Weekly Meander #12: The productivity paradox
On holding plans lightly & making space for possibility
Hello! Thanks for joining me on a weekly meander through my week just gone – with a focus on my working life (a way for me to document a time of professional transition as well as a little shot of motivation and accountability to keep me pushing on!) And in case you're new here and wondering who on earth I am, do check out this post. TLDR: I'm a documentary filmmaker coming to the end of distributing my debut feature doc and currently exploring/expanding into new professional avenues whilst also navigating parenting & perimenopause. Some balls may be dropped!
I'm still quite new to Substack and really enjoying finding my way around so you'll also find my recommendations of great reads I've seen in the past week. If you enjoy it, do feel free to leave a comment. And of course I'd love it if you would consider subscribing to get all my posts delivered straight to your inbox.
Well hi there. You catch me in pensive mood, staring out the window and absentmindedly chewing on a piece of straw (metaphorically, obviously).
I'm finding it such an interesting discipline to take this time every Sunday to look back over my week and think about what I've achieved. And this week, honestly, it wasn't immediately obvious to me what that was. After my action-packed week of personal and professional adventures last week, this has been a fairly quiet one in terms of concrete things I can point to (as you'll see in my, shall we say, slimmed down, work round up below).
This was partly down to an almost comical run of plans not, well, going to plan! 1
What would have been the big structural peg of my working week, a screening and Q&A at Cambridge University this weekend, ended up being postponed early in the week due to some unexpected circumstances. Then there were the two webinars I'd signed up to on Friday – which turned out to be next week. And the open day at Harwell (a UK Research & Innovation hub and the main home of national atomic energy research up until the 1990s) that I'd verbally agreed to attend with the heritage lead from Sellafield – which has already sold out. Double oops!
And yesterday, unrelated to the gone-awry work plans, but in keeping with the general tits-up vibes, (I'm sure there's a more elegant phrase but if the hat fits etc) I found myself:
dealing with a vomiting 4 year old on a bus in the South Downs National Park on the way to my son's under-10 cricket match
waiting for a woefully delayed country bus service to take us back to Brighton after said match – on a tiny patch of pavement battling for space with the botanical equivalent of a man-spreading commuter, with two hot and bothered kids, as cars roared past us at 60mph2
embroiled in a completely farcical situation that went on for most of the afternoon involving an unknown car that had erroneously parked in my driveway, an unhappy couple who had booked to park in said driveway (we rent it out via an app as a handy little source of extra income to prop up my paltry earnings as a successful Netflix-selling filmmaker!), a mysterious email address and a very confused pair of middle aged German tourists...
All of which was a good reminder not to get too hung up on things working out in any particular way – a weekly planner spread is all very well, but real life isn't always going to adhere to the plan, no matter how prettily coloured the fine liner pens it's written in may be..!
But shifting plans aside, I think there was another reason for my lack of obvious productivity. I think it was also down to a feeling – that I both know is right yet can also struggle not to feel a bit guilty about – that right now, much of what I need to do to move forward with my work is, in a sense, invisible, taking place in my head, my heart and my gut.
In this transitional time - before I've definitively committed to my next film project; while my new entrepreneurial venture into the business of individual life stories is still at such an embryonic and unformed stage; and while I'm still figuring out exactly what I want do with the stimulating space of possibilities that's opening up for me here on Substack – in this time, a lot of the work is just waiting and seeing which of the many ideas I've got bubbling away turn out to be the most persistent, calling out to me and demanding me to do something with them.
And I don't think this phase can be hurried.
Perhaps it's belabouring the point, but in another great post this week, one of my favourite Substackers,
, talked about her passion for growing flowers from seeds. I'm not really green-fingered at all but my other half is a keen - if somewhat intermittent, since the kids arrived - vegetable grower. So that sight of tiny green shoots peeping up through the soil and promising so much is one I am definitely familiar with.Kate likens the phases of planting seeds, early growth, seedlings and ultimately flowers to the phases of digital marketing. I've still got a lot to learn about marketing (more on that below!) but for me, it works equally well as a metaphor for creative ideation – and at the moment I'm definitely in the pre-first green shoots stage.
It's all happening out of sight and beneath the surface, but it's happening nonetheless. Productivity that looks like nothing from the outside – but productivity all the same.
WORK WINS THIS WEEK
Now don't get me wrong, there was plenty of little bitty stuff that needed my attention this week – much of it around the ongoing, tedious business of getting paid for my screenings, especially by university clients, as well as various other bits of correspondence.
