Experiments in Productivity: CompuTen

Last week I did something counter-productive. I switched off my computer at 10am. Switched OFF.

This meant that, after ten in the morning, I couldn't do any writing on the computer, I couldn't edit any of my works-in-progress, I couldn't connect with people online, I couldn't work on my blog, I couldn't promote my book or advertise my English classes.

By switching off my computer so early in the day, I successfully cut out 99% of my capability for productivity.

How on earth could this help me become more productive?

Before starting this rather drastic computer-diet, I used to be on my computer all hours of the day. Some days I would be tied down for as much as 7 hours 34 minutes.

How do I know this? I signed up to RescueTime, which logs what programs I use and what websites I visit. RescueTime tells me that about 3 hours of that was spent on email, on reading the news, on social networks and on entertainment. Less than two hours per day (on a good day) was spent on writing.

The Plan

So the plan was that, by cutting off my computer-use at ten in the morning, I would be motivated to get up earlier and do more writing.

The rest of the day, when my productivity dips anyway (RescueTime tells me that I'm 50% productive in the morning, but only 48% productive in the afternoon - with a 50% reduction in time at the computer as well), I would be able to get out into the world.

I would teach, I would go on adventures, I would read and think and cook and perhaps do some writing with pencil and paper. I would, in short, become more human and less virtual.

The Results

In the last week, when I was on my CompuTen diet, I averaged less than 2 hours of computer-time per day. Great!

In addition, because my computer-time was squeezed, I became more efficient at doing the important things. Like social networking. I found that I still spent 20 minutes a day on Facebook or Twitter or Google+ (whatever that is).

And I spent significantly less time on the less important things like writing - just 2 minutes 23 seconds last Friday, for example.

Success!

Wait. That doesn't sound like the plan. The plan was that I would get up early and write like hell for as long as I could, until the 10am cut-off time.

What actually happened was that I would wake up, somewhere between half seven and eight, and immediately get stuck into email and news-reading, pretty much until my alarm went off at 10am. This isn't the healthiest thing in the world.

So what went wrong?

Well, as it happens: nothing. But as with all experiments, you don't always get the results you're expecting. 

I was expecting to get up earlier and be more focussed when I was on the computer. I certainly didn't get up any earlier, but I was more focussed on the computer. I teach English, so I had to make sure that I prepared any worksheets or articles for my lessons first thing in the morning. No more procrastinating.

However, this compression meant that I had no time for computer writing or editing. I found myself mildly frustrated when all this free-from-computer-time brought writing ideas to the surface that I couldn't implement.

So what went right?

It was easy. I had a concrete rule to follow and there was nothing so urgent that it couldn't be achieved without a computer, or couldn't wait until tomorrow.

It was relaxing. There was no rush and panic to check something immediately. If I thought of something I wanted to do, I would write it down on a piece of paper to do the next morning. And then, often, when I got to it the next morning, it wasn't worth doing anyway.

I stopped using the computer for entertainment. Instead of watching the recent Montenegro-England football match online, I listened to it on the radio. This took me way back to my childhood and it was a real treat for my senses and my imagination.

I didn't read so much news and comment online. I did read a lot more fiction and non-fiction offline. I learnt the obvious: offline reading (from a real book!) is deeper and more meaningful. Last week I read the entirety of The Impact Equation and I feel like I absorbed more of it than I would normally (for those interested: it's all right).

I spent more time on my sofa. I spent more time in the kitchen. I spent more time idling. These are all good things in my book.

But, best of all, the CompuTen diet pushed me onto my AlphaSmart Neo 2. This cunning device is perfect for writers. It is nothing more than a keyboard with a tiny display. It does one thing and it does it brilliantly: it writes. Over the course of last week, I wrote more than 5,000 words on the dear little thing (including the kernal of this blog post).

Neo: The One.

Conclusions

I consider CompuTen to have been a success. However, it's not a long-term solution. The main problem with it is the forced computer usage in the early morning. I would rather fill this time with meaningful writing (not necessarily on the computer), eating breakfast and showering.

