The September Accountability Society: Week 1 - "Then it's no failure".

A sticky note on the wall of my study bears the message "Anything can be fixed, but if you do nothing then nothing will be fixed." This used to be stuck to my monitor at a former workplace; a reminder that the task I am avoiding will only continue to be difficult to finish the longer I put it off. 

In this moment, I want to be able to direct you to the completed project from last week, but despite eating into two days of this week's work, it still hasn't quite come together. I have decided to post it online nonetheless, and leave it as a work-in-progress. It is called Pause, and you can view it here.

Daniel Green and the September Accountability Society

In 2012 I took part in Weeklybeats, a project where participants uploaded one new piece of music a week for 52 weeks. While the project's founders and participants are largely made up of members of the Chipmusic community, I would say I'm casual producer of music at best. This said, I've taken part in every edition of Weeklybeats as it returned every two years, even managing to complete the full 52-week cycle in 2018. If you're interested, you can find this music here.

In years where my artistic practice has slowed, I enjoyed being part of Weeklybeats as an exercise in just doing things. It was an easy way to maintain a creative output with an externally-imposed and inflexible deadline. If your track wasn't uploaded by the end of the week, the project just moved on without you*, and you had to start on next week's piece.

At some point during one of the years Weeklybeats wasn't running, my partner suggested to me that I embark on some sort of other weekly project as a way of maintaining creative momentum. While I completely agreed with this in principle, I knew that my problem with self-imposed deadlines is that I could always just ignore it. There was no external website with a countdown timer to work towards, and if no one knew I was even doing this who was there to hold me to account for my inaction. So what was the point?

Of course, having seen many friends and people I respect undertake similar "do x for y period of time" projects over the years, it's taken me this long to realise the answer to my problem is just to tell people you are doing it. So here we are. K., you were totally right. Again.