Exploring the ways in which artists, artisans and technicians are intelligently expressing their creativity with a passion for culture, technology, marketing and advertising.
When it comes to collaboration on stressful tasks, caffeine impairs men's performance but boosts women's, according to research led by Lindsay St. Claire of the University of Bristol in the UK. The researchers say their laboratory study raises the question of whether men "fight or flee" while women "tend and befriend" under stress, and whether caffeine somehow intensifies those behaviors. They also ask whether coffee at business meetings might have the effect of sabotaging collaboration. 80% of the world's population consumes caffeine daily.
In retrospect, however, I have to wonder: Did I really need to know any of this information? Wouldn't these topics be covered again if they were really important (a quick multi-site/source rehash of the same topic seems to be how things are distributed online)? Is online content like advertising, where you see a message at least seven times before it really registers anyway?
In work, in life, how many impressions are needed in order to register a true meaningful impression? Or, do meaningful things, relevant things somehow transcend all the noise that surrounds them?
So much of smart thinking comes down to what to read next, how to filter the relevant, the meaningful from the merely entertaining.
So much of creative work comes down to answering the following question: what am I going to do with all this information?
• YouTube, with its ability to catapult someone from obscurity into infamy, launched new music careers, helped change what an advertising campaign is, took over the Guggenheim, and served as the depository of raw ingredients for a multitude of remixes and mashups.
• Paste Magazine compiled the best 25 music videos of the year. However this year, thanks to new technologies and the influence of the social layer, the music video was reborn as something that you engage with and not just watch: Sour/Mirror connected to your Twitter and Facebook stream; You Make Me Feel changed based on your local weather; Killing Me let users tell the world what was, well, killing them, via the hashtag #killingme; We Dance To The Beat let you create your own version of a video via an audio visual beat machine; Soy Tu Aire, has painterly mouse action; but the most surprising and exciting music video (should they really be called videos when they are this engaging?) was the perfect experimental mix of technology, artistry and innovation in the poignant and absolutely personal The Wilderness Downtown.
• Many websites transitioned from Flash to HTML5 giving it a lot of momentum. Due largely to iOS devices not supporting Flash, and now even the Macbook Air ships without support for it, 2010 was the year when HTML5 began to make its presenceknown.
• In addition to all the advancements of the digital world, there is still extraordinary print work being produced and FPO compiles The Best of 2010.
Last week we posted a short animation showing the many ways in which we end up avoiding work. Since then it feels like everyone is in a procrastination state of mind.
what the Greeks called akrasia—doing something against one’s own better judgment. Piers Steel defines procrastination as willingly deferring something even though you expect the delay to make you worse off.
And
Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals.
Much of procrastinating is an inner negotiation about what should happen, and why.
The philosopher Mark Kingwell puts it in existential terms: “Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”
The Procrastinators is a series of 11 episodes of monologues about procrastination produced by Dutch artist duo Lernert & Sander. “Artists, writers and filmmakers talk about concentration, focus and the fine art of wasting their time.”
Clearly the many ways in which we procrastinate are universal.
We created a new series of 11 episodes of monologues about procrastination. Artists, writers and filmmakers tell about concentration, focus and the fine art of wasting their time.
Premiere: July 4th, at the Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam at Limboland Live.
Online september 2010, on limboland.tv
Camera & Lighting: Ram van Meel
Audio recording & Mixing: Diederik Idenburg
Music: Danny Calvi
English subtitles: Tom Johnston
Assistent: Wilfred van der Weide
Special thanks to:
Wendela Scheltema, Kim Tuin, Peter Frank Heuseveldt,
Noel Lozen and Egbert Steenwinkel
The Procrastinators Club:
Aux Raus - Jop van Bennekom - Boris van Berkum - Guus Beumer - Ewoudt Boonstra - Matthijs de Bruijne - Arjan Ederveen - Bas Fontein - Dirk van der Heuvel - Cindy Hoetmer - Ernst van der Hoeven - Florentijn Hofman - Frank Houtappels - Peter Jeroense - Alex Klaassen - Bert Kommerij - Pieter Kramer - Esma Moukhtar - Piet Paris - Michael Schaap - Coco Schrijber - Mo Veld - Victor Vroegindewij - Martin de Waal - Micha Wertheim - Job Wouters - Roel Wouters
An interesting pattern begins to emerge from all these accounts of procrastination. Prolific creators often actively engage in procrastination in a methodical and disciplined way. Apparently writers can not begin to work unless their households are sparkly clean.
I view this as less procrastination and more psychological distancing.
scientists have demonstrated that increasing psychological distance so that a problem feels farther away can actually increase creativity.
We then can conclude there are degrees of procrastination and one of those degrees is less about avoiding work and completely about letting the subconscious percolate. Cleaning the kitchen and organizing the bookshelf as a way of thinking. The trick is to know what is motivating our desire not to work.
On those times when I find myself procrastinating I stop and ask myself: what are you so afraid of that this is the better choice? That usually gets me going again.
Actions DO speak louder than words (or tactics, or strategic planning). At the 99% Conference, Frans Johansson illustrates why groundbreaking innovators generate and execute far more ideas than their counterparts.