However, CompuTen showed me a number of things:

• I can resist the computer, if I have a concrete rule of when I can use it and when I can't.
• There is nothing so urgent that it can't wait until tomorrow.
• Multi-tasking is a killer.

Multi-tasking is surely the most pernicious capability of computers. My PC can deal with everything I throw at it: a to do list, six documents, a couple of PDFs, a novel in YWriter, iTunes, a couple of browser windows, each with five or more tabs open on news, social networks, Blogger, YouTube...

The problem is that I can't keep up. Humans are programmed to be able to deal with one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is for dweebs. 

So my new computer regime (which I am using right now) is to use the PC like a precision instrument.

• I will only use the computer for 25 minutes at a time.
• Before opening the computer I will write down the goal of my activity. One concrete, defined goal, so that at the end of the 25 minutes, I can answer the question: Did I achieve my goal? 
• Having just one goal should eliminate multi-tasking, but to make it easier on my will-power, I will only have one program running at a time (when building the links for this blog post, I nearly got distracted by another review of The Impact Equation - but stopped myself just in time!).
• At the end of the 25 minutes, I will close my computer and walk away - no matter whether the goal is achieved or not. I can always set a new goal and work for another 25 minutes, after a short break.
• If the computer task is likely to take less than 25 minutes - DON'T DO IT. I will batch these tasks until I have enough to fill 25 minutes. Email falls into this batch as well.

So that's my experiment over. I do anticipate that my new regime will be harder. I'm going to need rock-hard will power. But I have only 1 minute 22 seconds left of this 25 minute block, so I'm going to press Publish right now! 

What are your techniques and tricks for staying on-task at the computer? Please do let me know in the comments - we can get through this if we help each other!

Sounds Unseen: The Work of Libero Colimberti

Danger 400 volts! One glance at the auditorium tells me this isn't your usual cinema. One solitary wooden school chair, sharing space with the electrical consumer unit, in a cupboard under the stairs of what used to be Deptford JobCentrePlus, now an art venue called Utrophia.

I'm here to see three short films by sound artist Libero Colimberti. Libero's films are projected onto the slanting underside of the staircase, for an audience of one. As you would expect, sound is the star of Libero's films. The unusual projection angle only emphasises this, forcing me to lean back in the creaking chair.

The first of the films ('Microlanding Strip') visually consists of one continuous fixed shot of a quiet residential street at night. The scene is empty: the pavement, a row of houses on one side and a grassy verge on the other. But the sound is full of traffic, of buses and cars, of dislocated shouts, a man whistling, a police siren – and a mysterious mechanical cranking noise. Sight and sound do not match.

The eye of the camera stares at the scene, but our ears are somewhere else. At the bottom of the picture a clock counts down – but to what? Then a bicycle bursts into frame, racing towards us from the far end of the street. The cyclist is Libero, holding an enormous microphone. Sight and sound dramatically converge; the bike crashes into the camera, the clock hits zero and everything goes black.

The second film ('Salami!') I heard as an exercise in focusing our auditory attention. We follow Libero around his world. We see him trying to cross the road, walking past a construction site and through a park. In each location, though, our attention is on the sounds; we hear things Libero's way. The traffic noise, the birdsong, the noise of the diggers, each is turned up, crisply distinct, filling the cupboard-cinema, burrowing into our brains.

The richness of our auditory world is often overlooked for the flashiness of the visual. Libero tries to address this injustice. When we concentrate on sound, it fills our brains and we hear things that we'd swear weren't there a moment ago. Try it for yourself for a moment. Turn off the radio and listen. Can you hear the birds? The traffic of the road outside? Your neighbours? As you concentrate, the sounds swell and you begin to realise that there's a symphony happening out there (not always melodious symphony in London, but still).

