The pursuit of creativity, in five stages

photo credit: Flynnwynn

At times, when pressure mounts and you have to meet impossible deadlines, you set creativity aside and take the easy way out; you revert to clichés, breeziness, and other cheap tricks. After awhile, it becomes a habit and your integrity as a writer wavers. You become a hack. While the exact formula for creativity remains elusive, learning when, where, and how you are in the various stages of the creative process will help you get “in the zone” when you need to, and with practice, bring inspiration within your reach to get you out of that dreaded mediocre rut (or rot).

Read more

How to become the coolest teacher, ever

photo credit: fotologic

My first job, fresh out of college, was a preschool teacher. I didn’t last a month. The class started at 7 a.m. and we had to sing the same nursery songs every day and dance the same Barney and Friends choreography.

Read more

Why your 9 to 5 job is so last century

My grandma thinks I’m mucking around when, at three in the afternoon, I’m still in my pajamas gobbling up her lemon bars, sipping coffee, and telling her I’ve been working all day and need to take a break. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her that, “Yes, I do have a job and I’m not slacking around.” I’m tempted to add that I’m probably working longer hours than most people with traditional 9 to 5 jobs, but that would probably just aggravate her perplexity. (And anyway, by longer hours, I really mean watching videos in YouTube till 4 a.m.).

So I tell her about this wonderful thing called the Internet (well, she’s not so technologically-challenged; she actually uses Skype to talk to her ever-elusive prodigal son), and how I can work from anywhere so long as I have my laptop with me and I can connect to a Wi-Fi. I can work at home, in a park, in a café or restaurant, even a bar at night, or in the beach. The world is virtually my office. “But how do you work?? How do you get paid?” She persists. “Everything is connected now, lola. Everything can be transacted online. Everything I need for work is in my computer” She nods and thinks about this for awhile, shaking her head with how much the world has changed.

I, too, still shake my head once in a while with how much things have changed. I’m particularly awed by how different our minds work today, how it’s evolving with the advent of the internet, in the way we absorb information and link ideas–like a web or a map. If before, the emphasis was on linear, systematic, and standardized thinking (which was what traditional factory and office work required, as well as researching in the library), today, we are leaning to a more abstract kind of thinking, absorbing information from all directions, manipulating them until we form patterns and meaning, and creating ideas that lead to another idea, and another, and another, and further amalgamating and encapsulating, including connections with long past ideas, and so on and so forth, processing almost instantly, millions and millions of bits per second.

I think it’s so cool how we can absorb a myriad of information, interlink them, and try to put order in all the chaos without having to think of ourselves as insane in being able to synthesize seemingly unrelated ideas. Our brains are evolving and there are studies to prove it too! With it, our boring lives and stupid jobs and silly emotions will evolve too. Ooooh. It’s so new age. Here’s a study that suggests human brains are evolving.

Welcome to the nonwork

Congratulations on allowing yourself to browse a site dedicated to less office productivity! By taking that crucial first step in acknowledging the need to kill time and to make time for yourself, you take a bigger leap in leading a life filled with much procrastination and nights out drinking with your buddies.

The Unjob follows the newspeak format created in the dystopian future of 1984. Though not necessarily a word coined in the Orwellian opus, if slacking and having fun were allowed by Big Brother it’d be the most totally boss buzzword in all of Oceania. Totally.

A better way to describe an unjob is to define what it is not: work. With newspeak being the only language in the world that continually grows smaller, an unjob (or a nonwork, perhaps?) is the perfect word to define anything that happens after 5pm and before you wake up to go over your usual morning ritual. Any work that can be considered as being insanely fun and totally boss may also be classified as an unjob, depending on its level of insanely fun-ness and its totally boss gravity.

The Unjob as a blog, therefore, becomes my own personal repository for anything not related to work. Photos, videos and music related to any nonwork can be found at The Unjob, and I highly recommend that you participate in it by commenting and checking out what the Vox neighborhood has to offer.

Salutations dear Blair, Eric Arthur!

x|o
joey.