This week’s rebroadcast gets ready for the new year with a set of posts (from 2018, 2020, and 2021) on directing mental energy toward the tasks you care about.
This profile on me by Dan Jackson in Thrillist was originally supposed to be about Arlo Finch and Launch, but grew into a bigger piece on the many different projects I tackle simultaneously.
John August presides over a mini-empire steered by curiosity, fortified by experience, and fueled by brain power. With only 24 hours in a day, the multitasking writer of movies like Charlie’s Angels, Big Fish, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory scribbles out scripts for big budget Hollywood blockbusters, outlines sequels to middle-grade fantasy novels, maps future episodes of his hit podcast, designs apps for other creative professionals looking to optimize their time, and finds time to invent fonts. If you were granted a golden ticket to tour the laboratory that is his bald head, you’d find a jolly team of meticulous, laser-focused Oompa-Loompas.
That’s not really accurate, though. My inner Oompa-Loompas aren’t laser-focused. They’re a rowdy bunch fighting for control of my various gears and levers, each with a different idea about what the factory should make.
Over the years, I’ve gotten better at managing them, in part because I’ve recognized that I am them. There’s not a me separate from my interests and fears and jealousies.
I’m the product of these competing impulses, not the master.
But I’ve gotten good at recognizing when an Oompa-Loompa has an interesting idea, and then marshaling the forces to try it.
“I’m really curious about how things work, and generally the only way to know how things work is to actually do the thing,” he tells me over the phone one morning. “Rather than planning the thing or reading up about the thing or interviewing someone about how the thing works, I’ll tend to just start doing the thing and then figure it out as it goes along.”
I don’t second-guess whether it’s a good idea, or get fixated on what might go wrong. I don’t ask permission. I just assume I’m not any worse than someone else, and I’ll figure it out. That’s how I started writing my first script, my first musical and my first novel.
But I also leave a lot of projects half-finished. Sometimes they finally come into being years later (Writer Emergency Pack), yet often they don’t (an animated short; a new stage musical; my next directing project).
Giving yourself permission to move on to a better idea is tough. You’re always wondering if you’re one draft away. This will be the one that does it.
But as I look back over the past 20 years, most of my successes — both creatively and commercially — have come from the projects I was excited to do rather than the projects I felt an obligation to start or finish.
I’ve also had things I love fail. It’s heartbreaking.
But the projects I never really cared about? They’re worse in a way, because it was just wasted time.
If I have any general recommendations, it’s to aim to fill your day and your mind with interesting things, even if it’s messy and unfocused. Or as the article puts it:
It’s like watching a dancing bear juggle knives.
Such a life is unlikely to go quite as planned, but at least it’ll be exciting.
Getting Things Done in a Pandemic
As a screenwriter who works at home, I’m used to having large, shapeless blocks of time. Now that the coronavirus has many people unexpectedly working from home, I wanted to share a tool that’s helped me stay productive.
It’s a pre-printed sheet of 8.5×11-inch paper folded in quarters. I call it my Daily Plan. You can download the template as a PDF, or customize it in Pages, Word or Google Docs.
I print these up a dozen at a time and leave a stack by my phone charger. Each morning as I drink my coffee, I take one and fill it out.
Since the lockdown began, one of the things that’s honestly most helpful is writing the day of the week at the top of the sheet. Often the only way I can tell it’s Monday versus Saturday is by looking.
Below that is a list of blank lines and checkboxes, a classic to-do list. Here I put the tasks I want to get done, referring to the previous day’s sheet to carry over anything that’s still relevant.
What’s important is that this isn’t just for the must-dos, but also the want-to-dos. For example, playing Animal Crossing. It’s not a reward for getting other things accomplished; it’s its own thing worth putting on the list by itself.
There are a few items printed at the bottom of the list for tasks I do every day. For example, I have a 1,251-day streak going in Duolingo French, and no virus is going to break that. My 2020 goal was to learn how to draw, so that’s another daily task pre-printed on the sheet.
Do I actually draw it every day? No. But it’s on the list as a reminder that drawing practice is something I could and probably should do.
The pre-printed lines are also useful for recurring but non-daily tasks. My dog Lambert needs his teeth brushed every other day, so I scratch the line out if it happened yesterday.
The back of the Daily Plan is my schedule. Pre-pandemic, this was section full of meetings and school events. Yes, these were already in the calendar app on my phone, but marking them down on paper helped me recognize where I had free time to get work done.
