Category Archives: writing
Poem and photo: “First draft”
First draft
“Guess what?”
“Chicken butt.”
He fell over into the rut.
“How high?”
“A baby’s cry?”
He gave me the quizzical eye.
“Knock. Knock.”
“You’re a smelly old sock.”
He looked at me like my head’s down the block.
“Bye bye.”
“Here’s mud in your eye.”
He shook his head and tried to fly.
.
.
#poem #humorous #writing #firstdraft #chicken #butt
#mud #humor #poetry #may #wednesday #davidebooker #2020 #sock
052720
Filed under 2020, Poetry by David E. Booker, writing
The Six Morning Routines that Will Make You Happier, Healthier and More Productive
Start your morning off right with these simple but effective routines.
Of all the different things you can try to improve your productivity, a morning routine is one of the most effective.
There are a few reasons why morning routines are so useful. The first is obvious to anyone who has ever procrastinated, just getting started is often the hardest part. If you can start out with the right momentum towards your goals, you’ll avoid wrestling with yourself in the morning to get started.
The second is that the morning, particularly before the workday officially begins, is a quiet time with fewer social obligations. For many of us, the rest of the day can present a chaotic, ever-changing blast of responsibilities, urgent errands and unexpected interruptions. The morning, in contrast, is often the most consistent part of your day.
Morning routines also set the tone for your upcoming day. Do you want your workday to begin quiet and contemplative? With vigorous exercise? Silent meditation? Creative and productive? Your morning habit can push you along a current which will carry throughout the morning and allow you to maximize whatever aspect of your personality you want to be most important.
In this article, I’d like to explore a few different morning routines you can try. But first, let’s talk about what comes before the morning ritual: sleep.
When Should You Wake Up? How Much Sleep Should You Get?
When you talk about productivity, there seems to be two camps. Some argue in favor of waking up extremely early to maximize those early-morning hours. Others say getting enough sleep needs to be the priority. If you can’t go to bed by 8pm, you should wake up only after you’ve gotten 7-8 hours of sleep.
I believe the scientific case is fairly clear: when it comes to productivity, getting enough sleep is essential.
A lack of sleep causes enormous cognitive declines, it impacts your ability to form memories, and may even increase the risk of certain diseases (including cancer). Research indicates that 7-8 hours per day is a nearly universal requirement, so those who claim to get by on four or six hours per night might be kidding themselves.
Worse, the cognitive impairment of a lack of sleep can accumulate, even if you think it has leveled off. Any morning routine you develop needs to accommodate your sleeping rhythms.
Key Lesson: Your morning routine should allow you enough sleep. Pick a time you can wake up consistently and also get 7-8 hours of sleep on a normal night.
Creating the Perfect Morning Routine
I’ve experimented with a ton of different morning routines. Waking up super early, waking up without an alarm, exercise, learning, work and many others.
In all these different experiments, I’ve found that there isn’t one perfect routine that will make you rich, ripped and happy overnight. Instead, there’s different routines for different purposes, and so I tend to think about my routines as trying to match my most important goals of that moment.
If I’m really focusing on health and fitness, starting with exercise or putting in the time to eat a healthy breakfast might go first. If I’m working like crazy, getting straight to work on my most important tasks may be better than cluttering up my morning with different tasks. Different goals, different routines.
Therefore, instead of suggesting one routine, I want to suggest six. These different routines have all served me during different parts of my life, and so you can see which feels like the best fit for you.
The Six Key Morning Routines
1. Exercise and Energy
This routine is simple: right when you wake up you go and exercise. Before eating breakfast, checking your phone and emails or watching some television—go out and move.
I’ve done this before with running, swimming and even just push-ups.
The first benefit of this is that it puts fitness in that all-important first slot of the day. If you’ve struggled with staying on a regular exercise schedule in the past, this can be a good way to make sure it is a priority.
Second, this habit can wake you up. Exercise can keep you alert and mentally functioning at your prime, when a coffee may only be able to slightly prolong your later-day crash.
Recommended for: If you struggle with grogginess, you’ve had a hard time fitting exercise into your schedule and if you want to make fitness your top priority.
