Product and Process

I have come to the conclusion that I am a product person rather than a process one.  By this I mean that whenever I'm doing an activity that results in a finished object, I tend to be far more excited by the idea of the object, and its being finished, than I am by the steps needed to produce it. 

This is not to say that I do not respect or even enjoy process, particularly if it is process without an obvious end, such as yoga or hiking or puttering around the garden.  Knitting is a tactile pleasure, I find the sound and feel of my fingers on a keyboard rewarding, watching a plant grow is engaging, and so on. 

Yet even in those cases, I tend to find it hard to act without a goal of some sort.  It may be a vague goal, like hiking until I'm tired, or doing yoga for thirty minutes, or recording the day's plant development with my camera, but it's there, nonetheless.  Truely aimless activity is not something I do well.  I get fidgetty and find it hard to keep going except in very, very rare cases where the activity is so purely engaging that I don't think about doing it, I just do it.

Perhaps this is a longwinded way of saying that I find it hard to turn off the calculating part of my brain and just be.  It'd be tempting to blame my years of grad school for this, but I remember all too well being a kid who wanted to rush through projects in order to hold in my sweaty little fist the finished whatever as soon as I could.  I spoiled sewing projects by rushing through the steps.  I grew impatient with ambitious drawings that took forever to complete (your patience hasn't been taxed until you've tried to fill up a huge piece of white paper with tiny little drawings of coins for your illustrated dragon to lie on).  Even now I can't just walk out of the house and wander around; I feel a need to set a destination, or some other limit on the activity so that I know when I am "done."

Perhaps this is also a longwinded way of saying that I'm getting frustrated and tired with my current job.  It is almost entirely process-based, with the added torture of the few goals frequently being shifting ones, or, in the worst cases, meaningless ones (the kind where you spend hours working on a project, only to be told toward the end that the project has been cancelled or changed such that you need to toss all that work).  I need to see tangible evidence of my labors, and it is really hard to come by.  (Then I read this - heh.  Sounds all too familiar - read, especially, the related letters.)

Perhaps too I am rambling away in order to complain about blogging and my current paltry readership.  I know it's not fair to complain, as I'm the one who's been only sporadically committed to this blog of late - and it is my own blog - and I've had trouble figuring out what its current incarnation looks like.  But, for me, the point of blogging has always been to engage with people.  You, dear readers, are my "product" - you are for what I write in order to receive.  Without you, this blog literally has no purpose.  If I want to write for writing's sake, I have a laptop that I can pound on night and day until the cows come home.  What makes a blog different is the promise of interaction. 

So, perhaps, this is in the end a very longwinded way of saying, I miss my readers.  How can I get you back?

Comments

[Pink Cupcake]

I'm still here and reading, although I mainly read through bloglines, but that's because I've kind of been skulking around in the background of the blogosphere for a while now...

[Pilgrim/Heretic]

I never left... and you get 'em back the way you hooked them in the first place, with graceful evocative writing, and commenting elsewhere so people know you're around. (I don't browse around as much as I used to, so I'm usually alerted to new/revived folks by their comments on the other blogs I read.)

[Jill Smith]

I'm still here as well. I'm also a product person: I have started to try to think about blog postings themselves as product, with the interaction being a nice post-product bonus!

I can definitely relate to the endless coins and other mistakes arising from rushing headlong into a project (often a very grandiose project that only revealed how much process it was going to take once I was into it!).

[jo(e)]

Well, I'm another reader who never left.

[jo(e)]

I'm also thinking that in June, when I post a nude photo of you on my blog, that ought to boost your readership some.

[Rana]

*laughing* I'm already contemplating poses, jo(e)!

I'm glad to see all you faithful folks still here. :)

But, truly, my visit counts are WAAAAAAY down. I know that those of you reading via feed aren't counted, but there's a big difference between getting weekly hits in the 100s and weekly hits in the single digits, as is the case now.

So I'm hoping I can slowly climb back out of my self-inflicted pit, but I have to admit to my doubts about being able to do it in the absence of big political rants or impassioned whines about the evils of academia. ;)

[Pronoia]

Kept you in the bloglines, so I'm here when you are. Yay! I'm glad you're coming back.

[beth]

Rana, I've always liked your blog and just haven't been reading much because the updates were sporadic. You're getting me back in your comment-thread by commenting on mine - i.e., by jump-starting the interaction! It's impossible to comment on everybody's blog though - I try to make the rounds and let people know I've been there, but it's hard to do. Blog fatigue is so common; my stats stay up when I manage to post at least twice a week, but they're better the more often I post.

[Cyndy]

Some of us are just lurkers at heart. And if it is any consolation, I have some blogging friends with (relatively) fantastic readership and lots of comments who are still not happy. I'm more of a process person myself, but I agree it is nice to be read once in a while.

[David]

End v. Path? One is lead to curse the demands! The devoted reader has not the benefits of grad school and is not worthy of this assignment.

Exercise is a path to health.

You are much appreciated!

[New Kid on the Hallway]

I kind of over-extended myself with blog-reading and haven't been doing as much recently - but it's always a pleasure to see your posts in Bloglines.

[udge]

Found you via Beth (the VTech posts), and will be returning.

But blogging for an audience is not the True Path ;-)

[Rana]

*laughs*

No, but it's nice to have companions on the journey. ;)