What is it about the creative process that requires apart-ness from the day-to-day hum-drum reality of existence? This morning at 10 AM, coffee in hand, I was pounding my head against the keyboard trying to “reproduce this”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/events/ in WordPress. Many hours (and malt beverages) later, with the “new Nickel Creek”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0009ML2BU/qid=1123646806/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2872452-4177552?v=glance&s=music&n=507846 cranking on my iPod, and perched in the “Ship’s Lookout” loft of our beach house (where our pirated WiFi signal is strongest!), the code is practically *flowing*.
Of course, the latest NC album leaves it hard for anyone to be unchanged even with a passing listen. This trio of prodigious artists put such vibrant, brilliant energy into each cut. I used to sort of apologize for listening to the “bluegrass” that comes out of Nickel Creek. Now it’s more like, “Ew, you listen to bluegrass–” “Dude, you don’t know *how good* this stuff is.”
What do you do to bootstrap those creative brain cells?
Strangely, I find that whenever I code /anything/ I put on Counting Crows’ album This Desert Life. If I’m typing away and thats playing, I’m in the zone. If it’s something else, I get distracted.
I also code way better at night, when I’ve got nothing else to do. So I usually watch a show on dvd or something, then browse the web until I feel like I’m up to speed, chat on IM about it, and generally delay. Then around 11 I start coding, and I can go until about 6 or 7 am non-stop.
I can sometimes get in the zone during the day too, but it requires a quick “easy win” when I first start… seeing that first form calculate, or the colors start to fill in correctly.
I’ll be doing this sometime in the next week or two. I finally got typo installed, and I intend to relaunch the whole blog thing. Looks like fun again.
I can be listening to anything to code … well, as long as it isn’t crap (of which I have very little in my playlists).
All i need to get my code groove going is a little peace and quiet. Any interuptions generally completely destroy what i’m working on (thus, i find it hard to code when other people are around to both me … so most of the coding I do at home is after 10pm) … At work, i generally just zone as much out as I can and that works well enough (Don’t have email notifications, all my IM notifications are off, etc …) … but there are certain people that when they interrupt me I won’t be able to get back into it again and have to find something else to do till I settle down. Ideally I would always just wear a good pair of noise cancelling headphones, but they are just too expensive and i’m not allowed to wear them at work (can’t hear the phone ring).
Another problem that I have is if I am working on a big coding project at work I can’t work on my personal projects at home (which is why it is taking me so long to get my web app done). If i sit down to work on a personal project my mind keeps wandering back to what i was doing at work and I end up logged into the servers there working on that code.