2. Meditation and Stillness
Contrary to the first one, this starts with daily meditation. I’ve done this before with 30-minute meditation periods.
It’s important to do seated meditation and not do so lying down in your bed, or you’ll be likely to fall back asleep. I sit on the floor, not a chair, which is not terribly uncomfortable, but also a position that requires enough muscle tension that I’m unlikely to fall asleep.
I’ve found this helpful because it tends to leave me calm and focused. Useful if you expect to have stressful days ahead to start yourself off with a quiet mind.
I also find that one of the challenges of grogginess is keeping your eyes open. Meditation allows your mind to wake up without strain so by the time you hear the final gong you’re fully awake.
Recommended for: If you want to be calm and less anxious in your day, if you’ve wanted to make meditation a priority but haven’t had time, as an alternative if you don’t like exercise first thing in the morning.
3. Get to Work!
The key to productivity is just doing the work. This routine underscores this by making getting some work done your first priority, so that your first break is the chance to eat breakfast, shower, shave and do the normal routine you’d do in the morning.
I did this during the MIT Challenge. I even have old schedules I wrote on paper which had “6:55 – Wake Up,” “7:00 – Start studying,” written on them. I’d wake up, and in five minutes I’d be doing practice questions, listening to the next lecture or working on a programming assignment. Only after I did 30-60 minutes of this would I take a break to “get ready” to start my day.
This works because it not only maximizes your time, it shifts your productivity much earlier. You finish much earlier in the day and can enjoy a less cluttered evening without guilt that you’re slacking.
The second benefit is that you get to take a break when you need it. Too many people take their break before starting, so that when they have to work they can’t take a pause for fear of not having enough time to finish.
Recommended for: If you have important goals and projects that take a lot of time. If you expect to be working a lot and you’re worried you won’t have time to do everything.
4. Learning First
When I was planning my year-long trip to learn four different languages, the early morning was the only time my roommate (who went with me on the trip) and I had to do some pre-travel practice. Therefore, we woke up at 6am each day and did a half-hour of Pimsleur lessons before he got ready to go to work and I got up to start my day.
In other times I’ve done learning goals where I’ve read books, watched lectures, practiced skills or studied first thing. This is often useful for the same reason it’s useful for meditation and exercise: it puts something you struggle to schedule first thing in your day, so you won’t forget it.
Recommended for: When you want to work on an important learning goal but never find time.
5. Plan Your Day
Mental rehearsal is a key strategy elite athletes use to ensure performance. By imagining each movement vividly, they can perform better under pressure when the big event comes.
You can exploit a similar impact by planning out your day in the morning. Don’t just jot down some to-do items, but actually imagine working on them. What will be the complications? Where will you have gaps in your schedule that need filling? What will you need to focus on?
Doing this planning first thing in the morning can be a good way to prime your day for success.
Recommended for: If you have a hectic, busy schedule. If you want to focus your mind on work and productivity, but can’t start working right away.
6. Make Your Bed
Making your bed, brushing your teeth, showering, shaving, doing makeup, pressing your clothes and more are all little tasks that can put you in good form for the rest of your day. Such morning routines were pretty much expected a generation or two ago, but nowadays many people skip out on some of these steps as the culture has become looser.
An advantage of this more traditional routine is that in putting your house and appearance in order, you put your mind in order as well. As one admiral William H. McRaven put it, “if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made — that you made — and a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”
This approach can be taken on its own, or it can be synced up with one of the other two—say fifteen minutes for some key preparation activities followed by exercise, work or study.
Recommended for: Creating a sense of order and dignity in your day. Giving you a foundation of meticulousness and conscientiousness to approach your later tasks.
Add an Evening Routine
Morning routines are great for managing the first part of your day, but they also depend crucially on an evening routine to complement them. If you do decide to aim for an early rising schedule, you need an early-to-sleep routine to match it. Similarly, if you plan to work or learn first thing in the morning, you should plan out your day the night before so you know what to work on.
A good evening routine should minimize blue light (a good rule is to have no screens after 9pm), so that the melatonin circuit that controls your circadian rhythm can start to adjust for better sleep.
