I work as a graphic designer. Like many other folks in my pro­fes­sion I find it hard to turn off. I may not be think­ing about pro­jects from work all the time, but I’m always think­ing about pro­jects I’d like to do or review­ing the things I see all around me. I see every piece of design and men­tally critic it, 99% of the time I’m not even aware I’m doing it, but it’s there, almost like a 6th sense won­der­ing what ques­tions the designer faced.

I’ve lost count of the num­ber of times I’ve sat in a res­taur­ant look­ing at the menu only to real­ise I’m not look­ing at what’s on offer but the way it’s been type­set. What font did they use? What does it make me think of the res­taur­ant? Does it make the food I’m read­ing about sound even tastier or does it make me think I’ll be left want­ing more? Does the menu fit the sur­round­ings or does it just feel like a designer some­where threw it together because he didn’t get a proper brief?

It’s a pretty con­stant state of affairs. Right now I’m glan­cing at the empty can of San Miguel thats sit­ting on the din­ing table. Does it look like the taste? Does it make me want to lie on a hot beach in Spain? What the heck has a ship got to do with beer? Why did the designer pick gold as the main can col­our and break away from the green and white that used to be there?

I can’t turn it off, and many a time I’ve amused good friends as I verb­al­ise my critique.

Unfor­tu­nately relax­ing is made all the more harder by it. I read to do my relax­ing, mostly the blogs of a select few but they’re people who I’ve come to trust. I trust that the links they post are to inter­est­ing con­tent, art­icles that can lead me on a chase around the inter­net look­ing at web­sites, new web­sites. Web­sites that start the inner critic on it’s famil­iar chain of ques­tions. Ques­tions that lead me to find another way of reading.

Books.

Mostly made of paper that smell of ink and aren’t dis­played on a screen. How­ever, in this age of con­stant stream of inform­a­tion that feeds a thirst for know­ledge, growth and under­stand­ing, I find I need a book that doesn’t make me think too much. There’s no point going to bed to read only to lie in bed for hours think­ing about the chapter I just read and the chal­lenges or know­ledge it imparts. I need a good story. Some­thing that will make me keep turn­ing the pages, com­pel­ling me to read. So it is with great joy in the last year or so that I’ve dis­covered an author I enjoy, one that draws me to read rather than watch inane tv shows.

It’s not the nov­els that I write this about though, it’s the impact they have on me. As well as help­ing me relax, they force me to use my ima­gin­a­tion. When read­ing about the unrav­el­ling story I’m forced to ima­gine the scene, what people look like and where they are. I’m forced to stop ask­ing the ques­tions I ask all day long as I review and work on the vari­ous pro­jects I have on the go. That time away from ques­tion­ing and eval­u­at­ing can only have one impact as far as I’m con­cerned, that is, to make my work bet­ter. Hav­ing time to just ima­gine frees me from the con­straints that are so often put in place when work­ing. They may be imposed on me by the pro­jects, or by the press­sures I put on my self, but the more I read and use my ima­gin­a­tion in a com­pletely unat­tached man­ner. The more cre­at­ive I feel, the more my ima­gin­a­tion is fed the more eas­ily I find work.

In a time when the people around me seem to read more than they ever did, I seem to be the only per­son among my friends who reads nov­els. I’d like to encour­age you to start. Take a short story and read it. Start small and find some­thing that feeds your ima­gin­a­tion, a story which gives it new life and see what impact it has on your work.

It’s that time once again when many people are post­ing reviews of the year just passed. I always enjoy read­ing these posts, see­ing the people I fol­low who have achieved all that or more than they hoped to whilst hop­ing those who didn’t are able to in the com­ing year. I’m always drawn to writ­ing some­thing myself, and whilst my last year con­tains many high­lights – my trip to Israel, a sum­mer in North Wales and a deep­en­ing of friend­ships that have become increas­ingly valu­able – I always feel some­what hes­it­ant to “review my year”.

I think the heart of that hes­it­ancy lies solely in my feel­ing of a lack of accom­plish­ment. I never feel I’ve achieved any­thing worth writ­ing about or high­light­ing. I call it the curse of the Inter­net. It’s so easy to spend time look­ing and com­par­ing what I’ve done to all the people who have achieved a great deal, all the people who’ve had the guts to sit down work hard and put them­selves out there. I’m always left reel­ing at, what feels like, my com­plete lack of gumption.

