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New Year, New Notebook

Wasn’t it great how this year — and last year, I should say — Christmas Day and New Year’s Day both fell on Tuesdays? It made for a particularly quiet holiday season, at least at the office. And today, first day back at work, it’s a bit of a treat to remember that it’s just a three-day workweek — heck tomorrow’s Thursday, already.

All of that time off, both from work and, yes, from this blog, was exactly what I craved. I just needed the month of December, between my traveling and the holidays, to take it easy and spend time with Mister President. This morning when I got to the office, I felt more rested and recuperated than I thought I would, though there’s about a million things I’m already behind on for 2008.

Still, I’m feeling pretty positive about this year. Someone asked me in the elevator today if I thought the new year would be a good one, and somewhat unexpectedly, I said, “It’s going to be great!” I don’t know why I said that exactly, but it just sort of jumped out. And then I thought to myself, wow, it’s kind of frightening how much of an optimist I’ve become.

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Paris Is Burning (for Now)

Sorry, sorry; I’m having a hard time getting back into the swing of things after my trip to Paris. Between that and the holiday rush, there doesn’t leave much time for my duties here on this blog.

Actually, I hadn’t anticipated falling off the blogging wagon so easily. I fully expected to be blogging regularly from Paris, but after that initial entry, all of my best intentions flitted away. I was doing a lot of walking around town, taking photographs, spending time with my dad, seeing friends and fighting jet lag; somehow the idea of being productive on my laptop at the end of each day lost out to just resting and relaxing.

I had a great time in Paris, as I always do. In fact, its vivid beauty is so universally acknowledged and accurate that there’s almost nothing original I can write in further praise of it. If you’ve never visited, suffice it to say that it lives up to its reputation in every way — and with each repeat visit, it reveals something new and characteristically stunning.

It’s certainly not perfect, though. For various reasons, I was ready to come home by the end of the week — one of the primary ones being that I got fed up with the Parisian predilection for smoking like it’s going out of style.

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Books Under Glass

The Czech Center, located at 83rd Street and Madison on Manhattan’s Upper East Side has a modestly terrific exhibition right now called “Ladislav Sutnar: Modern, National and International.” It’s an incomplete but nevertheless enlightening retrospective of this crucial graphic designer’s work from the first half of the Twentieth Century. Though you’ll be able to peruse the whole of the exhibition in less than thirty minutes, if any part of your job as a designer — online or offline — involves the organization of information according to the subjective rules of visual elegance, then it’s worth the trip.

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From My Left Feet to the Left Bank

I’m a little burnt out on blogging, so forgive me folks for having been somewhat absent here over the past few weeks. Fear not; I fully intend to regain my mojo before too long. In the meantime, though, I’m trying to get through December’s litany of social distractions: the holiday season, for one, and just a little bit more travel before the calendar’s done, too.

If you’re also coping with the former, and if you’re in New York City, what better way to ease yourself through the December craziness than by spending it with a passel of your peers at AIGA New York’s Annual Holiday Party? Last year’s was a bit of a mob scene, but this year we’re upping the ante: dancing, a bigger, more spectacular venue, dancing, an auction of design goodies, dancing, and M.C. services provided live and in person by the inimitable John Hodgman — for real! The party is this coming Sunday night and tickets are a measly US$20.

The day after the party, I’m heading out to Paris again to visit my father for about a week. My goal is to visit him there twice a year, for at least as long as I can cobble together enough incredible shrinking dollars to pay for meals in Euros. Oof. I’m bringing a brand new, work-issued MacBook with me, so in theory I’ll be blogging a bit. It all depends on whether I find some cool stuff to do or not. If you know of anything, drop me a line. Otherwise, happy holidays!

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Presently

I am motivated, professionally, by this idea that I can always do better — or, more accurately, that whatever level of accomplishment I can currently claim isn’t enough. In a sense, I don’t allow myself to enjoy whatever success I’ve attained; I’m forever re-assessing my status or beating myself up for not yet having reached some higher, better plateau that seems to lie perpetually just beyond my grasp. I don’t let up on myself.

This isn’t bragging, nor is it career advice. It’s a strategy that got me where I am today, but it’s exacted its own kind of price. As much as I try, and as intent as I am on reshaping my behavior, I have a difficult time appreciating what’s good about my life. And this careerist sensibility bleeds over into my personal arena, too. It’s caused me to have a hard time creating consistently meaningful relationships with the people I care about. Or maybe this perpetual dissatisfaction was hardwired into me deeper down, turning me into an efficient desk jockey on the one hand, while on the other hand leading me to continually seek other, ‘better’ relationships — meanwhile becoming disaffected and disconnected from those I care about.

Either way, it’s not a sustainable strategy for living. I realized lately that I haven’t done a good job appreciating what I have or, especially, who I have in my life. I’m not completely without gratitude, but I have spent a lot of time in the company of people supposedly near to me while daydreaming about being elsewhere — thinking about design, or playing on my computer, or just not being present. On the whole, I think that I would have had a much nicer time these past three and a half decades if I’d just been mentally there, if I’d really appreciated the people around me, let them know that I was really with them, and happily so. I would have had a lot more fun, and I think those in my life would have, too.

I’m going to start doing a better job with that. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

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Testing, One, Two, Tees

It’s Friday and everyone’s exhausted, so I just thought I’d throw this out there to maybe brighten up a few folks. Herewith, test prints for a brand new batch of my Hel-Fucking-Vetica shirts. Yes, I’ve finally gotten around to re-running them — or am nearly ready to get them run, anyway. With a little luck, they’ll be ready in time for holiday sales and shipping. What better way to celebrate during the December holidays than with a little typographic profanity?

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Just Doist It

Like a lot of people, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion that how I manage to-do items is more of a perpetual journey than an achievable goal. I have yet to come across the perfect task manager, and despite some intermittent progress, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that I ever will. So, periodically, I find myself possessed with an urge to overhaul my system — because of inherent shortcomings in my existing methods that have scaled to intolerable inconveniences, because of changes in my working style or my life, or because newly introduced productivity tools promise to make the ongoing search more interesting.

So in this spirit, I’ve been playing with a few new task managers lately. I’ve had mixed success, but one thing I can say: this new round of candidates has definitely confirmed my previously stated opinion that most thinking in the “Getting Things Done” school of productivity is far too elaborate for me.

For over a year, my daily to-do list has more or less been managed in an entirely manual fashion; every morning I create a new list and copy over incomplete items from the previous day’s list. It’s an approach that’s not completely at odds with GTD, but neither does it adhere particularly closely to David Allen’s principles. But one of the to-do applications I’ve flirted with (currently in pre-release state, so I won’t talk about it in too much depth) is so thoroughly committed to the GTD way that it’s more of a hindrance than a help for me. After the initial delight of getting my hands on a fairly powerful task management machine, I’ve become weary of its apparent and frequently unavoidable complexity.

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