If Libero's ear is sensitive, his eye is playful. When he reaches his house we hear the persistent orgiastic cries of a woman in coitus and the banging of her bedroom door against its frame: she's fucking against the door. Libero listens: half-horrified, half-fascinated. Then he sees the salami. Just inside the ecstatic woman's door is a plate with a salami sausage on it (not a euphemism). The banging of the door stops, orgasmically spent. Libero greedily seizes his chance to slip his hand through the gap for the salami – but before he can seize his sausage (not a euphemism) the banging begins again, battering his hand and Libero has to beat a retreat.

The first two films play with the interplay between sound and visuals: the first by dislocating the sound from the visuals, the second by exaggerating the sound over the visuals. The third ('Frame') does away with visuals altogether. A red frame appears, bathing the cupboard-cinema in its glow. A clock counts down in the top right corner of the picture. The sounds alone suggest the story. We hear traffic, then a girl shouting in the distance. Slowly, we realise that we're eaves-dropping on a domestic argument, as a neighbour might – we can't see the drama, hidden behind a fence or some trees, perhaps. “Don't you f****** dare!” Subtitles highlight essential phrases. “Oh f****** hell!” A woman is screaming at a man – her boyfriend. “Because I f****** love you!”

We piece together the scene from the dialogue: “What does it matter if I jump off here?” the man shouts. The woman, we can hear now, is trying to calm him down, trying to talk him down from his suicide. He must be standing on a window sill or on a rooftop. “I f****** love you,” the man shouts, in despair – “But I f****** hit you! What does it matter if I jump off here?”

But Libero doesn't let us hear the conclusion to the story. The sound of sobbing shake the cupboard-cinema and a drunk walks by, singing “I love you...” The countdown stops. We're left to fill the silence with our thoughts.

The triumph of the films of Libero Colimberti is that he directs our attention to the hidden sounds of life, those sounds we take for granted, or hear only as irritants, not as music. As I duck out of the dingy cupboard, out into the bright sunshine of Spring, I listen for a moment to the symphony of Deptford Market and sing.

'Salami' by Libero Colimberti

'Microlanding Strip' is playing at Window 135 in New Cross until this Saturday 9 March.

Having Hair

 It all started over a pint of peanut butter milkshake. For the twenty-seventh time in seven and a half months, I take the piss out of Mike's luscious locks of red hair. They reach to his shoulders in opalescent curls and have to be flicked out of his face whenever he laughs, which is often and loud. I know that taking the piss out of a man with long hair is childish and lazy, but I am both of those, so it seemed appropriate.

But there must have been something about that twenty-seventh insult because, instead of brushing it off like so many fallen leaves, he leans in over the milkshakes and says: 'I'll be cutting it soon.'

Like a wingey child who instantly regrets his playground cruelty, I shudder in alarm: 'Why! It's a part of you, Mikey – you can't do it! How will I recognise you?'
'Because,' he replied, 'I am making a wig...'
I laugh and start to say, 'Who would want a curly ginger wig!'
But he cuts me off (pun alert): '…For little girls who have cancer.'
Oh. I felt so bad that I vowed there and then to do the same myself.

Little did I realise that my careless promise would involve eighteen months of hard work, as my lazy follicles strain to reach the requisite seven inches of cut-offable hair.

End of June 2011

Now, as I stand on the cusp of returning to the normal world of normal hair, what have I learnt?

There are many phases to growing hair. There is the initial phase where nothing is happening. My hair was just growing, silently. I'd done a one-inch buzz cut a couple of weeks before the fateful promise, so during the first four months it grew to a normal length and nobody noticed.

August 2011

Then I started to look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo for another month or so before something extraordinary happened. It poofed. Suddenly, without warning, my hair was cool. It stuck out all over the place and adolescent girls on the street walked past me, shouting things like, 'Look at that guy's hair – it's so cool!'

November 2011

It wasn't to last, of course. Spring brought a growth-spurt, the poof fell in on itself and I was left with serious eye-flop.

