A writer, reloaded

There was a time when I believed that doing two or three things at once made me more productive. Life was good. Things were happening.

Then I wrote a novel and started wondering why relatively small steps took such herculean investments of energy–and worse yet, took such a long time. At the risk of sounding sexist, I’m going out on a limb here and speculate that men are relatively poor multi-taskers; we work best when we focus exclusively on a solitary task for a long period. Or at least limit our efforts it to a few areas over the course of a day. Perhaps women can multi-task more effectively, but I think almost everyone deals with the problem of scattered focus and its bastard step-child, the unfinished never ending project. Or Chia-Pain, as I call him.

When it comes to patience for an open project, I learned quite a lot from my landlord. My apartment is in a house, probably by far the oldest in my town, and everything is custom built. At one time it was a mansion, with all the trimmings: a dumbwaiter, a creepy safe in the basement the size of a Packard, a massive double wide front door with sweeping arches. Then it got older, and it got converted. Walls and doors appeared, replacing open landings. Paint cracked. Siding rusted. A few years before I moved in, the roof leaked so bad my kitchen flooded.

The big challenge for my landlord is this: in a house of such scale and age, there is always something breaking. The challenge is prioritizing what to fix now and what to table for later. Or what can be tabled. And sometimes he has to just rip off the Band-Aid, let the blood flow and gut something to the studs.

But more often, he has to be content with fixing part of the problem. What matters is that he made the situation a little better, and over time this will result in big improvements. The secret is remembering those gains when things get frustrating. Like when my landlord ripped the sewer line out in the middle of winter, which meant cutting off the water and damning me to an undisclosed location for the past few days. Which is why the updates are slow in coming lately.

Anyway, here’s a great article on multitasking that got me thinking about the importance of staying on point:

The Autumn of Multitaskers

One of the greatest chess players of all time died this week, a disgraced former grandmaster exiled to the frosty equivalent of the Devil’s ass. He had a lot of insight about the game and unfortunately a lot of hate, which is probably the legacy that will follow him through the ages.
But whenever I castle, I’ll remember him beating Spasky, the mighty Russian. For a brief moment, Bobby Fischer was a true champion.

A great phrase–if uttered at the right time, and from the right speaker–can be a powerful stimulus. It can inspire. It can excite. If it’s clever enough and simple in design, it might make a very complex idea understandable to everyone. And if the receiver is ready for the idea they are about to hear, then great communication can happen.

Tonight forces aligned and I caught this kernel: “Our female partners are much less concerned about what we think, than what we feel.”

Not sure where the hell that idea came from, but all of the sudden a lot of things about relationships made sense.

Better late than never, I guess.