WWN47 : The Productive Power of Place

Dear reader,

This has been an interesting week.

And I’ve learned a bunch that I want to draw together to share with you, but it requires a brief introduction.

Our church is running a holiday club, a few mornings this week looking at the book of Jonah.

Well, I decided it was foolish to drive down with my daughter at 0930, drive home, work for an hour, and then drive back to collect her at 1200.

It’s not a long journey, but I know I’d take time to settle, time to get into the swing of things and by then I’d be looking at the clock and thinking:

“nearly time to go so I’m not late…”

And I’d get nothing done!

So, instead I decided to camp out in the church library with my noise cancelling headphones and work there.

Thus cutting two legs of the journey out, and in the process learning a valuable lesson about the power of place that I now share with you.

Because said library…

…well…

…it’s not the nicest spot in the city.

It’s tucked away in the basement of our temporary building, zero natural light, no windows or ventilation, and dodgy fluorescent bulbs set among those cardboardy ceiling tiles that feel like you’re in an office.

There’s an excellent selection of books there.

But I’m only using two right now and I have those at home anyway.

So I’m left in a less comfy chair, with little light and a poorer view.

And yet… according to the gurus with their pretend plane trips, it’s ideal.

There’s nothing to distract you from the mind-numbing nonsense of creating CAW-CAW content, or moving numbers from one spreadsheet to another, or reading your metrics or prompsterbating to CrapGPT.

No cats walking past in the garden, no kids bouncing on the trampoline, no dream afternoon sun to bask in.

If you’re doing office-type work, or creating content like a CAW-CAW, it would be perfect.

But I’m a writer, not a spreadsheet man any more. So I dutifully work through Proverbs, try to come up with stories to match as I gear up to re-launch the Solomon’s Fables project I parked early last year. It feels slow.

My brain feels slow. Slug-like.

I considered writing some poetry instead but the thought of writing poetry in a windowless room made me feel spiritually sick..

And then the holiday club finishes at noon and I pick up Ruth, drive home, have lunch, get out to the cabin and…

Ahhhhhhhhhhh.

My mind expands. My creativity returns. I want to write poetry, my ideas start sparking again, I want to do something new and exciting.

Everything changes!

And I find insight into an important point I’d almost forgotten.

A long time ago, in what feels like a different world before @getpaidwrite was a glint in my eye, I tweeted this:

Lockdowns might be a dim and distant memory, but the echoing effects of that evil are still sounding today.

And we’ve forgotten again the power of place.

We live in the domain of digital distractions. Internet everything.

It sucks.

Especially for writers!

Imagine an alcoholic forced to live 24/7 in a pub with free beer on tap and you have a small taste of how disastrous it is to have writers chained to the internet all day. All the spaces we have, mediated through a screen full of dopamine bombs.

Blurring into one when they need to be seperate.

Truly, every activity needs its own space.

And the spaces that work for focused, dull, deadline-driven work like that of the content creatoooors and CAW-CAWs are not those that work for creative writers.

So give some serious thought to how your shape your space.

Even in my writing cabin, which is relatively large, I’ve been far more productive since I moved my writing chair next to the desk. Now, there’s a large bookcase blocking my view of the rest of the cabin.

If I stretch my hands out, on both sides I hit bookcases. I can see my screen and the sunny garden outside the windows.

This is a writing space. Nothing else.

But it’s also tailored for creativity. As I sit back in the chair, I look beyond the top of my screen and see the wide expanse of sky through the floor to ceiling windows ahead of me. There’s nothing hemming me in. No constraints.

You might think it silly, but this is serious, science-backed stuff.

There’s a whole field of neuro-architecture that shows that you’re more creative when you’re in a high-ceilinged room, and more focused in a constrained one. It’s known as the

“cathedral effect”

Of course, we’re all limited by reality when it comes to designing our workspace. I built a cabin, not a cathedral. I can’t have ten feet of space above me, though next time I build a writing cabin I’m going to try…

…but that’s one reason I sit where I do, where I can see the sky. It’s partly why I recline to write, being lower down opens up the space above me. It’s the best of both worlds for now.

The point is not that you must go and build a cabin (or buy your local cathedral).

The point is to remember that places matter.

To remember that where you write can shape what you write more than you’d think.

So shape it first.

But what if you can’t build a cabin?

Or if, like me, you have to work outside it sometimes. Do you just give up and go home? Do you forget about work for the day?

Say it ain’t so!

I’ve actually been giving this a ton of thought this week because of my situation, stuck in a subpar space.

And because I think best as I write, I started to write.

And I wrote.

And I wrote.

And I ended up with a simple six-page report that draws from and builds on several of the tactics inside my course Speed Daemon Secrets.

Specifically, tactic #1.3 on why an ancient religious practice can help focus your brain in seconds, tactic #2.6 on the one thing NOT to do on a break, tactic #4.6 teaching the weird lighting trick I learned from an asian entrepreneur that makes it almost impossible not to concentrate, tactic #4.8 on how to hack your brain like it’s 1717 and tactic #5.4 the blindingly obvious thing you better already have done.

And then I’ve taken those and developed a six page bonus report that also covers how to create a productive place - even if you don’t have a penny to spend or a single spare square foot of space.

I’ve called it Placeless Places.

The price for this new report?

Absolutely nothing.

Not one single penny.

But because it reveals and builds on several of the Speed Daemon Secrets, it’s only available to buyers of that course. I like to reward my people and although I could totally have charged for this as a separate thing, I don’t like adding costs to existing buyers.

So the report is gratis to anyone who owns Speed Daemon Secrets already and is reading this.

Said buyers just need to head over to the course area here and find the new SDS bonus password. Reply with that password before Saturday midnight UK time and I’ll send you the Placeless places bonus report PDF.

Of course, if you haven’t yet bought Speed Daemon Secrets then you have the time to do that, the same deadline will apply for you.

You can buy Speed Daemon Secrets right here:

And then just fire me an email with the password contained therein and the bonus report is yours for free. So long as you do it before the deadline of Saturday Midnight UK Time.

(Note that the bonus is optimised for reading on a computer, no I’m not faffing around with mobile friendly versions at this stage…)

And until then, may your pipesmoke fill many a productive place,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

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