitasking a few years back:

powered by ODEO

We’ve added a footer to items that appear in the 43 Folders RSS feed. Here’s why.

The 43 Folders feed is a popular way for people to keep up with what’s happening on our site.

If you’re not sure what we mean by “feed,” we’re talking about things like “Atom” and “RSS,” which are open standards that allow you to subscribe to a syndication feed that displays the headline and full content of every story that appears on our site. And, then, you can use apps like Google Reader or NetNewsWire to read lots of sites, quickly, conveniently, and in one handy place. Pretty neato, right? Totally.

We are very happy to provide this free service at our own expense, since it’s a convenient way to let our readers decide how, where, and when they want to read what we have to say.

Our site’s RSS feed is inarguably one of the things that helped to make 43 Folders as popular as it is today: a time when the feed loads somewhere in the world over 100,000 times each day. For example, yesterday? Here’s the count, according to FeedBurner:

Pretty neat, huh? Yeah, I know!

Okay, so what’s the problem?

Problem is: there are unsavory types out there who abuse the openness and flexibility of website feeds like ours to do all kinds of annoying and nasty stuff that’s way outside the generous BY-NC-ND Creative Commons License that we have chosen to provide legally-binding guidance on how others may reuse or republish our copyrighted work. And, for any variety of reasons, that abuse is just not cricket.

So, to help readers understand where the feed items came from — and, yes, to remind would-be scrapers and charlatans whom the purloined words legally belong to — we’ve added a modest footer to the bottom of feed items that directs people to the originating post, as well as underscoring the copyright and licensing information. It also directs people to this page in the event that they want to learn more about why the footer exists. Guessing that’s how you ended up here. Hi.

Anyhow, here’s what the footer for this article’s feed item looks like:

Questions, comments, or abuse reports?

We hope that the footer is not a distraction to your enjoyment of the articles; it’s something we’ve been reluctant to add, but, unfortunately, the large-scale, programmatic abuse of our stuff has made this footer advisable and necessary.

If you have questions, comments, or wish to report having seen this footer show up in places that seem to break the terms of our licensing (such as a spam site or any other place that wraps our stuff in frames, other peoples’ ads, or some such webcockery), please contact us. Upon your notice, we will dispatch our army of douche-starved goons to pummel these people within an inch of their lives. (Well, not really. But we probably will nicely ask them to please stop.)

And, no matter how, where, when, or even why you’ve chosen to read our site, we are very grateful that you read it all. So, you know: thanks.

— Merlin

Known Issues

(removed as they’re fixed)

• Footer currently (incorrectly) shows Merlin as author of some posts that were written by other people (2008-08-21 06:17:20 EDT)
• 43f Icon png has weird alpha color (black) on some browsers (2008-08-21 06:14:12 EDT)

Psychology Today: The Creative Personality

[via delicious.com/huxant, w/a reminder by Jack Shedd]

Some days, I can’t decide how I feel about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say: “chick SENT me high”). He’s written some great stuff, but, sometimes, he mixes Big-Word academicspeak with anecdotal observation in a way that smells a little hokey to me.

So, although I’m trying not to audibly roll my eyes at a pop-psychology Top 10 list about creativity’s “dialectical tension,” I definitely am interested in one of his observations about the “paradox” of creative people.

Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility

This is a theme that comes up again and again when professional artists and writers talk about how they approach their work. I’m thinking in particular of things I’ve read recently by Stephen King, Anne Lamott, and Twyla Tharp.

Most all makers with longevity talk about a process that involves regular, scheduled work periods that allow generous time for warmups and getting into what Csikszentmihalyi himself has called, “Flow.” For as long as he or she can stay in that Flow state, a good artist is capable of synthesizing unbelievably disparate material and ideas in a way that’s often satisfying and productive. For those who cannot, it means another morning of video games, Facebook, and binge eating.

Artists who are in the early draft stage of a given project tend to adopt a generative attitude about capturing and accepting whatever shows up without judgment or self-editing — having a gentle attitude about imperfection that gives “bad” or “incomplete” ideas the same wide berth as the the apparently-great ones.

This is not stressful for the gifted artist who knows the dirty little secret that nobody shits a masterpiece; it’s all about editing, re-writing, and shaping the raw materials into something that will eventually become whole, polished, and cohesive. Eventually. But, first, you have to get something down. And that’s where that supposed “paradox” sure comes in handy.

My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Selfe, introduced the concept of the paradox by saying it was something that “contradicts itself…or seems to contradict itself.” I recall my 14-year-old self thinking both my teacher and this recursive concept were very profound and deep. But, really, that second part is entirely appropriate here.

The artistic combining of “playfulness and discipline” only seems contradictory to the aspiring artist who believes creativity means buying a beret and playing a Miles Davis record while you shoot black-tar heroin. The truth is that creativity is much more about combining the self-discipline to tolerate ambiguity with the will to transform the results into something meaningful. It’s not really contradictory; it’s largely an issue of intentionality and attention.

If you can find a regular time and place where you feel safe to let all your ideas sit naked for a while, you’re much more likely to produce work you can be proud of. Granted, in the editing process, you’ll adopt a schizophrenic alternation between openness and judgment, but it’s still not really a paradox at all — no more than “heads” and “tails” make a coin paradoxical.

Sure: you can call this, “dialectical tension” if you like. But, from a tactical standpoint, this stuff comes down to basic attention management — finding a way to shut out everything that’s not the thing that requires your focus to get made.

And, yeah, “talent” doesn’t hurt either, but there’s no way to even discover if you have talent until you’ve made a lot of crap and an occasional good thing, and find a way for that all to be okay. Plus, anyone can tell you, “talent” is like having a nice ass or a rich father; it helps open doors, but the actual work on the other side of the door is all on you.

Donate your beret to Goodwill, clear a Saturday morning, and maybe brew a pot of coffee. You have a lot of work to do, and the paradox is that you can’t work on it while you’re reading about the non-paradox of creative paradoxes.

How you like that one, Mr. Selfe?

My friends at Six Apart recently asked me to make a list of blogs that I enjoy. I think they’re planning to use it for their new Blogs.com project. Unfortunately, I’m late getting it to them (typical), but if it’s still useful, I’ll post it here in a day or four.

As I think about the blogs I’ve returned to over the years — and the increasingly few new ones that really grab my attention — I want to start with, ironically enough, a list. Here’s what I think helps make for a good blog.

1. Good blogs have a voice. Who wrote this? What is their name? What can I figure out about who they are that they have never overtly told me? What’s their personality like and what do they have to contribute — even when it’s “just” curation. What tics and foibles fascinate make me about this blog and the person who makes it? Most importantly: what obsesses this person?
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” A blog shows me where someone’s attention tends to go. Then, on some level, they encourage me to follow the evolution of their interest through a day or a year. There’s a story here. Ethical “via” links make it easy for me to follow their specific trail of attention, then join them for a walk made out of words.
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. Some of the best blogs use unusual formats, employ only photos and video, or utilize the list format to artistic effect. I regret there are not more blogs that see format as the container for creativity — rather than an excuse to write less or link without context more.
6. Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. At some point, everyone wants to kill the Buddha and make their own obsessions the focus. This is good. It means you care.
8. Good blogs try. I’ve come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there’s the other 98%. They’re still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That’s why “good” is getting rare.
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules. Duh. I made a list, didn’t I? Yes. I did. Big fan.

And, yeah, you should disagree with potentially all of this. It’s because I have an opinion, and so do you. It’s why you probably have a blog. See? The system works.

Coming soon: the blogs I read, enjoy, envy, and admire.