In his chautauqua on being stuck Robert Pirsig identifies the cause of “stuckness” has having too many tasks at hand for your mind to process. His solution to get unstuck is “don’t try to force it, that will only get you more stuck.” But I think that’s only one form of being stuck, some kind…
I’ve run into a dead end with my Life Architecture project. My idea was that by making small, incremental changes to the structures of your life, you would arrive at a more satisfying everyday experience and better outcomes overall. Along the way I’ve come up with a workable methodology. But the results don’t seem any…
I first stumbled on A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, and Construction when visiting a friend. I was dealing with some creative roadblocks and the book stirred in me a new passion. It contains 253 “patterns,” design solutions that work together to help people create homes and neighborhoods that feel good and function well. While I’m…
For about a year or so I’ve been exploring ways to restructure my life in a more natural, “living process” kind of way. Consider that nature is not in the business of suddenly creating new structures. Instead it takes existing structures and makes small tweaks that reinforce, strengthen, and elaborate the existing structure. To get…
The idea that I’m working on here is to try and use architectural principles to redesign the structure of your life to create new structures that feel “alive” and propels you forward. The first step is to capture a vision of how you’d life to be in the future. The idea isn’t to set goals…
When you’re trying to re-design your life, you want some kind of idea what you want your life to look and feel like. Here’s a process that I’ve worked through a couple of times and I think could work for anybody. It’s pretty simple, start sketching out in words how you’d like your life to…
My Medium feed is littered with Productivity advice: Make these 7 Changes and You’ll Start Making Money Online Writing a Time Management Plan: 7 Essential Points 10 Beautiful Ideas to Change Your Career It’s not that these articles are bad. Some of them have very helpful tips. The problem is that they may not always…
I have one last thought about the parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13. As I said in a previous post, I get stuck on the part of the parable where Jesus says that the tiny mustard seed grows so large that it becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the mustard seed growing into a tree that I wrote about recently. I was reviewing my schedule, looking for small actions that might have big results. Then suddenly a light bulb went on. What if Jesus parable isn’t about small things becoming big? What if the point of the…
In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus tells a story about the Kingdom of Heaven. The Kingdom is like a tiny seed. It starts small and then grows into a tree, spreading its branches to give shelter to the birds. I’ve been thinking about this parable a lot recently. Kingdoms typically spread by force and conquest.…
Here’s a hack that helps get your mind moving when it’s stuck on a problem. Start making a list. For some reason breaking a difficult or unclear situation into smaller pieces helps you work through the issue. Say you are thinking about having friends over for a barbecue. You have to do a lot of…
Starting a design with a sketch risks starting with too much information – and information that is likely not a good fit with the project. There becomes a risk of working on and strengthening irrelevant parts of the structure at the expense of latent centers that are essential to the project. Christopher Alexander proposes starting…
A digital garden is a collection of online entries that are on public display and grow over time, not simply in number but also in complexity. So how does one go about setting up a digital garden? Is it simply a matter of setting up a bunch of notes and tending them, enriching them, expanding…
“Working with the garage door up,” brings to mind a garage workshop where neighbors can drop in, watch your progress, use your tools, and learn something in the process. You may learn something as well. Andy Matushack gets the idea from Robin Sloan, who talks about biking past the open door of a woodworking shop…
Andy Matushack’s Evergreen Notes are notes that grow and improve over time. They become valuable building blocks for thinking and writing. Most people take notes as a way to remember key facts and details. These are jotted down in a notebook and reviewed just before a test or a project. Evergreen notes, on the other…