I am learn­ing though. Learn­ing to not let that fear of fail­ure or fear of no one noti­cing be the reason to stop myself from doing the things I want to. Thats why I’m writ­ing this post, to set out three small tar­gets to try and set me on my way this year. I think they are all achiev­able and am hop­ing they will set me on my way to accom­plish some­thing this year.

In the last year I’ve put weight on. Some people will argue that I needed to, I’ve always been a bit skinny, but in the last year I’ve put on a little too much. I weighed myself over the Christ­mas hol­i­days and well the num­ber at the start was too high. My first mis­sion is to lose a stone in weight by exer­cising more reg­u­larly and cut­ting out those little treats which have snuck into my diet.

The past couple of years has seen my blog fall in to decline, sig­ni­fic­antly. I’ve always enjoyed writ­ing for my blog, but the past couple of years has seen a lot of things change in my life and it didn’t feel right to be writ­ing about them here. Nor did it seem right to con­tinue writ­ing about things which on reflec­tion are quite trivial when com­pared to the loss of loved ones. But time is mov­ing on, and I feel that it is time to pick up my pen once again and begin writ­ing for my blog with more reg­u­lar­ity. I real­ise I’ve said this before, and it’s got­ten past Janu­ary, Feb­ru­ary and into March before I’ve really real­ised I’ve not done any­thing I’d hoped to, so I’ve given myself a num­ber to aim for. I’m going to try to write four posts a month. Not four link posts, but four art­icle posts, although I hes­it­ate to call them art­icles. There’ll be no word count, just ori­ginal con­tent, con­tent I cre­ate because I want to and enjoy it.

The third thing I want to do is a little more open ended and prob­ably some­thing that every­one hopes to do. I’d like to use my time to greater effect.

I’ve always been a night owl, I like stay­ing up late, the quiet cosi­ness of being up late with a small light on and my book, sketch book or Mac for com­pany feels great. The prob­lem is when you have a nine to five job that kind of beha­viour is not really help­ful. Hit­ting the sack in the early hours of the morn­ing and then rising only a few hours later to go to work is a recipe for dis­aster. Burn­ing the candle at both ends only really has one des­tin­a­tion for me, run­ning myself in to the ground and an onslaught of mouth ulcers. So in order to com­bat this tend­ency to waste my time, I’m resolv­ing to give my self a bed time and get up earlier. My aim is to be up at six each morn­ing in order to do a half hour of exer­cises, then spend time read­ing my bible, pray­ing and whatever is left can be spent writing.

Re-reading that last para­graph makes it feel like a pretty big task, but I think knuck­ling down and doing it will help me to achieve the other two points. More than that though, hav­ing a set time to sit and read my bible without dis­trac­tion will be the biggest bene­fit of all.

I’ve always admired those who are able to get up early and spend some time each morn­ing to do this. While I’m away in North Wales for two weeks every year, I spend time lead­ing a children’s hol­i­day club. When I’m there, life is so dif­fer­ent to my every­day life that I’m able to eas­ily get up early and spend time each morn­ing read­ing from the word. I’ve become acutely aware in the last few weeks that it’s all down to a mat­ter of atti­tude. I’m so aware of how import­ant it is in those two weeks to devote my time in such a man­ner, that it’s time to change my atti­tude and devote that time every morn­ing rather than in the even­ings when I find it harder to con­cen­trate and often run out of time. It’s some­thing that I enjoy, but often feel a need to do out of duty, yet, when I set time aside I’ve seen the bene­fits in my life and my rela­tion­ship with Jesus. I want to do it more and so this attempt to change my sleep­ing pat­terns is motiv­ated by that desire.

And so with that, please join me in rais­ing my hot black­cur­rent to 2012 and all it has in stall!

Like most of the world, the arrival of an iPad in my life has meant a lot of my estab­lished routines and beha­viours have changed. I’m no longer set­ting up camp on my sofa with my Mac­Book Pro to spend some time read­ing RSS feeds and going where the links take me, instead this time is being spent using my iPad. I find I’m using my Mac­Book Pro a lot less than I used too, that’s not neces­sar­ily a neg­at­ive thing though, as the time that I do spend on my Mac­Book Pro is much more mean­ing­ful than it used to be. I’m find­ing myself going through a shift in mind­set as I’m more focused when I sit down with my Mac and don’t find myself drawn to the likes of Twit­ter and Reeder. My pro­ductiv­ity has increased, which can only be a good thing as I gradu­ally pick up more freel­an­cing work. The work that I am doing has become more mean­ing­ful, that is with one excep­tion. Here.

The blog. It’s slipped and largely because of my shift in beha­viour. Most of my blog­ging revolved around read­ing inter­est­ing art­icles and cur­at­ing them on my site. This then drove me to write longer form con­tent when I wanted and when some­thing attrac­ted me suf­fi­ciently. I now find myself both link­ing less and writ­ing less. Not good.

Read­ing a Ton More

I fol­low a lot of very good blogs, most of the things I read are on the inter­net and since get­ting my iPad Instapa­per has really come in to it’s own. Shawn Blanc nailed it when he wrote

So in short, Instapa­per is the best way to read the Inter­net. And the iPad app … is the best way to read your Instapa­per articles.

The trouble is, if a large por­tion of your read­ing mater­ial comes from the inter­net, the desire to share increases. It’s so easy in today’s world to share some­thing to Twit­ter or Face­book, but if you want to add a little com­ment­ary to that link and share it on your blog, well it’s a little trick­ier. On the Mac I can hit Cmd-1 and MarsEdit will fire up with the link pre-populated and any selec­ted text quoted. On the iPad, thats not so easy. Theres no MarsEdit for iPad and well, quite frankly, the iOS Word­Press app sucks and copy & past­ing back and forth between apps isn’t the easi­est or quick­est way of doing things. Put quite simply the bar­rier to entry for post­ing on the iPad was too high.

So what’s the big deal? Well, like many people I like to write. I don’t con­sider myself a writer but one of the reas­ons I star­ted blog­ging was to give myself another cre­at­ive out­let; a place to stretch muscles that don’t neces­sar­ily get stretched all that much; a place to, should I need, release a little about top­ics that don’t neces­sar­ily interest my friends.

I miss it.

The trouble is I don’t really know where to begin, and so in my usual man­ner I began to prob­lem solve. The con­clu­sion I reached? I find it easier to write when I have a reas­on­ably steady flow of things going through the blog. Some momentum. The best and easi­est way of cre­at­ing that momentum, or gen­er­at­ing flow, is by cur­at­ing links and point­ing people to other well writ­ten and inter­est­ing content.

For once my think­ing on this sub­ject seemed to coin­cide with some other folk on the inter­net. Shawn Blanc and Ben­jamin Brooks touched on this recently in The B&B Pod­cast. When they visit a site they want to see art­icles before they will begin to meas­ure if you are worth fol­low­ing. Some­thing I agree with quite strongly, if there is a good art­icle on a site I visit I will take note, if there are a couple in close suc­ces­sion, chances are you’ll end up in my feed reader. But if there are large gaps between art­icles and noth­ing else pos­ted it makes a site feel stag­nated, a stag­na­tion I feel has begun to develop here. I want my site to feel alive and the best way to do that is to write reg­u­larly, and, because I’m out of prac­tice the best way to break a cycle of not post­ing is to link to oth­ers. It’s not and nor should it be the sole pur­pose, but an act­ive site is a cared for site and a cared for site usu­ally brings good content.

Begin­nings of a Redesign

Seek­ing out an easier way of build­ing that flow led me down the path to the begin­nings of a redesign. I needed an easy way to share links on the blog.

So to help me begin to develop this flow I’ve made a few changes to the site. A slight facelift which aligns to a grid but really is a frame­work for the future and has allowed me to make a couple of adjust­ments to the beha­viour of my links. For those of you who have noticed the titles of the links now point straight to the site I’m link­ing too, so rather than includ­ing the link in the text as I’ve done in the past I’m now free to just include my thoughts. It leads to a more stream­lined way of post­ing from both the iPad and my Mac.

Thanks to Ben Brooks’ adjus­ted book­mark­let and the plu­gins that it requires I can now post more eas­ily to the site. The pace isn’t quite what I’d like it to be but it’s devel­op­ing and my hope is that I can pay more atten­tion in the long run and begin to write my own art­icles with a little more reg­u­lar­ity than the sporadic post­ing that I seem to have settled into.