I’m pondering the idea of awarding experience points to my younger students. If they show up to their lessons at their regular time, they get xp. If they can play their assignment from the previous week, they get xp. If they learn something on their own, they get xp. Ask a good question? Xp.

The idea is to make is a positive motivation only. They don’t lose xp for any reason. After they get 1000xp, they level up. The xp requirement doubles for every level. I’m thinking of putting a leader board up in the lesson room.

I talked to a nine-year-old about this and he understood it immediately and dug it.

Watching Skins a couple of weeks ago, and Cook was running down the road singing Ace of Spades. Somehow it got into my head that I should do a blues version of the song, and it haunted me until I finally got around to doing it.

The first time I heard this song was when The Young Ones was in syndication on MTV back in the early 80s. I must’ve been around 9 or so.

Hopefully Grover will add some on top of my recording and I can post an updated version.

Ace of Spades (blues cover of classic Motorhead single from 1980).

We’re going to take the massive piles of stuff you generated with your brain dump (which in GTD terminology is called the In Box or In Basket) and sort it into buckets.

Since you can implement GTD with anything: cocktail napkins, bits of birch bark, tar paper and chalk, you could use real buckets for this, but I personally use the virtual folders in my ToDo application. You could use folders on your pc, nodes in an outliner, branches on a mind map, or whatever, as long as there are distinct boundaries where you can separate one thing from another.

Official GTD implementation suggests that you use these buckets at a minimum: Next Actions, Calendar, Projects, Reference, Someday/Maybe, and Waiting For.

Next Actions

This category is for things you know you have to do, whether it’s a one-off or the next step toward completing a larger project. It’s important to write these using action verbs that command you  to take a single specific physical action: buy new shoes, clean the litter pan, fix the porch light, decide on dice mechanic for The Flowers of Evil, buy Buttermilk to make Paneer, call Mom about dinner Thursday night. If there is more than one step to the action, or it has to be done at a certain time or on a certain date, it belongs in Projects or in your Calendar.

Just because it’s on your next action list doesn’t mean you have to do it immediately, but it feels really good to click that little check box and watch it fade to gray.

Calendar

This should be obvious, however, this is not the place to put your daily todo list. If it can be postponed at all, it has no business in your calendar. This is a place to put dates to remember, meetings, appointments.

Projects

Anything that takes more than one step to do is a project. For instance, clean my studio means that I have to take out the overflowing trash boxes, recycle all the empty soft drink cans, re-shelve any stray books, organize my art supplies, and sort through the multiple boxes of tangled and sticky audio cables to see which, if any, I should toss.

I personally break down my projects into tiny little steps because it’s a useful procrastination method, but I’d imagine that if you just list the name of the project, you’d probably be able to figure out what the most logical next action is anyway.

Reference

Reference is stuff that doesn’t really require any action but is nice to keep on hand. I keep a shopping list, books I’d like to read, movies I’d like to see, things I’d like to buy, and online resources for graphic design in my reference at the moment.

Someday/Maybe

I explained this to one of my students today as my Christmas List for Life. This is stuff you’d really like to do, but it isn’t crucial. This could be ideas for projects, classes you’d like to take, vacation ideas, things you want to buy.

Waiting For

After you’ve called Trent about buying the yacht and left a rambling, drunken message. You really don’t know if you should bother scraping off the barnacles until you know if he’s coming to take a look. So you mark call Trent re: Yacht off your Next Action list and write waiting for Trent to confirm appt re: Yacht on your Waiting For List. If he hasn’t called you by the next time you review this list, you can put nag Trent re: Yacht on your next action list again.

Other Folders

I have a folder called Fallow Projects (thanks, Merlin!) where I keep any projects I’d like to work on in the future, but are shelved in the present (like my Haunted House game). I also have a folder called IBNU, which stands for Important, But Not Urgent. This should be pretty easy to figure out on your own.

So…

Set aside an hour or two and sort your In Box (brain dump) crap into the correct buckets. Let me know if you’ve come up with any cool tricks or novel folder ideas.

My biggest influences as a songwriter are Johnny Cash, Merle Travis, Serge Gainsbourg, Paolo Conte, Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Tom Waits, and Flannery O’Connor.

Lately (meaning in the past 10 years), I’ve been listening to a lot of old, dark blues; stuff that goes back hundreds of years and has become more twisted as it evolved. Blind Willie McTell, for instance. Dying Crapshooter’s Blues is a masterpiece, and it’s antecedent, St. James Infirmary is a favorite in my repertoire.

I never listened to Nick Cave until I got sick of people assuming I was a huge fan. We have exactly the same influences. I like the idea of Nick Cave more than I like his music. Too bad Lydia Lunch never asked me to do a duet.

Here’s a sampler of what a friend once referred to as my Southern Gothic Nihilistic Beatnik music:

Time to Die – I wrote this one when I was around 19 (1994), and working as a security guard in a bank parking lot. One day, I just took out my pad of paper and wrote the lyrics to around 10 songs.

It’s a Long Road – I wrote this on a Greyhound bus from Philadelphia to Alabama in 2003. It’s what I call a revenge song: one of my friends or relatives does something really stupid and I exorcise my frustration by writing and recording a song about them with the serial numbers filed off.

Broken Little Town – I wrote this in a motel room on a trip down to Alabama after leaving my girlfriend of 6 years. The imagery in the song was inspired the crappy truckstops that I make a habit of frequenting on road trips.

Black Marie – I wrote this when I was 21, and about to move up to Pittsburgh to have my heart broken by the girl who invited me to move up there to live with her. It’s meant to be an homage to Marty Robbins.

Demons Gotta Feed, Woke Up Dead, and Poison in My Blood were all written one day and recorded the next. 2008 was a particularly productive year for me, and my blues and voodoo influences started rising to the surface.

