Mysterious Flame

Just so you know, the Feedburner feed is located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysteriousflame. I actually had to resubscribe to it in Google Reader (it looks like I had been subscribed to the default RSS feed generated by Drupal) so you may have to adjust accordingly.

So MF has had a new look for about 2 weeks now, and it’s finally got all it’s content back. (Hopefully I didn’t clog anyone’s RSS reader with a ton of “new” posts.) As I mentioned in my last post, I resuscitated the old posts from trusty old Google Reader, reformatted the text and images and tweaked a few grammatical points here and there, and viola! Mysterious Flame is back on the road. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten the comments back on the site. I’m honestly not sure how to do that since I’m not a power WordPress user (yet), but frankly, there weren’t that many to begin with, so I’m OK with it. If you want to go back and re-comment, by all means, do!

Hopefully I was able to retain the old Permalinks (I checked, but there are probably a few that I missed.) So if you see anything that looks out of place, a broken link, or something that’s missing, please let me know via the contact form.

Hello to newcomers

I want to welcome newcomers to feel free to poke around the site and explore. Have a look at the About page to see what this site is about, (“sharing ideas for maintaining creative momentum and finding ways to become ‘unstuck’”). Take a look at the Art & GTD Series, which is one of the main intellectual problems that got me to start the whole site to begin with. I’m also pretty proud of the posts I’ve done on Stuckness, Gumption, and Motivation.

Welcome back to old friends

Old friends, I hope you’ll enjoy the new site and find it more usable than it was before. I’m sure some things will be tweaked here and there, but I think this design will prove to be more versatile in the long run. For at least a year anyway. ;-)

Upcoming content

While it has indeed been a while since I’ve written anything new, I’ve got a few things in the pipeline, as well as some cool/useful tools I hope you’ll like.

Anyway, it’s good to be back, and I look forward to getting this ball rolling again. See you around!

So you might’ve noticed: Mysterious Flame has been down for a while. I’m a man, I can admit it: it’s my fault.

See, it all happened when I tried to take advantage of a special Executive Shared Plan package at A2 Hosting to combine different web hosting accounts into the same account (this site and my fine art portfolio, and I failed to back up the SQL database(s) correctly.

And MF went kablooey.

But there’s an upside to this! I’ve had some ideas knocking around for redesigning/restructuring the site as well as moving it from Drupal to WordPress. (Drupal was overkill for what I wanted out of the site, and the forum idea never took off.) So this was an unexpected (read: unplanned) opportunity to take a stab at it and try to get my webdev skills sharpened.

So take a look around, and please be patient as I hammer out some kinks. I’m still working on recovering all the old content (thanks to trusty ol’ Google Reader, I was able to find pretty much all my old content, and revise it here and there.) So, kids, there are two lessons to be learned here. Lesson #1: Always backup properly, especially your databases. If you don’t know how, find out! Lesson #2: When things go wrong, there’s an opportunity to create something newer and potentially better.

Here is a quick list of various tools that can be used for capturing as promised earlier in my post The Importance of Capturing

• Pen and Paper Tools
  • Moleskine notebooks/sketchbooks
  • plain ol’ 8.5 x 11 (US Letter) paper
  • 3 x 5 index cards (favored by Merlin Mann and Anne Lamott)
• Digital Tools
  • PDA/smartphone/handheld device
  • text file in conjunction with the Text Manipulation tools for Quicksilver
  • Voice to text service such as Jott that allows you to call and leave a message, which is automatically transcribed and e-mailed or texted to you. Rosh Sillars at Prosperous Artists has talked about it here.
• Camera
  • digital (I use a Canon Digital Rebel)
  • film
• Morgue/Idea File
  • literal file folder or an entire file cabinet full of physical clippings
  • folder on your computer containing files you’ve downloaded
  • image bookmarking web service such as FFFFOUND or We Heart It

I’ve used all of these at some point, and I use a combination of most of these even now. (I quit using a PDA years ago after I sat on and broke my trusty Handspring.)

Everybody’s got preferences as to their various capture tools and what they use and how. People are amazingly specific about their pens, whether it’s a fancy fountain pen or a humble Pilot Precise V5 (what I have used daily for over a decade.) So what capture tools do you use? I’d love to know. Share in the comments.

Ideas are like dreams. There’s probably not a lot of difference what happens in the brain when you’re having a dreams or an inspirational flash. I’m not a neurologist, so I wouldn’t know. But I can imagine that something similar happens each time. (Ever noticed how many ideas are born out of dreams?) They have this much in common: these momentary flashes appear brightly for an instant, and then quickly fade into the subconscious, never to be found again when you need them or want to remember them.

There are a lot of important nuggets there in those flashes. Too bad they go away in a puff and they’re hard to recall. But they don’t have to be, if you find a way to capture those things and make a habit of doing that.

See, Capturing is one of the fundamental concepts of Getting Things Done. There’s so much “stuff” in our heads that escapes us when we need it. I can’t over-stress the importance of capturing things — whether it’s the need to call to make an appointment to get your tires rotated or if it’s an idea seed that could give way to a masterpiece.

It’s not so important how you capture things, but that you do capture them. The tools are as diverse as there are human beings, and everyone has their own way of doing it, their own preference. (We’ll discuss different capture tools in another post.) Just do it in a way that makes sense to you so you can act on it later. If it’s something that someone else will have to do later on, make sure you frame it in such a way that they’ll understand it, using clear, well-defined language.

Capture, then Process

Writing stuff down on a sticky note won’t do you much good if you never see it again. When you capture things, be sure to put them in a place where you can find it — enter it in your Trusted System to ensure it doesn’t get lost. Make sure you review it and process it so that it’ll get acted upon or otherwise filed into the right place.

If you’re using the standard GTD procedure, it should go like this, going by the Do, Defer, Delegate, and Delete method, taking care to file away what needs filing away:

1. Capture each item on a separate sheet of paper, which goes in the inbox.
2. At Review Time (daily, weekly, as often as necessary!) Process it and deal with it by asking one of the following questions:
   • Is it actionable and can it be done in less than 2 minutes? DO
   • If it can’t be done now, in what context can I do it? (At the grocery, while I’m running errands, while I’m in the studio, etc.) DEFER
   • Is this something I need to let sit on the back burner and re-evaluate later? If so, put it in your Tickler file for future evaluation, or set up some other reminder for yourself, whether it’s 6 days, 6 weeks, or 6 months from now. DEFER
   • Am I the right person to do it? If not, I should hand it off to the right person and follow up with them at some specified time. DELEGATE
   • Is it a piece of reference material that should go in a reference file or an idea file? (This would apply to phone numbers you need to have around or to doodles that might make their way into a piece.) FILE AWAY
   • If it doesn’t get answered by any of these questions, it’s probably trash and not worth hanging on to. DELETE

There’s one caveat, though: don’t overdo it to the point that it’s an obsession, and you’re so busy capturing things that you never ever do them or just feel so overwhelmed that you’ll never get to any of it. Moderation is key. Just be sure to periodically evaluate and purge captured items that are no longer going to be useful or doable. If you think you’re doing that, take a good hard look at it like my friend, productivity guru Patrick Rhone, suggests.

Remember, getting a handle on capturing (and then processing) is fundamental to staying on top of things. If you wait too long to process or review, you’ll end up with forgotten ideas and missed opportunities. I’ll be sharing some of my own capture tools in a few days.