Why I take sketch breaks instead of surfing the Internet
blog.glenelkins.com
blog.glenelkins.com
They're both non-verbal, I can almost feel myself using a different part of the brain. It's a good little rest, and erases my mental "context" of the problem -- I catch a lot of silly errors when I return to work.
Sorry for the guitar geek-speak. I guess for a second there I mentally collapsed the distinction between one of my nerd communities and the other.
Maybe I'll go onto Harmony Central's guitar boards and start using acronyms like DRY and OOP just to balance the scales...
I did the majority of my writing with a guitar strap on, so I feel like picking one up to see if it could get me back into writing, something I've struggled with ever since I moved.
I once had to edit tablature for a song I was writing out of a movie review - oops. That was a "I can do two things at once, but maybe I shouldn't" moment.
What type is yours?
Definitely my favorite as well.
I'm guity of being caught doodling in class. As early as first grade. I still remember one particular day long ago where a teacher noticed me doodling during class. The lecture halted. My notes were confiscated. Then torn up and tossed into the trash. I was horrified.
And yet, to this day, I've never stopped doodling. It's quite soothing. Some of my best works of art started as "just a doodle."
It's fun, challenging and has lots of opportunities to weave in bits of technology too.
From what I found, I prefer sketching with a 2H pencil to tablets. There is just a lot more feedback, and like the author describes it, I'm a lot less likely to get unfocused when sketching on paper than when sketching in Illustrator.
I haven't tried it myself, but enjoyed using Logitech's early io Pen years ago http://www.logitech.com/en-us/support-downloads/downloads/di...
http://www.amazon.com/Back-Napkin-Expanded-Problems-Pictures...
Trust me, I have literally 1000's of pieces of paper lying around here with ideas, sketches, the works, built up over 15 years. I'm never going to scan any of it.
Get a tablet before it's too late.
There are smartpens now, but there's still a loss of texture when storing images, and displaying them on a backlit screen alters them as well.
That aside, a tablet completely wrecks the point of getting away from all the distractions that come with your computer.
But doodling? Brainstorming? There is no app in the world (yet?) that can match a pad of paper and a good, comfortable pen.
It is more expensive than normal scanners but in your case it would properly be worth it.
I do a lot of photography on film - maybe 5% of it ever gets scanned. I have, at this point, maybe 10,000 frames of images shot on different types of film all sitting around in binders. Most of them will never be scanned.
So what? Most of them don't deserve to be scanned. Save the effort and braincycles for your good sketches/ideas/doodles/etc as opposed to trying to painstakingly archive every insignificant thing that's ever crossed your mind/pen/keyboard.
In my most current job going on 5 months, I'm mostly a programmer, but I've also become something of a scribe because the documentation of their current environment setup is absolutely abysmal. One time, a coworker and I had been debugging a SQL Server SSIS package that kept failing on a new machine when there should have been no reason to fail, and for quite awhile had no leads. All efforts to look through stacktraces, logs, and the event viewer lead nowhere. All we knew was that it was some Excel error from what it was telling us. What ended up being the issue was that the following folder didn't exist:
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile\Desktop
It's an empty folder, though. We were given absolutely NO indication that this was needed from our research, until my colleague remembered it one day after THREE weeks of trying to fix this damn thing, and all we needed to do was create a damn directory. My boss's face turned white when I told him what the fix was because he recalled having this same exact error bite them in the ass before.
This is the site in question that saved us now has a permanent place in our Wiki now:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/innovateonoffi...
(and yes, we wrote down all the information from it in the chance that the link goes dead :)
It was also quite rewarding to slowly see myself improving.
I don't have any physiological proof but moving away from the screen is the first step to a purpose-seving 'break'.
On the musical side, odd time 'swing' drum rudiment at slow pace , while sustaining a deep breathing pattern is very relaxing. ( actually it's something close to what steve gadd advice for learning/enjoying drumming )