The lyrics to August Night in Georgia were written to a vamp that my friend Anthony Willingham and I were messing around with. That’s him on mandolin and creepy laugh. Recorded just weeks before Parker was born in 2009. I regret that Anthony and I weren’t able to record more music before he moved away, but life intervenes…

The Night I Murdered Evonne was written for my friend Julia Ellingboe, because she’s working on a game called Murder Ballad Black Jack, and needed some murder ballads recorded. 2009.

Devil, Get Out of My Head was written after a particularly bad week for my mental health, in which I considered giving up music altogether.

One day, I’d like to re-record these songs with folks like Jason McPhillips and Marshall Burns as my backup band.

So, you spent $12 on a new moleskine pocket notebook, huh?

It’s time to free your mind.

I wouldn’t suggest doing this in your extended brain (moleskine, pda, iPhone, whatnot), so get yourself a big sheet of paper and something to write with.

Go to a nice quiet spot and start writing down everything you can think of that you have to or want to do. Include everything, whether it’s as mundane as changing the lightbulb in the laundry room or as grandiose as parachuting into the midst of Machu Pichcu. Write down that idea for a movie you want to make, or the game you want to design. If you have one roll of toilet paper left, write that down as well. Don’t worry about priority or importance. Keep this paper with you as you go about your day. You’ll probably be reminded of lots of little things as you live your daily life. Think of it as a scavenger hunt for things to do. Make it fun.

Here’s an excerpt from my own brain dump:

• fix the flooring in the kitchen
• band practice on Monday @ 1:00
• NaNoWriMo this November
• Mom’s birthday, July 17
• clean the litter pans
• record blues cover of “Ace of Spades” aka Son House plays Motorhead
• Drawing tutorials for Rachel’s drawing tutorial site

Keep in mind that simply writing everything down doesn’t commit you to doing them. The idea is simply to get them out of your head to free your brain up for what it does best: come up with more ideas.

Introduction

I’m diving head first into David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology in an attempt to actually accomplish the multitude of things I want to accomplish, and grudgingly finish the things I don’t want to (but am obligated to) accomplish, without having anything slip though the cracks.

GTD seems perfect for aesthetic polymaths like myself who are always in the process of generating ideas, making new connections, and starting new projects. We tend to not be that great at time management or productivity, and I’m guessing that’s because we’ve become accustomed to spontaneity  and inviting chaos and passion into our lives. Most time management and productivity solutions are targeted toward people who live a different lifestyle, and have a personality that is suited to compartmentalizing and ordering their time. I’ve never been good at that, and I’m finding that GTD is great at adapting to me, rather than me adapting to it.

The problem is navigating the seas of GTD materials out there. In addition to David Allen’s three books, there are probably hundreds of thousands of blog posts, hundreds of  blogs dedicated to the practice, and dozens of podcasts about GTD. This can make getting into GTD a little intimidating. Not to mention the fact that reading a book on time management and productivity, even those as well written as David Allen’s, can make one’s eyes glaze over. That’s why I’m writing this series of posts.

The Extended Brain

One of the core tenets of GTD is that the mind is designed for having ideas, not for holding them, and trying to keep track of everything is a major source of stress. The solution is to utilize an “extended brain” which we trust to remember things so we don’t have to. This extended brain can be anything you can write in: a planner, a pda, a stack of index cards, a moleskine notebook, or an iPhone with the proper apps installed. The only condition is that you are in constant possession of this object

Decide what you are going to use as your sacred tome of GTD. If you own it already, great. If not, this is permission to go out and buy yourself a new moleskine (if you’re broke like me), or an iPhone (if you just got that student loan).

Having spent too much time and not very much money, I can honestly tell you that ToDo is the best of the iPhone GTD-friendly apps. It syncs with your Toodledo and Remember the Milk, and is much more intuitive to use than either service’s proprietary iPhone app.

If you know me well, you know that I really only get vocally political when it comes to arts issues. Well, I just found out yesterday that President Obama cut back arts funding in his budget proposal for 2011. Arts education funding has been consolidated with several non-arts sources.

On the other hand, the government spends twice as much in ONE DAY on the war in Iraq as they do for the entire year on all the government sponsored arts programs combined. This says a lot about not only our government’s values and priorities, but those of our society.

I’ve had students in the past couple of years who have attended schools where the arts programs have been eradicated. I don’t like where this is heading.

Perhaps those at a high level of government don’t understand that without exposure and experience to the arts, our physicians and engineers and chemists won’t learn the creative problem-solving skills that will allow them to address the multitude of pressing issues that face our civilization now and in the near future. In other words, steel and silicon and dna are, or can be, as much an artistic medium as oil paint or ballet, but they are useless unless they are being utilized as such by those with an artistic temperament.

Meanwhile, those of us who are fighting to save our culture and civilization from rotting from within due to the corruptive nature of apathy and escapism are struggling, especially in the current economic climate. We are the infantry of culture. We who have chosen to sacrifice social and financial security to share our art with those who need it most–be they nascent artists or accountants who realize that they desperately need something real to fill that gaping hole in the spirit that we all have–we are falling into a increasingly deeper financial hole. Some of us can’t hold on much longer, and you’ll lose us to steady jobs with benefits.

Is that what you really want, Mr. President?

I’m not as happy with this one as I am with the portrait of John. I used a different process in an attempt to save time. I think I ended up paying for it. Still, not too bad.

Also, I need to work on hair. Really dissatisfied with the hair on both these guys.

I’m not sure if I’m finished with this or not. I’m a little off on the anatomy in places, but it’s late and I don’t know enough about anatomy to see where. I don’ t like the hair, but I’m not sure what to do to improve it. I’m pretty happy with the way I was able to get Photoshop to look like nice wet oil paint with a single brush.