A Fold that’s worth a Thousand Gain
If you want to improve your productivity and capability, there’s no easier way than mastering the art of multi-tasking. You see, in order to be a great designer, an artist, a photographer or a writer you have to already be excellent at getting things done. And time is never on your side so you need to find better ways and tools for deploying your energies.
To do that you need to unlearn the bad habits of the past, which are unfortunately mostly learned from our parents, teachers and even from ourselves:
always being online; always emailing or messaging each other; multitasking with a laptop or a phone; working on more than one computer at a time. All these bad habits have only one purpose: to get more work done in less time. And those are not the best ways for developing your capabilities because they serve more to diminish your productivity and capabilities than to enhance them. They take away your capacity for self-knowledge and waste precious time which could be invested in exploring other ways of being productive.
We are all multi-dimensional and we are all capable of many different things. And we can be productive and creative in many different ways. But unfortunately, the way of being productive that most of us learned was to work on only one thing at a time, and then re-learn it in a more complex way, like creating websites on one computer and the same design on another.
It’s not difficult to think about how much time is wasted because we need to know how to use different software, whether for design or for software or for writing. It’s not that our methods are better than others’ but they will become better if we learn from others by seeing what others do differently from us. Unfortunately, we live in a world where productivity is the most revered and valued human quality. And we believe that the more things we get done, the more successful and valuable we will be.
And yet there are many people that are very productive in their own way but not as competitive or successful as others who use more mainstream methods of being productive. Their ways of being productive might be even better than our mainstream ways for doing one thing at a time. If you want to be creative and successful you have to learn how to become better at getting things done.
Most people do it by working with 30 pieces of different software at a time. We’re not that different, we always want to use multiple programs for creating our artwork and even more for the web. But there’s one way that is much more traditional, which doesn’t seem very updated or modern but which can be very much effective. Unfortunately, most people don’t even think about using it anymore because they are so used to see everything only digitally now.
I was taught this method when I was in Greece, where I was learning how to cut stone. It might sound bizarre but it’s a very ancient way of being productive: stone carving.
The principle behind it is very simple: you carve your stone by placing another stone on top of the workpiece and then hammering two chisels gently from above.
If the workpiece is big enough, you’d have to place 15 or 20 stones on top of each other to create a 14-meter high statue.
At first you might think that there’s no way someone could be productive by carving their cutting stone in this way. But once you try it, you will realize how much more effective it can be than using only one chisel at a time or using one method over and over.
Sometimes it can take you a while to carve a stone but once you’ve done it, after many hours of hard work, it will only take you seconds to cut another. You spend your time multiplying the number of your pieces instead of wasting time repeating the same one for a long time. And when you’re done there will be many beautiful stones that belong together and form a bigger piece.
If you try carving stone in this way, by cutting each piece in one go, it might look perfect but each stone will be different from the other and they won’t be able to fit together like they would if they where carved one by one. And if you try to put them next to each other, because they are different in size, they won’t fit.
It’s the same thing with designing. You can cut many stones and make many beautiful pieces that look perfect on their own but if you want them to be part of a bigger design or a better story or better experience, then they need to fit together. It’s the same thing with writing multiple articles about the same topic: if you just write 10 articles about one topic, at the end of it your readers will feel overloaded and will stop reading what you have to say because there’s too much information.
You can say that by using this method many stones will be lost in the process, but what you will gain is a much better workpiece, one that’s more impressive and meaningful. It’s the same thing with writing. The more articles you write, the better they become. If they start as a million pieces of stone added to your workpiece, at the end they will all come together to create something much more valuable than if you had worked on only one stone at a time:
This is my example of laying many stones on top of each other to create a digital design which is the same as creating a statue out of stone (above picture).
It’s not the end, it’s just the beginning of a new story.
I don’t only want to teach you how to write more in less time by using this method, but I also want to teach you how to become more creative and effective when it comes to writing. And at the same time, I want your readers not only to read more of your articles but also to learn more about what you have to say. I want them not only to finish reading your article but also take action when they are done reading it. And all those goals are achieved when you start writing diversely instead of writing always about one thing in one specific way.
Conclusion:
If you want to learn how to be productive, you first have to understand why most people choose a different method for being productive, by working from one thing at a time. Then you have to understand why it’s not always the best possible way, and why you should try to be more creative about it. And finally you can learn how to use a different method which will make you better at it.
I chose an example with the stone because I like the idea of having many small pieces that come together and form something bigger and more powerful than if they had been cut one by one.