Not a front for a secret organization.
Written by Rob Schultz (human).
On a good night, Set List at the Pack draws a fairly diverse crowd. In terms of age, we regularly host comedians in their 20s as well as in their 60s. And one thing both of those age groups have in common is that they find this sort of thing completely baffling:
Set List at the Pack is a completely improvised stand-up show that happens every Thursday night at 10:00, at the Pack Theater in Los Angeles, CA.
I’ve noticed days sneaking by where I get nothing done. Nothing at all! And it’s not that I have nothing to do. In fact, I decided to see what exactly I have going on at the moment, and I made a big weird chart that keeps growing new tentacles whenever I leave it alone for a few minutes.
I think about this panel all the time.
I suspect that the real problem is that I’m spoiled for choice and I’ve started playing the Netflix game with my tasks. You know the one. It’s the game where you spend a show or movie’s-worth of time just browsing around the menu instead of picking something? It’s because you know you can’t do or watch everything you want to watch and do, so now you’ve added the task of ‘look at and rank everything.’
I did the same thing in school – I don’t want to work on the project for the fun class because I’ll feel guilty about neglecting the boring class, but I don’t want to work on the project for the boring class because it’s boring.
The thing is, you’ve only got time to do one or two or three things in a day anyhow, so you can’t spend one of your actions on wondering what you should do with your turn. You need to spend your time chopping the arms off of that monster!
And what do you mean you only get to chop off two or three tentacles a day? Over a year that’s hundreds! The monster doesn’t stand a chance!
Anyway, today I made my cuts by releasing a new zine, mailing it out to my subscribers, and adding a discount reprint of issue two to the shop!
and let’s leave last year far behind.
This is my favorite part of World of Tomorrow part 2.
I saw this thing online last year where some guy kept track of how he spent every hour of 2016. So I gave it a try.
I expected that keeping track would make me more accountable to my time. It did not. I did find it helpful to see what I was doing on a given day, and it's both more convenient and less cumbersome than leafing through a diary to see what I was up to. Still, my logging tapered off until I gave up sometime in October for no reason.
Click to view the thing in the thing with the thing!
My version of the chart also includes notes on what TV show or movie or game or book I was consuming, or what project or job I was working on. Your version is just a broad strokes of my year. Each color represents a kind of activity. To wit: