I’m sitting at my desk, which isn’t really a desk, but a folding table I set up along a wall in my bedroom. On top of that desk, there is an iMac and a MacBook Pro, a mouse and a track pad, a wireless keyboard, two pair of headphones, a dictionary and an AP Stylebook, two Moleskine notebooks and two books, and assorted other junk.
Oh, and a Fred Sanford bobblehead doll.
I have spent the majority of the last three months sitting in the office chair at this table. I set up this station in August, after four months of working at the dining room table. During those four months when my work station was set up in the dining room, I spent 8-10 hours a day there and the remaining hours, when I wasn’t running, sitting in my bed with my laptop in my lap.
With all that time surrounded by all of that technology, I should be super productive, right? Well, I spent a lot of time sitting in that office chair with my feet on the table, watching television. Sure, I’ve been trying to read more, but productivity, yeah, not so much.
I’m not here to chew myself out. I’ve already done that. No, this is me making an attempt to use my time more wisely, to simply be more productive. I want to write more, so I am sitting down and writing.
Like Austin Kleon says, “If you want to be the noun, first do the verb.”
Can I actually make this a habit? Can I convince myself to sit down every day, or even a few days a week, to write? That’s a damn good question. Do I have anything to say? Why would anyone care what I have to say? I mostly left social media (no Facebook, no Twitter, very little Instagram and a bit of Strava) two weeks ago for a long list of reasons, but pretty high atop the list was: Why do I think anyone cares what I have to say?
I still don’t have the answer.
I do know I don’t miss what Ryan Holiday calls “status anxiety.” No more worrying about what clever thing I’m going to say about that run I just went on or what “hot take” I’m going to have on the Rays pulling Blake Snell in the sixth inning when he had only allowed two hits and thrown 73 pitches in Game 6 of the World Series. I also don’t waste any energy getting mad at something someone I haven’t seen in 20 years posted about something I don’t really care about anyway.
But I want to write. Once upon a time, it was a career goal. I put those dreams aside for a number of reasons (and I’m totally fine with that decision) but that doesn’t mean I don’t find joy from writing. There is a reason over the years I have had four different blogs, three that are still active and two I post to at least once in a while. I don’t want it to be my livelihood, but I still want to flex those muscles from time to time.
So that is what I am doing. I don’t know if I will keep posting to this blog or just keep it to myself. I have plenty of external hard drive space I can store files, if I choose to keep them to myself.
This is a start. This is me doing the verb. Check back later and see if I succeeded.
Scott Martin 