May 2012

Over the course of the summer it struggled manfully towards Kurt Cobain, defined as the point at which long man hair becomes cool. But Kurt Cobain is dangerous territory. It could, under certain conditions, look awesome. It could also be a total pain in the ass.

November 2012

If I managed to eat breakfast without getting beans in my hair, it was a good day. Brushing my teeth took on a new angle: literally. I had to tilt my head to one side – like a GIRL – to flop my hair out of the reach of my toothbrush. It didn't always work. Last night I dreamt of getting my hair stuck between my teeth, like dental floss – and it was a realistic dream. Any form of exercise had to be undertaken with a Bjorn Borg headband, which looked cool, until it didn't.

The petty practicalities I never quite got the hang of. When to wash hair? How often to wash hair? What do you mean the hair blocks up the drain! It takes two years to dry instead of two seconds? There were times when my hair actually felt uncomfortable to wear after washing. It was dry and brittle and set my skin on edge whenever I touched it. Then someone told me to use conditioner. That helped. But it still looked puffy after washing and I was only happy with it about two days after a wash – by which time it needed washing again.

I had to learn how to brush hair – and that hurts! I learnt that if you hold the hair, then you can stop the hair brush from ripping from the root. I learnt the different in pull between a comb and a hair brush (thanks Cat for the hair brush donation). I learnt that hair gets everywhere, picking it off chairs, books, faces. I learnt about the smell of hair, the smell of grease, hanging down into my face.

Whatever my hair was doing, it wasn't normal. I had joined an exclusive gentleman's club of long-haired don't-give-a-fuck dudes. Look at all those dorks who buzz cut their hair every month and for what? So they can carry on looking like every other dork on the street.

Hair on a man equals rocker, hippie, celeb, hipster – depending on where you are and what else you're wearing. I am none of these things, so I felt like an imposter, as if I'd had a hair transplant from the eighties. That didn't stop drunk people shouting at me in the Underground: 'Look – it's Allan Carr's mate!'

Long hair was also most useful for my secret life as an undercover cop, instantly putting multiple disguises at my disposal. Hair up, hair down? Hat hair, bandanna hair? Top knot, pony tail?

I had assumed that I would become a hate figure for street urchins, but the worst came when a Tunisian lad squinted up at my beard and asked, 'Are you man or woman?' One of my ex-girlfriends refused to even look at me, demanding that I tie up the offending hair and squash it under a hat: 'Better.'

More favourably, only last week I drew comparisons to Brad Pitt in the new Chanel adverts. But I still prefer the Kurt Cobain. I remember, when I was twelve years old, my sister telling me that (being blonde) I should grow my hair to emulate the suicidal pop star. I didn't of course; I wanted to be normal as well back then. Well, she finally got her wish.

Now it is cut. I don't know what I'm going to do with it next. I did quite enjoy the poof-phase, but it's not for grown ups. On the other hand, the first comment my hair-dresser makes is, 'You're going bald!' So maybe I will grow it out again, for the comb-over.

Long hair is an identity. I'd never had to identify with my hair like that before. It wasn't an identity that I had chosen, but society foisted that identity upon me. The long-haired outsider. It was an entertaining eighteen months and maybe I feel like less of a person now I'm back with the short stuff. But then again, as my house-mate says, 'A hairstyle is not a lifestyle.'

Dork.

David Varela, Goldeous Kline and Me

Last week, David Varela took a vow of silence and spent one hundred hours writing stories. To prove it, he streamed all one hundred hours live on www.100hours.tv and created a live notepad so that the whole world could see his words appear on their screen as he typed them.

David was raising money for the Arvon Foundation (they run residential creative writing weeks for schools and community groups - I went on one of their paid courses in October: outstanding) and for every person who donated, he would write a story.

I found out about this spectacular project through my friend and neighbour, Naya. She recorded an interview with David Varela for Trans Limits Storytelling, and you can watch a snippet here:


You can help the other David reach his well-deserved £3,000 by donating here (although he won't write you a story any more!).