I often like to plan out my day ahead of time and either read a book or listen to an audiobook with the lights out for 20-30 minutes before sleeping to make it easier to doze off.
Matched to your goals a good routine is the foundation for success. It can help you become more productive, healthier and happier by tweaking at one of the most consistent and important points in the day.
Filed under 2020, writing, writing blog, writing tip
The Single Reason Why People Can’t Write, According to a Harvard Psychologist
“Why is so much writing so hard to understand? Why must a typical reader struggle to follow an academic article, the fine print on a tax return, or the instructions for setting up a wireless home network?”
These are questions Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker asks in his book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century. They’re questions I’ve often encountered –and attempted to tackle– throughout my career as a business writer and editor. Whenever I see writing that is loaded with jargon, clichés, technical terms, and abbreviations, two questions come immediately to mind. First, what is the writer trying to say, exactly? And second, how can the writer convey her ideas more clearly, without having to lean on language that confuses the reader?
For Pinker, the root cause of so much bad writing is what he calls “the Curse of Knowledge”, which he defines as “a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know. The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose.”
“Every human pastime –music, cooking, sports, art, theoretical physics –develops an argot to spare its enthusiasts from having to say or type a long-winded description every time they refer to a familiar concept in each other’s company. The problem is that as we become proficient at our job or hobby we come to use these catchwords so often that they flow out of our fingers automatically, and we forget that our readers may not be members of the clubhouse in which we learned them.”
People in business seem particularly prone to this “affliction.” You could argue that business has developed its own entirely unique dialect of English. People are exposed to an alphabet soup of terms and acronyms at business school, which they then put into use in their day-to-day interactions once they enter the working world.
And what starts out as a means of facilitating verbal communication between people becomes the primary mode with which people communicate their ideas in writing, from email to chat apps to business proposals and presentations.
“How can we lift the curse of knowledge?” asks Pinker. “A considerate writer will…cultivate the habit of adding a few words of explanation to common technical terms, as in ‘Arabidopsis, a flowering mustard plant,’ rather than the bare ‘Arabidopsis.’ It’s not just an act of magnanimity: A writer who explains technical terms can multiply her readership a thousandfold at the cost of a handful of characters, the literary equivalent of picking up hundred-dollar bills on the sidewalk.”
“Readers will also thank a writer for the copious use of for example, as in, and such as, because an explanation without an example is little better than no explanation at all.”
Whenever I write a sentence that makes me pause and wonder about what it means, I assume that other readers might react in the same way. If a sentence is not clear to me, it might not be clear to others. It’s an approach that I recommend to anyone who is trying to improve his own writing.
Before hitting publish and sending your writing out to the world, it’s better to be honest with yourself about how much your reader is likely to understand a given passage or sentence. Before you commit your writing to print– or to the internet– take a few moments to make sure that what you write is clear and understandable by as many of your intended readers as possible.
As Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize-winning physicist, once wrote, “If you ever hear yourself saying, ‘I think I understand this,’ that means you don’t.”
These 13 Books Will Make You a Better Writer in 2019 | Inc.com
One of the best ways to improve your writing is to read about the craft.
Source: These 13 Books Will Make You a Better Writer in 2019 | Inc.com
- Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips
Ernest Hemingway never codified his insights on writing into a book, but he did share his thinking on the topic in commissioned articles; letters to his agents, publishers, and friends; and through his novels. Ernest Hemingway on Writing is a collection of his insights on the craft of writing, and includes several practical and inspiring tips.
- Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury
The prolific science-fiction author Ray Bradbury collected the lessons he had learned about the craft during his long and successful career in Zen in the Art of Writing.
- Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t: Why That Is and What You Can Do About It, by Steven Pressfield
Steven Pressfield recently returned to writing about writing with a brand-new book, Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. It’s a no-nonsense guide to writing stories that people will want to read. While the bulk of the book addresses how to write fiction, Pressfield shows how the same principles of writing good stories can apply to writing nonfiction.
