Buster Benson

hud:

The site’s idea is a spin on something called morning pages in The Artist’s Way. That exercise is supposed to get thoughts out of your head, uncensored and unedited and everyday, to focus on whatever’s important to you. A guy named Buster created 750words.com as a way to iterate on this idea through tech application and game dynamics.

What I use the site for mostly is to write a daily To Do brainstorm. It may seem weird taking 20 minutes to write 750 words when a to do list would take 2 minutes. But there are some useful benefits of “To Do prose,” written with whatever else comes to mind along the way. Rather than just listing actions quickly and somewhat mindlessly, To Do prose gets you to think though the gaps, the questions and issues surrounding what you’re thinking you want and need to do. On several occasions I discovered a solution to problem, a better use of my time, or I re-examined a goal. To Do lists, and list-making applications, are all the rage, but writing it out “long hand” like this for me was a very useful experiment.

I think Hudson’s on to something here.  I like the phrase “to-do prose”, as opposed to the the popular to-do list, because it’s true that figuring out what to do is as much of a discovery process as it is a simple list of goals.  It’s not easy to know what you should do, it takes a little exploration, brainstorming, and thought.

My daily writing has been going in this general direction too.  That’s part of the reason why I think it’s best to do in the morning rather than the evening, because it helps spin your brain around and get all the things working in the right direction.  At night, it’s more of a reflection tool on what I did, how I felt, etc.