My schedule now is basically just zoom calls and hangout sessions with friends. At least I don’t have to budget travel time to get from place to place.
The Daily Plan folds open like a book. Inside, I have an overflow list of tasks, along with a section for notes. For example, how many decks of Writer Emergency Pack we have at the warehouse, or the name of a book I want to order.
I use a proper notebook or the Notes app on my phone for stuff I need to refer back to, but the Notes section is a great place to jot down things that are only relevant today.
The Daily Plan also has a peek page, a list of all the projects I’m working on — both official stuff and fun things. It’s printed on the back of the sheet, which ends up underneath the to-do list. As I sit down with my morning coffee, I’ll look through this list to consider whether there’s anything related to those projects that could be done today.
Where this all came from
The idea of a daily to-do list is probably as old as paper and writing.
At its heart, my Daily Plan shares a lot with David Allen’s classic Getting Things Done system, in that it describes work in terms of projects and “next actions.” I’ve used GTD at various times in various ways, both in handwritten notebooks and with apps like Things and OmniFocus.
While GTD works great for many people, I’ve found it inevitably devolves into lists of things I never get done, and eventually stop looking at.
What’s helpful about the Daily Plan is that it’s new each day. I have control over it because I only add the things I want to add. In this way, it more closely resembles David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner. ETP is a little narrowly focused for my taste, and I’ve never found micro-scheduling to work for me.
The most direct inspiration for the Daily Plan came from a habit I’ve gotten into whenever I take a long international flight and find myself with 10 to 14 hours to fill. This unstructured free time used to spike my anxiety. What should I do? Should I read the book I brought? Should I play that puzzle game on my iPad? Should I do Headspace? Which movies should I watch on the seat-back screen?
Beginning last year, I decided to make a Flight Plan before the wheels leave the runway. Once I’m in my seat, I pull out a sheet of paper and list the in-flight movies I want to watch, the things I want to read, and the games I want to play. It takes ten minutes and is honestly transformative. I used to dread long flights. Now I see them as a chance to watch and read and learn. I’ve taken this amorphous blob of time and given it purpose.
The Daily Plan is basically my Flight Plan for ordinary life.
I started using it in January, well before the pandemic. While it’s useful in normal times, it’s proved indispensable in this current age of nameless days when the boundaries between work and home life are blurred. It provides a sense of structure and control.
So if you want to give it a shot, you can download the template as a PDF, or customize it in Pages, Word or Google Docs.
Customize however you like, adding the items you want to do every day, and listing your projects on the peek page. (If your printer can’t handle two-sided printing, just print the first page. You can flip the paper and print it again, or just not worry about it.)
The Parable of the Potato Farmer
I can’t in good conscience recommend you watch all of this video, the third and final part of a series by the late Technoblade. But there’s wisdom to be found here.
To the outside world, I’m an ordinary Minecraft YouTuber, but secretly I’ve spent the last year fighting to maintain my spot as the number one potato farmer in Skyblock. Opposing me is SquidKid, the former rank number one, a man whose obsession with potatoes is rivaled only by my own.
Like Amundsen’s expedition to reach the South Pole, this is best thought of as a race, with two men competing to reach 500 million potatoes farmed. As with many battles, even the winner lost:
why did i spend 600 hours on this war. this was a terrible idea.
Yes. It’s an objectively terrible idea to farm digital potatoes. But we can actually learn from Technoblade’s futile quest. Late in his video, he makes two salient observations:
It is only with a worthy rival we can reach our fullest potential.
Rank number one isn’t an achievement. It’s a prison which forces you to dedicate your life to defending a temporary title.
The truth is we’re all potato farmers to some degree. We chase meaningless status symbols. We optimize systems rather than questioning whether they should even exist. We villainize our competition and slink into ethical gray areas.
Technoblade wrote his own cautionary tale, an Aesop fable for the digital age. In the end, he wasted a lot of time, but at least he learned something from it.
I gained a lot from the Potato War: patience, discipline, carpal tunnel.
Farming 500 million digital potatoes is stupid, but registering 500,000 voters could swing an election. Exploiting a quirk in how minions behave is pointless, but convincing our cells to manufacture a target virus protein is a game-changer.
The difference ultimately isn’t in the amount of work, but the choice of the objective.
With this in mind, I’ve started asking this question about how I’m spending my time: Is this actually productive, or just potato farming?
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