No Dikkering Around

For writers, there’s the Morning Pages exercise, a great practice for clearing out the gunk and getting words on the page. For performers, there are open mics, a great practice for getting better at talking to an audience. For all of us, there’s the RWG Method, a great way to mine your brain to generate material whether you’re a writer …

This is the weekly post where we get on the accountability bandwagon and watch our productivity skyrocket. It’s simple. We use the most powerful tools in the creative shed: social pressure. Reply in the comments and let us know what you got done this week. And let us know your goals for next week too. Do that again the next week. Then join the monthly accountability Zoom meetings to talk through your progress. And then watch yourself get a lot more done. Finish your book. Write your act.

There were so many cool things about The Matrix, one of the best, most fun movies ever made. One cool thing in particular stuck with me, and that was the ability of the characters in the Matrix to download skills and knowledge into their brains like downloading software into a computer. When Neo downloads Kung Fu and says, “I know kung fu.” When Trinity requests pilot training for a particular model helicopter and it downloads into her brain in the few seconds it takes to walk to the helicopter.

This is the weekly post where we show up to share what we got done in the week. Here’s where we get instant accountability and amp up our productivity. Reply below to let everyone know what you got done—that’s how this works. Get ready for a lot of process talk… My two areas of creative focus this week were the Patrick Stoodle’s Completely Awesome Army of Killer Robots screenplay and the Nothing Civil About It satirical novel.

Joe Pickett used to get up early on Tuesday mornings and deliver the print edition of The Onion newspaper around Madison, Wisconsin. But his passion lay in pranks. With his friend and cohort Nick Prueher, he developed his pranking skills over the years, doing things like disguising himself for driver’s license photos, putting up a booth on campus where st…

Time just keeps rolling. Why won’t it stop!? Here I list what I managed to get done in the last week, and you do the same. This keeps us accountable. It’s a great way to achieve super-productivity. Jump on the bandwagon and be a part of the magic. I decided to throw out yet more chapters of Nothing Civil About It because I finally cracked the tone I’ve been searching for. All it took was killing one character, and everything fell into place.

I met with Marc Warzecha from the Sketch School last night to kick-off a 4-week course, “Turning Headlines into Comedy.” Tam-a-Gram joined us. As did about two hundred other people looking to bone up their satire writing. Best part: we had the foresight to record it, and here’s the video.

Hello! This week I finally got into the groove on my new schedule, which I posted about a month ago. And I’m pleased to report that it’s mostly working. The best thing about the schedule is that it gives me the freedom to flake on things, which really works for me. It’s set up like this: My Reminders app sends me notifications when I’m supposed to be working on a particular project at a certain hour of the day, like an alarm.

Thanks for being a paid subscriber to No Dikkering Around. I appreciate that you’re here, because that means to me that you’re serious about mastering the craft of comedy and entertainment. To that end, I have a great tool to offer you… Have you ever been frustrated trying to write comedy with AI’s help? It’s tone deaf and d… Keep reading with a 7-day free trial Subscribe to No Dikkering Around to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Two of the most powerful drivers of productivity are peer pressure and accountability. These Weekly Accountability Posts give you both. Take advantage! I show up every week here to share what I got done in the past week, and I encourage you to do the same. Cracked the story and tone for one of my novels in progress (Nothing Civil About It), wrote a bunch of outline notes, scrapped the chapters I’d written previously, and wrote a preface. All of that, messy as it is, is below.