A creative director at my first day job used to talk fondly of the agency where she'd started out, where designers had a timesheet code they could use for "time spent staring out the window." What she missed was the official recognition—lacking in most workplaces—that creative work demands downtime. Sometimes the brain works best when your attention wanders.
Puttering is the name I tend to give this process; apparently that's the more American word for it. UK usage favors pottering. The OED defines the verb potter as "occupy oneself in a desultory but agreeable manner; move or go about whilst occupied in such a way." The Online Etymology Dictionary adds "be busy in doing little," and notes that it seems to be a frequentative verb, similar to chatter. (Which suggests that fretter might be the verb for pottering with a guitar—if we didn't already have noodle.) It also includes a graph showing that usage of potter is about half what it was in 1800. I wonder how that graph might align with the spread of models of industrial productivity.
I, for one, have not had much time for puttering lately. I miss it, and I'm pretty sure my creative work is suffering for the lack. The sticky-note wall might qualify, since it is fundamentally aimless. But that's no more than a minute or two a day. A minute is not a lot of downtime.
I just encountered Hanif Abdurraqib's description of an annual braided-vignette document on a random topic of interest, which can grow to hold a book's worth of words that will never be public. I love that idea, and I'm curious about what the songwriting equivalent would look like. Perhaps a rhyme/stanza game within the St. Jerome's document? The band's goofing around with parody songs and Unbelievable Truth mashups might serve a similar function. Certainly digging in to etymology does.
Puttering is the name I tend to give this process; apparently that's the more American word for it. UK usage favors pottering. The OED defines the verb potter as "occupy oneself in a desultory but agreeable manner; move or go about whilst occupied in such a way." The Online Etymology Dictionary adds "be busy in doing little," and notes that it seems to be a frequentative verb, similar to chatter. (Which suggests that fretter might be the verb for pottering with a guitar—if we didn't already have noodle.) It also includes a graph showing that usage of potter is about half what it was in 1800. I wonder how that graph might align with the spread of models of industrial productivity.
I, for one, have not had much time for puttering lately. I miss it, and I'm pretty sure my creative work is suffering for the lack. The sticky-note wall might qualify, since it is fundamentally aimless. But that's no more than a minute or two a day. A minute is not a lot of downtime.
I just encountered Hanif Abdurraqib's description of an annual braided-vignette document on a random topic of interest, which can grow to hold a book's worth of words that will never be public. I love that idea, and I'm curious about what the songwriting equivalent would look like. Perhaps a rhyme/stanza game within the St. Jerome's document? The band's goofing around with parody songs and Unbelievable Truth mashups might serve a similar function. Certainly digging in to etymology does.
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