One of the perks of being a tech reviewer is getting the newest toys and trying them out for free. One of the non-perks is doing a ‘shootout’, getting a bunch of said toys together and trying them all out at the same time.
So there I was, trudging up Bukit Timah Hill at an unprecedentedly early hour on a weekend (yes, working weekends, woot), trying to get decent photos for publishing with six cameras. A couple of them were excellent; easy to use, fast and responsive, like extensions of my eyes. A couple were average. A couple were bricks; using them to take photos was like using a rock to write.
(At some point, I wanted to hurl said bricks down the hillside, just to see them go crunch against the rocks.)
About halfway up the hill and over a hundred pictures later, I discovered something interesting: I was actually taking better pictures with the cameras I enjoyed using. Big duh right – would you do better using a big granite slab to write or a pencil – but you know what? It brought home closer to me that using the tools you love not only help you love what you do so it makes you do more, it also helps you do it better.
When I was a design student, there was a particular sketchbook I loved to use. You could only buy it at two places in the entire country, and sometimes they would sell out. It was meant for children, and the cover had a cute, colorful drawing of happy zoo animals, so it was more suitable for a kid to carry to kindergarten than for a teenager to be seen drawing it out of his bag in public.
But I absolutely loved it.
It was the texture of the paper, which was recycled. It had a rough, unfinished quality, and I loved the way it felt on my pencil. Every other type of drawing paper felt too smooth to draw on, but this paper was entirely inviting. I remember spending the entire month of one of my school holidays at the library, just sketching my way through a book.
That sketchbook with the colorful cover taught me one thing: when you use tools you love, you’re inspired to do more.
MUJI 0.38mm gel ink pens, another tool I love that inspires me.
When I first started working, a company I was doing a project with had a simple drawing tacked on its door for all their clients to see. It looked like this:
I don’t know where the original idea came from, but I’ve carried this little nugget of wisdom with me ever since. I’m just surprised not more people know of it.
The top 10 productivity lessons I learned in 2008 that helped me work faster, better and happier. The short version for the busy folks:
1. Work at What You Give a Damn About
2. Knowing is Not Doing
3. Decide What Has a Place in Your Life and What Doesn’t
4. Multi-Tasking is a Big Fat Lie
5. Create, Don’t Freeload
6. Tackle the Small Problems First
7. Respect Your Unconscious
8. Money is Renewable, Time is Not
9. People are not Schedules
10. 80% of Value is in the Habits
11. Make Ideas
And here we go with the long version!
1. Work at What You Give a Damn About
I find that I’ve done my best creative work when I do stuff that has real meaning for me. Maybe I’m a spoilt knowledge worker diva, but I can’t do banal, uninteresting stuff that doesn’t make a difference.
But beyond personal satisfaction, this is about making personal meaning – and this is real regrets-at-your-deathbed level stuff here. It’s just stupid to be productive for productivity’s sake; do you really want to run faster and harder up a ladder that’s propped up against the wrong wall?
Find out where you want to contribute to most, and then productivity the heck out of it. Now cue quote from famous person, in this case Steve Jobs: