Last semester, when trying to revise my portfolio, I did something kind of bonkers; I opened ten little Stickies on my desktop and put one poem in each one. This allowed me to see all the poems at the same time, and as I thought of lines or ideas, move from one to the next.

It seems like a kind of death by multitasking, but I have been doing a similar mass revision today, and it works, I think, better than you would expect. I guess this is a sort of workflow self-hack. I am, always have been, easily distracted. If the distraction can be another form of what needs to get done, all the better.

But I think this technique has, also, to do with my desire to see the bigger picture of the story. If I can persuade myself that the details that need to get cut out of Poem X can go into Poem Y, I have less trouble cutting them.

Things I have done this weekend that were not related to work included reading back issues of Horse and Hound, online. “Research.”