Briefly in the office to do some admin: not back at work, but whittling down the inbox and unsubscribing a bunch of blogs out of the RSS reader.
The other day, I had this notion to try and repurpose an old Amazon Fire 8 tablet as an ambient information radiator of some kind. I was rigging it up when I caught myself and said, what the hell am I doing? Do I really need a glanceable radiating thing in the office? I have a very specific set of intentions for 2024, and putting another radiating talking thing in the office may not be the best use of my little space. I’ve only just gotten my phone down to the Swiss Army knife thing I want it to be. I had a cheap Android tablet in my Amazon cart in case I couldn’t get the Fire to do what I wanted, and I deleted it from the cart there and then.
I had a flash of notions around this, and I wasn’t in reach of a notebook at the time. I wrote down what I remembered yesterday, and it boils down to: a low-signal year.
I’ve removed from my RSS anything that hasn’t updated in the last 18 months, anything that tends to pile up and anything I tend to skim through rather than want to read. I’m about to clear up the number of emails I get from Bandcamp – they go to a separate folder in my email and there are currently 597 emails in it. And then I’m going to opt out of some newsletters.
On the wall, the big whiteboard is two-thirds full with stuff I need to write, the Pending board is almost full, and I need to clear down and rewrite the Status and To-Do boards. I have Wants and Schemes, this year, and whether they come to fruition or not, whether I need to pivot mid-year or not, I want to stick to the Wants and Schemes ruthlessly.
Your best work will always come from following your instincts, creating something that you personally wish to see in the world, not what you think other people are longing for.
I’ve always stuck by this concept, for better or worse (usually worse). What I hope to do in 2024 is about that: taking out almost all of the outside voices, and working with my internal stores. Low-incoming, low-distraction, intentional viewing of films and reading of books and essays, making best use of the daylight hours and walking away from the screen when I’m stuck, to go outside and work with my hands and think. Low signal and high focus. In the words of the late and much missed Benjamin Zephaniah, I Have A Scheme.
Writing all this down here sets the intention and makes me accountable to myself. I look forward to explaining to myself in June 2024 about how and why it all went wrong.
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