Keeping a commonplace book

There is a particular kind of quiet that arrives about twenty minutes into a piece of work, when the part of you that keeps checking whether the work is going well finally gives up and wanders off. Everything useful I have ever made happened after that moment, and almost nothing useful happened before it.

Where it starts

The trick, if there is one, is not to be more disciplined. It is to make the first twenty minutes cheap enough that you are willing to spend them badly. A page you are allowed to ruin gets written. A page that has to be good stays blank.

I keep a running list of the small decisions a project asks for, because the list is the only honest record of where the time actually went.

Attention is not a quantity you have, it is a shape you make. Two uninterrupted hours and four interrupted half-hours are not the same material, and no amount of arithmetic will turn one into the other.

What it costs

• Time, which you notice.
• Attention, which you do not.
• The other version of the work you did not make.

What finishes a piece of work is rarely inspiration. It is a deadline, a collaborator, or the specific embarrassment of having told someone it was nearly done.