Friday 18 January 2013

why craft : digital productivity

reflections in a glass table

When I started this blog way back in 2008, I intended it as a place to reflect on the intersection of craft, digital and community - three things that are important to me in both my personal and professional life, on a micro and macro scale.

Yet since returning to blogging after what was, in effect, an extended blogging maternity leave, my posts have become almost exclusively a record of what I've done and things I've made. This is not, in itself, a problem and it has been a nice way to ease myself back into e discipline of regular blogging... but it is not what I initially intended my blog to be.

So I have started to ask myself why this has happened and so, in asking this question and following my subsequent thoughts, I have also moved closer back to the reason I started to blog.

When I started blogging I had few commitments in my life, expect perhaps going to work every day and part-time study. But even then my place of work is/was a constant source of inspiration and my study was a driving force behind my decision to blog. I remember being able to sit on the sofa knitting after work whilst watching films and TV programmes and having the luxury of spending whole weekends just sewing and listening to Radio 4.

How simple those days seem now I have two pre-school children and next to no spare time for myself. Radio 4 is still my constant companion but It often feels like all my spare thought capacity is taken up with Thomas the Tank Engine (and his numerous Friends) and other more practical things such as my new and extensive knowledge of child speech and language development, and paediatric cardiology.

Yet somehow, despite now being busier than I have ever before, I also seem to be making more than before - both on my own, and with my children... how can this be the case?

And one reason which is at the front of my mind is digital...

  • Smart phone and tablets have given me space and time to find inspiration and information during the tiny moments of calm which arises in my days due to the additive effect of tablet reading
  • Sites such as burdastyle.com and ravelry.com allow super-fast access to patterns, ideas, resources and expert knowledge for making
  • Hints, tips and ideas from productivity sites such as unclutterer.com and lifehacker.com have genuinely helped me to become more organised and have given me space to get things done
  • And apps and utilities such as Blogsy and Google Drive allows me to work on documents whereveer I am at a given moment, rather than being tied down to what we now call the grandad box in our house.

Then there is the act of blogging itself which I am sure has played a part in providing me with the enthusiasm and inspriation to do more. By making myself think about and analyse what I have done I am inspired to build upon and improve my own work.

And so I hope too that this new start in thinking about why I craft will have a similar effect on my future thoughts and will be the start of many future outpourings. I look forward to seeing where this will lead me.

 

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