[TID-BITS] : VISUALIZATION
I’ve come to realize, and am beginning to accept, two things about my process. One is that I’m a visual person, and two is that anxiety is just a necessary evil in my process.
DETOUR: I’ve realized lately that I use the word “just” way too much, and furthermore always misspell it “jsut” which my autocorrect has stopped correcting. At first I was going to create a manual auto correct to change it rather than having to retype it all the time. Bu then I realized this could be one of those “wear your watch on the other hand” scenarios to help me be more conscious of my use of the word. In fact, I find the word a bit insulting, as it implies simplicity which invokes easiness, which I know are mutually exclusive. It’s a small insight, but helpful as I continue to refine my(self/process/(limited) understanding of the world and exploration of the human condition…)
(Resuming regularly scheduled journaling in 3, 2..)
I’m a visual person. I work best when I can test out my ideas, play with the layout, and see it how its going to be/work/live in the environment I’m working in. When I worked at my previous job, I would work with designers who would take my “blueprints” for laying out websites and design the actual webpage from them. Now on my own, with my clients, I use the blue prints as much more of a “checklist” and when I go to “design” the website I’m working on, let the elements of the theme and other features (or limitations…) define most of the actual design. I also use a “design as I go” philosophy which admitted makes for a bit of a chaotic ADD Jackson Pollock style process – organized chaos – until its complete.
The other aspect of my visualness (that’s a new word) comes in my personal life – or rather is part of my everyday life. I need to see things to remember them – or else I forget. This can cause problems, for example, if my fiancée has something on the calendar that I need to remember to plan around, I’ll forget he mentioned it unless I can see it in context on the calendar. I think of it akin to a snapshot – and I often take snapshots of my computer screen and throw them in the trash. This way I have record of something I might need to remember in the future, but don’t have to see it cluttering up my desktop. Oddly, I often use the trash as a safe place to store documents. Which I suppose creatively solves the problem of accidentally deleting an item – I know exactly where it is if I intentionally delete it! This is in fact part of being visual for me, as having a lot of “noise” in my visual environment makes me very anxious. So, the best scenario is if I can see it and move on, snapshot then move it to the trash.
This last part about visual clutter and anxiety is something I’m still grappling with. Indeed, there are many aspects about my process and daily life that give me anxiety, and I’m still learning how to both channel and avoid, or diminish anxiety. The “screenshot in the trash” method and general filing of documents into type-A style organized folders helps with this. For the other anxiety-producing aspects of my life, I’m working on figuring out how I can channel the anxiety into more productivity. While it does help “motivate” me – and generally when I’m anxious about getting something done, I’ll sit down and crank it out so I can check it off. However sometimes there are SO many things on my plate, across multiple to-do lists, that I imagine myself sitting on a sinking ship letting the tasks pour over the bow at an alarming rate and observing the flood. Of course, since I’m always the hero of my own story, eventually I get the motivation to get up and fix the leak.