But a lot of my time was spent on the kind of free-flowing, meandering thinking about gestating ideas for future endeavours that I've just been describing. Much of it with a cup of coffee in hand and a big sky filling my field of vision.
So I can't really demonstrate any output from any of that right now – but that's ok.
I did do a couple of more solid things though that I think I can safely put in the win column for the week. And they were:
1. Phone interview with the lead figure in a 1980s nuclear waste dump campaign
I don't want to say too much about this as I'm not exactly sure where it's going yet. But it came about through a bit of of random serendipity and was a thoroughly enjoyable hour and a half spent delving into a fascinating piece of British nuclear history which I think is largely forgotten now – I didn't even know about it and I'm far more nuclear-curious than the average person!
It was also an unexpected pleasure to do an initial interview over the phone again. These days the default always seems to be a Zoom or Google Meet - and of course there's something to be said for the social bonding aspect of seeing each other's faces. But I was reminded of the greater focus on what is being said that I find possible when talking over the phone, audio only. It feels easier to take detailed notes too – something I find myself shying away from when the other person can see me doing it.
I'd be curious to know if this is specific to me or something that lots of people feel too in these video-first days – do let me know what you think in the comments.
2. Completed Leonie Dawson's Marketing Without Social Media workshop
The second big tangible thing I completed this week was this online training from Australian business coach Leonie Dawson (do check out the recent interview with Leonie with
at or the podcast interview with her and if you want to find out more about who she is and what she's all about).
I've been in Leonie's orbit since 2017 when I first bought her annual goal-setting workbook (as previously mentioned I have a bit of a thing for paper planners and diaries and journals – and Leonie's versions are particularly jazzy and colourful 😄). But this year I decided to go 'all in' and sign up for her Business Academy.
I've never been a huge fan of social media and I use it fairly infrequently in my personal life. But in my work life, I’ve used Twitter and to a lesser extent Facebook to help with, variously, crowdfunding, outreach and distribution on my nuclear doc. Lately though, I've been feeling increasingly reluctant to spend a lot of time in either of these spaces – and so this particular workshop really caught my attention.
I found it really practical with a lot of useful take home ideas to put into practice, both in my filmmaking life and in my fledgling new business as I start to move forward with that. Substack wasn't directly mentioned, though Leonie is a devoted blogger and I think much of what she says about blogging also applies to Substack, at least for how I'm conceiving of using it for now.3
WHAT I'M LOVING ON SUBSTACK THIS WEEK
As a bit of a documentary and animation nerd myself, I already know and love the National Film Board of Canada or NFB (and their Roku app!) so was fascinated to learn more about its history and ethos in this overview from animation journalist
. I confess to a moderate amount of smugness upon finding that I’d already watched 2 of the 5 animated shorts Alex picks out and am now looking forward to watching the others - especially ‘Bob’s Birthday’ (who could resist a film about a British dentist in a mid-life crisis losing his trousers!)
You may or may not have been through menopause or peri-menopause yourself, but it’s a fairly strong bet that if you’re reading this, you have been through puberty. It’s an obvious analogy in many ways but apparently not always an uncontroversial one as I discovered in this piece, packed with helpful info - as well as this enraging factoid:
there are some people, even some doctors, still clinging to the outdated idea that women were never “meant” to have menopause. Apparently, we women all used to drop dead before the age of 50.
One of the ideas I can sense slowly emerging out of the primordial ooze of my mind at the moment is a project for my life stories venture involving the relationship between grandparents and grandchildren. This gorgeous piece written by
to her newborn grandson beautifully captures the very first moments of this fledgling relationship, even before birth. What a precious thing for him to be able to read it when he’s older. And how lucky for us that Cherie shared it with all of us too.
Proudly taking part in the
24 essays club with – this is post number 6 😊
Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo (everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE
Find me on X /Twitter & at LinkedIn
Life stories website – coming soon...
I must confess it was only when I went to look up the origin of the phrase 'best laid plans' that I discovered it was not in fact an unattributed proverb as I'd thought, but actually derives from a Robert Burns poem,'To A Mouse: On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785'. The original Scots ('the best-laid schemes o' Mice/ an men/Gang aft agley') gives the quote an extra dose of piquancy I think.
apart from a handful who were slowed down by a cyclist out for his weekend ride – my hero!
Thanks for the shout out, it sounds like you have so much going on, I’m sure the green shoots will appear soon! 👏👏
Hi Vicki – thank you for the mention. I really appreciate it! "Bob's Birthday" taught me what a mid-life crisis was before I'd even hit my teens (and made me a tad more suspicious of my dentist). I enjoyed reading your post. Totally agree about phone interviews!