One of the glorious features of David's project is that all his writing is freely licensed under the Creative Commons copyright. That means I can (and you can) share the story he wrote for me! So here it is, along with a little comment by David before he started writing:

###

DAVID CHARLES: Goldeous Kline and the Borrowful Glaxons

4 hours to go...

At this point in proceedings, 95 hours in, I really do start to doubt my sanity. If I'm writing slower it's mainly because I'm double-checking that everything is real. David Charles has made that deliberately difficult.

He's asked me to write the story of Goldeous Kline and the Borrowful Glaxons.

Not being sure what exists and what does not, I Googled this phrase and was 'shown results for Golden Kline and the Sorrowful Klaxons' because clearly I'd made some kind of typo. So I know that these are not pre-existing entities. One David has come up with their names, and another David will come up with their story....

I'm excited. Are you excited?

--

Having destroyed the Amaloid horde and saved the galaxy once again, Goldeous Kline fired up the thrusters and headed back to base. She could expect a heroine's welcome - indeed, she did expect it, as she had a shower of Finusian champagne at least every couple of weeks, the galaxy being as dangerous as it was.

Once out of Amalon's orbit, she engaged hyperdrive and was back in Sector Omega-6 within milliseconds. She opened the comms channel.
"This is Goldeous Kline, requesting permission to dock. Repeat, Goldeous Kline. Yes, it really is me."
She awaited a response.

And she awaited some more.

"Switching to secondary wavelength... This is Goldeous Kline. Acknowledge."
More silence.
Maybe this was a prank. The boys in the comms shack did enjoy a good joke - but not normally on duty.
"This is Goldeous -"
"Hi Goldeous. Just hang on a sec. We've had a -"

There channel went silent again. Were they under attack? Was there a fire in Command?
"Sorry, Goldeous, we're - no, let me - let go of that -"
"Command? Everything all right?"

The channel buzzed into life for a second and she heard what she thought was somebody being slapped across the face.
"Bzzzk... Eh oh? Eh oh."
"Hello?"
"Greeting, pilot. All your base are belong to us."
"Excuse me?"
"No excuse. All your base are belong to us. Also your ship."

There was the sound of wrestling at the other end of the line again. Goldeous wondered who this invader could be. Their dialect was unusual, but the larynx must be humanoid. The Provaricons? Shepsy? Yes, she'd never trusted Shepsy.

"Kline, are you there?"
"Yes! Status."
"This is Commander Sheppard..."
"Commander - good to hear your voice."
"Yeah... bit of an issue back here. Admin cock-up really. Problem with the bank."
"Who are the 'Bank'? A new enemy alliance?"
"Could say that, yes. Thing is, they rather have the Galactic Council on their side on this one."
"A conspiracy!"
"I'm not really making myself clear, am I? Goldeous, fact is, we've got ourselves up to our ears in hock. Acquisitions went wild with the credit card last year and now the lenders are foreclosing on us. Seems we were borrowing against our bases, but what with all the conflict recently, property prices have gone through the lunar crust."
"I... don't understand."
"They're repossessing everything. The bases, the ships... even Deckard. Apparently galactic law still regards him as a thing not a person."
"But this is absurd! Sir - permission to launch a counter-offensive!"
"No, Goldeous... do you have any idea how much those photon torpedos are worth? Save your ammo and bring your ship back here. That's a direct order from your Commander."

She wrestled with the concept in her mind. Surrender? It felt... so wrong.
"Sir. Yes, sir. Requesting permission to dock."
"Granted. Bay Three."
"But Sir... I don't understand how we could have spent so much money so fast."
"Finusian champagne isn't cheap, Goldeous. Glaxon Command out."

----

I'm going to end it there - because I'd have to stop at that point or follow through and finish a whole sci-fi parody novel, and I've only got three-and-a-bit hours left. Thank you, David, for the inspiration!

###

And thank you, other David, for the story! It was perfect, especially given my current reading of Debt by David Graeber (The Davids are taking over!).