Tony Schwartz: The Myths of the Overworked Creative from 99% on Vimeo.

Great talk from ‘renowned media guru’ Tony Schwartz (no, me neither) about how it’s not how much time you have, but what you do with it that counts. The obvious is stated repeatedly – it’s not multitasking, it’s spreading yourself too thin; giving your full attention to one thing results in better work than giving a little bit to everything; email is evil, but addictive; working instead of sleeping will not make you more productive – but all of it is worth hearing again, especially Tony’s suggestion that our ability to work follows the same 90 minute cycle format as our sleep. Basically, everything he said explained my current struggle to get my head into anything like a creative space, so in future I’ll be sleeping more and turning the internet off.

The Last Supper on skateboards (via BoingBoing). Jesus & co are wearing Mexican wrestling masks and eating tacos. How cool is that?

Tell me you follow Terry Richardson’s tumbler/photo blog. What?! What’s wrong with you?! Go here now.

I’ve no idea what Herb Lester Associates actually do all day long, but evidently it involves drinking coffee, wandering around a bit and making amazing maps of London and New York. I have both You Are Here (a map of the best places in London for freelancers to get free wifi, good coffee and be left alone) and Wish You Were There (a map of long lost ’60s LDN), and I love them both. I shall no doubt be getting their newest, the self-explanitory How To Find Old New York in time for my next visit to NYC. I suggest you do the same by clicking here.

As a follow on from the earlier Hyperpotamus post, check out his website. Really nice, simple design. May well have to borrow a few style cue for the next incarnation of this blog. Wonder if there’s anything on wordpress what does a similar, moving box type thing.

What does your desk say about you? Mine is ordered, stylish, with a little elegant clutter, but only a little. And yours?

As previously mentioned, I like quotes. It’s as if I think that by merely knowing what someone intelligent said, I will become just as intelligent as they. Only I’m not intelligent enough to remember any of the things that they actually said, which is why I have to write them down. Here are my most recent finds, the majority of which I’ve lifted from the brilliant @ommwriter’s twitter stream (for ‘majority’ read ‘all’) – I suggested they make a page of them ages ago, they haven’t yet, so I’ve made my own.

Some are funny. Some are true. Some are familiar – although who remembers who first said “Less is more”? Really? Liar. Some are inspiring, but I left most of those out because most ‘inspiring’ things make me cringe. All entertained me though. Lookout for the one by Truman Capote, whose way with words was almost as inspired his taste in home furnishings (see above). The one from Popular Mechanics is also very insightful.

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” – Oscar Wilde

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” – Leonardo da Vinci

“What’s the sense of living if you’re not learning.” – Chiquira Carrasca

“Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” – Maria Robinson

“Music is love in search of a word.” – Sidney Lanier

“Imagine more. Think less.” – unknown

“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow…” – Lawrence Clark Powell

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.” – E. L. Doctorow

“Writing is both mask and unveiling.” – E.B. White

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” – Edwin Schlossberg

“Writing well means never having to say, ‘I guess you had to be there.’” – Jef Mallett

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.” – Popular Mechanics, 1949

“The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.” – Richard Harding Davis

“Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.” – Catherine O’Hara

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” -Ernest Hemingway

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” – Tom Clancy

“A dose of poison can do its work only once, but a bad book can go on poisoning people’s minds for any length of time.” – Stud Terkel

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us” – Franz Kafka

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.” – Elmore Leonard

“The human mind is like umbrella. It functions best when open.” – Max Gropius

“Discovery is the ability to be puzzled by simple things.” – Noam Chomsky

“Some stories are true that never happened.” – Elie Weisel

“I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” – Henri Matisse

“It [creativity] is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – Doctorow

“A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” – Thomas Mann

“It’s a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.” – Andrew Jackson

“There is no method except to be very intelligent.” – T. S. Eliot

“The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector.” – Ernest Hemingway

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.” – Truman Capote

“I never had any doubts about my abilities. I knew I could write. I just had to figure out how to eat while doing this.” – Cormac McCart

“Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you’ve made sense of one small area.”- Nadine Gordimer

“If you can’t annoy somebody, there is little point in writing.” – Kingsley Amis

“If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov

“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean” – Robert Louis Stevenson

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” – Albert Camus

“Other people’s interruptions of your work are relatively insignificant compared with the countless times you interrupt yourself.” – B. Francis

“Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.” – Cyril Connolly

Cool Snow White and The Joker iPad vinyl stickers.

If I had an iPad I might be tempted by a gothed-up Snow White.

There is an advert that pops up every so often over there on the right hand side. It may or may not be there now. Have a look. It’s one of these google ads that is generated according to surrounding content. It features a picture of a very smiley bald man with a laptop (or sometimes an equally delirious lady with lovely long hair and a laptop) and above his head it cheerily reads: Why not be a writer?

I think the same thing every time I see it.

BECAUSE IT HURTS AND MAKES ME WANT TO BREAK THINGS.

Just saying.