- The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron
The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity is the classic book by author and creativity coach Julia Cameron in which she introduces what she calls “morning pages.” Morning pages is a powerful stream of consciousness writing exercise that is not intended to yield publishable material, but which can help you get your pen moving and your thoughts flowing–even if you never intend to share them with the rest of the world.
- Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life’s Work, by Steven Pressfield
Ever since reading his classic book, The War of Art, I’ve read every book about writing by Steven Pressfield (and I will continue to read every one he writes, including the one he’s publishing soon, which he’s generously serializing on his blog). In that book he gave a name to what every writer grapples with. He called it Resistance.
To fight the Resistance, writers (and other artists, for he was addressing artists broadly in that book) need to give up their amateur mindsets and habits and “turn pro.” In Turning Pro, his follow-up to The War of Art, Pressfield fleshes out what he means exactly when he tells writers to “turn pro.”
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Zinsser
William Zinsser was a journalist, author, and writing instructor at Yale. His book On Writing Well is a classic among writers and has sold nearly 1.5 million copies in the 40 years since it was published. It’s one of the first books I recommend to anyone seeking to improve their writing.
- On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King
Fifteen years ago, mega-best-selling author Stephen King wrote a book about the craft of writing that became an instant bestseller: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. After telling the story of how he became the writer he is today, King devotes the second half of the book to sharing his writing strategies, like his suggestion that you should write for your “Ideal Reader.”
- Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors, by Sarah Stodola
This book looks at the techniques, inspirations, and daily routines of 18 iconic authors of the 20th century, including Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, David Foster Wallace, Toni Morrison, and Margaret Atwood.
After profiling so many successful authors, what did Stodola learn about their writing process? “Genius, I have concluded, is the presence of not one ability but several that work together in tandem. Genius is far more tedious, far less romantic, far more rote, far less effortless, than we imagine it.”
- The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield, edited by Shawn Coyne
All writers struggle with writer’s block in one form or another, but Steven Pressfield named the enemy and outlined a strategy for conquering it in The War of Art, the perennially best-selling guide for writers and other creative professionals. In the first part of the book he introduces what he calls Resistance – the force within us that conspires to prevent us from fulfilling our creative pursuits – and then spends the next two sections sharing his solutions for overcoming it.
- The Art of Nonfiction, by Ayn Rand
As the late novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand describes in The Art of Nonfiction, an edited collection of lectures she gave on the craft of writing, part of the reason why it took so long to finish her second novel is because she often suffered from severe bouts of writer’s block.
- Lifelong Writing Habit: The Secret to Writing Every Day, by Chris Fox.
In Lifelong Writing Habit: The Secret to Writing Every Day, Chris Fox describes the 12-step process he created that has allowed him to make the transition from part-time writer to full-time author of several best-selling thriller novels and nonfiction writing guides.
At the beginning of the book, Chris describes what a habit is, and explains how you can reprogram your brain just like a computer to install new habits. Habits live in a part of the brain called the basal ganglia, and they consist of three parts: The trigger, the routine, and the reward. The key to changing your habits is to identify which ones are good for you, which ones are bad, and then “flip” the bad ones to good ones.
- 8-Minute Writing Habit: Create a Consistent Writing Habit That Works With Your Busy Lifestyle, by Monica Leonelle
Monica Leonelle, a novelist and author of several books about writing, has written a book that speaks directly to those of us who struggle to get our writing done while balancing other commitments at work and home.
In the first part of The 8 Minute Writing Habit: Create a Consistent Writing Habit that Works With Your Busy Lifestyle, Leonelle describes several “blockers” that get in the way of our writing, thoughts like “writing might not pay off,” “I’m not good enough to be a writer,” and “I’m stuck in the planning/writing/editing phase.” For each blocker, she offers several practical tips for overcoming them. In the second part of the book, she shares nine strategies the pros use to write consistently.
- Several Short Sentences About Writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg
Verlyn Klinkenborg is an author and creative writing instructor at Yale. In the preface to Several Short Sentences About Writing, he argues that “most of the received wisdom about how writing works is not only wrong but harmful,” and then devotes the rest of the book to smashing assumptions and correcting misconceptions about the craft.
Filed under 2019, book list, writing, writing tip
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