ALGC PROJECTS

Greetings once again! It's been a couple weeks since I've put out a new dispatch, and unfortunately they're going to be sporadic like this for a while, but there are so many incredibly exciting projects in the works, all of which you'll hear of in due time. 

 

I've been spending quite a bit of my free hours recently thinking about ideas, how they work, how to capture them, how to turn them into something, etc. It seems like a monthly occurrence at this point - a revolutionary new productivity software is released that allows its users to streamline their "workflow" (whatever the hell that means) clear their pre-frontal cortex of unnecessary distractions, or, in some cases of particularly lofty promises, grant them a "second brain". In this dispatch I'd like to explore why productivity can be a tricky thing to achieve, and the system that I've set up for myself to help me get things done.

 

I've always found the productivity industry very annoying, because there are so many people online who spend so much of their time obsessing over how they can optimize the way they work, and seemingly very little time actually working on whatever it is they do. Some have even managed to form entire careers on giving productivity advice, and peddling products, services, and software that promise to transform how you work. 

 

Creativity and productivity are very fickle things, and, in my experience, when an idea comes about, no software that exists is properly optimized for my brain to get it out of my usually half-asleep head and into the world where it cannot be forgotten. When I get an idea for a project, whether it's an artwork or a video or a story, it begins its journey as a small yellow slip of paper.

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I can't tell you how many of these are floating around my room at any given time. They make up the to-do lists, diagrams, ideas, trackers, and angry notes that are the foundation of my every day life. Most of them eventually get thrown away, once they've served their intended purpose, but some of them I save in folders and binders if they're memorable in some way.

 

Once an idea has been captured on one of these slips of paper, it sits for a while, until maybe one day I decide to do something with it. Then it transitions to its second phase of life, as a journal entry:

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As you can see I've made some significant progress on filling the new journal I made over the summer. But yeah, this is where ideas get dumped once they've sat around long enough to be sort-of complete in my head. Sometimes the stuff I write in here is good enough to be used directly as a video script or dispatch, but most of the time it's still pretty incoherent in this stage. I don't know how people write diaries that end up getting published after their deaths; I'd be mortified if these journals were ever published, because so much of it is just utter nonsense - 90% of the entries in these journals stop at this stage. But some of them progress further to the next stage of an idea's life:

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This step might need some explanation. Usually if I'm writing something, be it a video script, an essay, or a short story, it is typed out on my typewriter before I transcribe it onto the computer. The reason for this is two-fold: firstly, as I said before, a lot of my journal entries are in a pretty messy state, and if I went straight from the notebook to the computer I'd have to do a lot of revisions. Revising is one of my least favorite things in the whole world. I hate going slowly and carefully through a google doc and trying to figure out what sections need to be re-worded or re-written, and I hate even more opening a new blank document and trying to figure out what sections of the previous version are good enough to paste into the new version. Typing on a typewriter forces me to do an extra draft, without it feeling like I'm actually doing revisions. The other reason for drafting on a typewriter is that, much like writing by hand, it's a much more deliberate, physical process. Typing into a computer can feel really impersonal, like you're performing a task of mere data entry, rather than actually creating something. 

 

But yes, once I'm satisfied with a typewritten draft, I transcribe it once again in a new draft on my computer, usually in either Obsidian or Google Docs. 

 

I don't think it is possible for any productivity software to replace this system I've created for myself. But just as much as I don't think that one software can fit everyone, I don't think that my system would work for everyone either. Most of my methods for getting work done have been formed over many years, and by borrowing ideas and systems from tons of different people I come across online. I hope this dispatch can serve, for someone out there, as one of said resources to borrow from and get inspired by. 

 

Thanks for reading!

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- ALGC