Avoiding White Noise and Navigating Rough Waters
Hello there!
After another weekend partially consumed by work, I come to you today slightly fatigued and somewhat refreshed. In other words, I’m having a Monday. Right? I had a lot of items to address and sorted through before I continued formalizing Agents of Oblivion. If anyone is interested, I can talk about some of the specific steps involved in finalizing a product, but today I’m going to address one of the most useful tools in getting things done–avoiding white noise.
White noise is the miasma of everything distracting you from the task at hand. If you’re working on writing an essay on tombs in RPGs, looking at pictures of Pop Tart Cat is not going to get you in the right frame of mind, unless you use that as your mantra for centering yourself before work begins (which is, admittedly, no worse than some folks staring at candle flames). In any case, white noise comes in multiple flavors.
You have sweet, sour, and square.
Sweet is when you are kinda playing around the edges of your project. Perhaps you’re talking about it to friends which makes you as much the white noise generator (WNG) as them.
Sour is when you seek out negative white noise or encounter it on social media outlets. It is often found in discussions about sports, religion, politics, and, yes, RPGs. I rarely engage in such discussions, save with my closest friends, so why would I do it on a public forum? If you want to read it and participate in such dialogues, that’s cool. I’ll be over here writing and talking about game stuff and what I’m working on. Like I should be.
Square is when something starts off sweet or sour and invariably results in a walkabout across the internet. Do you need to take a spiritual journey across the wastelands of the web to find your inspiration or are you eating a piece of licorice which suddenly switches shape and has become hard to swallow? You know you’re wasting your time. Talking about work does not equal work or we would be drowning in far more oceans of mediocrity than already exist. Go do something productive and then tell me about it. Don’t just talk about what you may be doing. Saying you might dig a ditch or have a perfect concept for the best ditch ever doesn’t really interest me. Dig the ditch and show me. Heck, if I’m interested, even share the trials and tribulations of the ditch digging. I’ve dug a few ditches and I can always use a few pointers.
You might say, Sean, aren’t you creating white noise here? Nope. I’m clarifying my thoughts and sharing them with you. I’ve navigated a few of the more treacherous reefs in the waters of the business and sharing them is both good for the soul and the mind as the process of putting the words down helps me examine and refine my own process.
Until next time, I bid you, dear reader, adieu!
