I have been in a strange mood for the last few days. I saw a therapist for the first time in years to try to deal with issues related to my last few traumatic years and the current stresses of being cut off from my family. I’ve been a bit introspective and it was while introspecting, surfing through the hundreds of RSS items in my Google Reader feed aggregator, that I realized that I had developed routines related to media consumption but no routines related to media production.

It has been said, “discover your routines and abandon them” or something to that effect. This is good advice and when I realized just what a slave to following what was happening in the world I had become I realized some things needed to change. I mean, really, what was I getting? More and more of the same ol’ news for the most part. The Republicans did something dumb or evil. Fox News is propaganda. LOLCats are funny. The climate is changing. Gas prices are rising. The Democrats are spineless. Iraq is bad. The terrorists have won. Religion is crazy.

I understand all of that, and having it reinforced over and over may have stimulated pleasure centers in my brain but it was also pointless. I’d come home, dig into my Google Reader, skim through a few hundred items (delving deeper into those that seemed amusing, interesting, or outrageous) and that was it. I had developed an information addiction but I wasn’t really getting much in the way of real information.

So, I cut out most of the feeds I was subscribed to. This morning there were fewer than 20 items in my feed. I skimmed them in a couple minutes, then went to the headlines at my news aggregator and then signed off.

The next addiction was podcasts. Science Friday, the Infidel Guy, the Onion Radio News, CSPAN, and many others get listened to throughout the day while I sit at work hacking away at code. I dropped half of the podcasts I was subscribed to and probably still have a lot of trimming to do. Either way, I have decided to confine podcasts to time spent at work and not to listen to them on the bus or on my bike. In those times I need to concentrate on the other half of my problem, media production.

I have only written a handful of songs since the RPM Challenge in February and I never really write blog entries I care about. My podcast that I started years ago has languished in obscurity. My book is sitting at 80% complete and not getting much better. The reason for all this is that while I have a consumption routine, I don’t have a production routine. I create at my whims. That is no longer going to be the case. I have decided to craft a production schedule with deadlines and to announce things in advance so that I can be held accountable by myself. If I expect that people are expecting me to do something by a particular time, I will do it. I do well with deadlines because I’m a procrastinator and open-ended situations allow me the option of wasting my time doing something else. This is why I can crank out an album in a month for RPM or a novel in a month for NaNoWriMo but the other ten months of the year I am completely sporadic.

No more.

I have the following areas that need to be addressed in terms of routine, my blog, my podcast and live performances of my music.

I have decided on the following schedule for these items.

• One major blog entry a week. Smaller entries will still trickle in as I feel like it, but every Thursday there will be a real essay or article about something I want to write about.
• One new podcast episode a month. On the first Sunday of every month I will upload and release an hour long podcast episode.
• One real world musical performance a month and one Internet performance (webcast or Second Life) a month.

In order to meet this schedule I made myself blog this morning. It is, after all, Thursday. It’s the 17th, I have a couple of weeks before I need to release a new podcast episode but there will, in fact, be one at the start of August. I will be rejoining the real-world live music performance scene with a new backing band on September 27th at the Terminal Bar. However, in the two months preceeding that performance, I will have to perform two Internet concerts and find a solo acoustic gig in the month of August.

I have other projects and things in the works that also need deadlines. I am reading three chapters for an audiobook version of H. G. Well’s “The Sleeper Awakes” over at LibriVox.Org. I am still compiling, editing and writing my book “Hira Hira”. Beyond that there are a multitude of projects that I wish to get to. Transferring the Nuclear Gopher tapes to Archive.Org, recording The Universal Thump, writing more songs, writing a couple of pieces of software that I wish existed, a graphic novel, editing of a few videos, and more. None of these things will happen without a productivity routine so I will be figuring out times and routines to work on all of them as well as deadlines for them that are reachable with the routines.

This might seem like it takes the glamour out of creativity but I don’t think so. The creative individual constantly has to deal with trying to actually accomplish things while also generating new ideas. People who just sit around and accumulate a backlog of projects they wish they had done don’t get far and that’s what I feel I’ve been doing. I want this to stop.

So, people out in Internet-land, get ready for a little more predictability. It’s a-comin’. See ya next Thursday…

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