{"id":14407,"date":"2024-08-20T17:08:34","date_gmt":"2024-08-20T17:08:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=14407"},"modified":"2024-12-12T14:23:42","modified_gmt":"2024-12-12T14:23:42","slug":"on-messes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2024\/08\/20\/on-messes\/","title":{"rendered":"on messes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I had a moment last night when I did this at my desk (evaluate my situation), and the first thought I had was \u201cobviously I should clean up my desk,\u201d and the second thought was \u201cnah that\u2019s so much work though,\u201d and the third thought was \u201clet\u2019s do a little bit of it for funsies anyway?\u201d \u2014 and within a couple of minutes I had a mostly-clean desk and substantially more peace of mind. Which reminds me: people often disagree about the relationship between a messy workplace and a productive mind. I actually think it\u2019s quite possible to have a coherent model where everybody\u2019s perspective can fit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><strong>there are different stages of work which benefit from different sensory environments.<\/strong> I noticed these differences within my own process when working on my last book: early stage drafting felt like a noisy, messy mining process best done with Led Zeppelin blasting on the speakers. Final stage editing felt like intricate jewel-setting work, best done in a quiet clean room in something like a hazmat suit.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><strong>there are productive messes and unproductive messes.<\/strong> the difference i think boils down to something like clarity of intentions. a useful mess is one where you at least roughly know where everything is, and the presence of different elements has a cross-pollination effect. I almost said \u201ccross-contamination\u201d, which is an interesting \u2018negative affect\u2019 version of the thing.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">messes are clutters not just of things, but of intentions. that&#39;s what really makes them difficult to tidy<\/p>&mdash; Visakan Veerasamy (@visakanv) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1772636036465656051?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 26, 2024<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00ab <strong>ARRANGEMENTS:<\/strong> I\u2019ve been thinking a lot about arrangement recently. the arrangement of objects, of ideas, of anything. when I used to work in content marketing, a fond memory I have is of how me and a colleague would collaborate to create infographics (which were really popular around 2013-2015 or so). We were determined to make good ones. One of the ways we would do this is look for good extensive lists of quotes on some topic, and then I would spend some time sorting the quotes into categories. So something like \u201chow to do blog promotion\u201d might have 30+ quotes, and I would try to assemble them into about 7 main themes. Then I\u2019d try to organize the themes to have a coherent narrative from start to finish. I similarly enjoyed this work when working on my book <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"http:\/\/gum.co\/introspect\">Introspect<\/a>, where I tried to synthesize everything I\u2019ve ever read and learned in the self-help genre, isolating what I\u2019ve found personally helpful, and then assembling them into a coherent narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the past 2 years or so since shipping Introspect, I\u2019ve felt rather unmoored, listless, fragmented. I\u2019ve come up with hundreds of fragments of drafts, but I\u2019ve not yet found an organizing principle that\u2019s really satisfying to me. I believe that when I do, I will suddenly seem much more productive as a writer, publishing at a much higher cadence than I\u2019ve managed these past 2 years. I\u2019ve had fleeting glimpses of some <a target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/visakanv.substack.com\/p\/when-the-vision-isnt-manifesting\">visions which have not yet manifested<\/a>. I trust that it\u2019ll happen eventually, but I\u2019ve been getting increasingly flustered at not feeling much sense of progress. It\u2019s hard to really know which internal reports are correct and which are misunderstandings or wishful thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I have a bunch of different ideas about what approaches I could take in order to try to solve this puzzle. Restated, the puzzle is: I\u2019m trying to find a way to rearrange my stuff in a way that feels resonant. One idea that was funny and appealing to me recently was to do an \u201call-hands meeting\u201d with myself. \u00bb<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u00ab <strong>RELIEF<\/strong>: (condense into 2 sentences?) I\u2019ve been conflicted and knotted about many things in many ways for some time now, which makes it difficult for me to get very much done. Most of my efforts go towards caring for my child. I have been playing a lot of Witcher 3 while he naps on me. A part of me would like to write something nice and comprehensive about the game, but I can\u2019t seem to muster the energy for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I don\u2019t want this substack to be about the interior experience of my creative struggles all the time. There are other things I want to write about. But I find it challenging to go on some of my nerdposting expeditions when I feel like some of my basic needs aren\u2019t met. If someone needed to pee really badly, it doesn\u2019t make much sense to ask \u201cbigger\u201d questions like\u2026\u00bb<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I had a moment last night when I did this at my desk (evaluate my situation), and the first thought I had was \u201cobviously I should clean up my desk,\u201d and the second thought was \u201cnah that\u2019s so much work though,\u201d and the third thought was \u201clet\u2019s do a little&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[730],"class_list":["post-14407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-substack"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3Kn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14407"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14407\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14475,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14407\/revisions\/14475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}