Musician Diaries

For a long time now I've been living with an inner tension caused by the struggle between two opposing tendencies. Not the kind of creative tension that solves itself in work being done, but the psychologically straining of intending something to be both black and white at the same time.   The ideas in struggle were:   1) The music I enjoy perhaps the most (not the only kind I enjoy, but the kind I always go back to) is one where technique means shit; a guy singing in a goofy way, a guitar that sounds like a door buzzer, can bring me tears of joy or rage, as long as there is feeling in that thing, as long as I hear something genuine and human taking place there. Punk bands of one single, Mr. Nobodies giving all they got, I love that stuff and look for it and dance to it and live for it and can't get enough of it.   2) The music I intend to make, for a long time, has been burdened by something that was almost a "superstition" of technique. I compose easil

Lately I've had two realizations, which have driven me to one decision. The realizations are these:   1) Zeigarnik should have killed me by now 2) Ah, the irony!   In this post I will discuss realization #1. I owe to  Jim Benson , among so many other fruitful insights about intangible work , the acquaintance of the Zeigarnik effect. Here's the wikiquickie:   In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. ( Wikipedia )   Add to that the way I work in my stuff; I once read some work diaries by the poet Giacomo Leopardi, and they were quite alike to my methods, a few centuries later. Example of an entry, the way I remember them: "I take this flower in my hand... (both flower and hand are going to fade away, in the same way life etc..., fragility of beauty, etc...) " The zipping of songs in my head works pretty much like that... I may have the gimmick, a few sentences, what should be the

In my audio production works, I've found the kanban board to be an essential tool to keep focus and sanity. I wonder how could I survive so much time without using it.   The kanban board is one of the few Lean tools that have made a mainstream transition to the personal productivity world (hopefully, more of them will find their way into the masses as time goes on).   The main responsible for this transition is Jim Benson, author among others of a book called 'Personal Kanban', in which he describes the very simple (deceptively simple) tool that the Kanban board is.   A tool is good when it is transparent, when it doesn't get in the way of your work, when it doesn't require extra maintenance (=yet one more thing to do).   The kanban board, in that spirit, has only two rules:   1) Visualize your work   2) Limit your work in process   That's it. As Benson frequently mentions, this is so simple to understand that nobody does it.

Ouch, I missed last week's post. But I think the countermeasure should be easy.   The problem has to do with my adoption of the tickler file, one of the great great great elements of the GTD methodology .   You use a folder per day, and in each folder you put notes. I used to have a note saying something like "Did you write the blog post this week?", which I placed in the folder for the upcoming Sunday. That way, I was sure I had a checkpoint for my weekly post if I wasn't able to get to it before Sunday.   The problem came when I started writing down in other papers some ideas for future posts. Those papers went into the folders too, but their function was not clearly enough defined: finding them means "write this post", or just "remember that you have a blog?". In the middle of that confusion, I must have lost/decided to throw away the original checkpoint note.   So the countermeasure is: creating a new checkpoint note for Sundays, an