Sometimes I think we expect improv to work differently. We want exercises that produce better scenes right away. If an exercise is awkward or hard the first time we try it, sometimes the instinct is to throw it away. We try a new opening and it sucks. It feels stilted and forced. We are In Our Head. It’s not Organic. We give up, or move on to something that feels right, right away. This is a mistake.

The first time I try a chord on the guitar, it may physically hurt. It feels awkward. My fingers can’t make that shape. And if they can make that shape, I might take an inordinate amount of time to switch from that chord to any other. So should I give up? Should I say, “G7 chords don’t work for me. I only play E and D chords.” Of course not.

And neither should we as improvisors. We should be willing to practice new exercises many times before we even judge it to be useful. And we should recognize that we may have to do it again and again across many practice sessions, before the skill becomes second nature. Eventually it gets into our body and becomes a process that we do subconsciously. It will then be as easy as saying a phrase or singing a melody, or playing a D chord.

You might ask, why am I here? I’m here to get better. I feel out of shape as a performer. As an actor, I never really nailed down any particular process. I’d get a script, memorize it, go to rehearsal, try to absorb the blocking and direction, and try to figure out the best way to say my lines. It’s not a great process and it doesn’t seem to take advantage of all that early training which encouraged me to work off my partner. So the first priority was to find a studio, go back to class and figure out a process–a real process that starts with a script and ends with a full, dynamic, grounded and improvisational performance.

I’m in my third class at Black Box Acting Studio and I feel like I’m on my way to that goal. In the first two classes, they use exercises that are drawn from Meisner training, mostly repetition and independent activity exercises. In the next level, they bring in viewpoints and punctuation walks. Their process is a hybrid of things. It’s good practice and I feel a lot closer to that goal of a repeatable process.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve gradually fallen out of shape. I’m still well below my New York average weight, but I had lost enough ground, that I decided I had to do something about it. I’m back on a diet that is similar to the one I used a long time ago, when I first exercised seriously in my 20s. And I’m back in the gym. I’m reading the Four Hour Body by Tim Ferris and taking ideas from there. For instance, yesterday was my first day doing kettlebell swings, an exercise he recommends.

I’m doing other things too. I completed a few classes at the Annoyance, and now I’m in writing classes at Second City. I’m also taking guitar classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music. This upcoming year, I’m thinking as my DIY MFA project. My longer term plan is to start focusing on getting cast in some plays by the summer or fall. I want to get through one more class at Black Box and find a good scene study class that I can use to practice my process.

As usual I’m having trouble fitting everything in. I want to work on everything at once. I realize this is not the optimal way to do it. Eventually, I might narrow things down to writing or acting or improv again and focus my full force on that for a few years. But for the next 3-6 months, I’m going to continue down this path. It gets overwhelming if I try to think too many moves ahead. I want to keep focusing on what is the very next step and put my energy there. I’m going to trust that it will take me somewhere interesting.

I first started thinking about this because of Checklist Manifesto, a book by Atul Gawande. I have not read the book yet, but I’ve heard several interviews of him. The book is about how checklists for complicated procedures help minimize mistakes and save lives. He is a surgeon and he has seen how a simple checklist for a surgical procedure can dramatically reduce the number of complications. I don’t do anything as grave as surgery, but there are a lot of things I want to accomplish each day. I thought checklists might help and started using them.

My first checklist was a weekly one. Initially, I drew up a list of daily tasks. I realized quickly that I didn’t have enough time each day to do all these things. So I cut the list of daily activities to a minimum. However, there were plenty of other things I wanted to do, some only once a week, others several times a week. So I added those to my weekly checklist too. For example, I want to practice guitar every day, so there are seven boxes next to it on the list. Other items may have only one box next to it, like doing payroll for my mother’s home health care workers which I do every Monday. I have four boxes next to exercise. I don’t care which days I work out, as long as I work out three or four times during the week. My final task for each week is to review, edit and print my checklist for the next week.

After using that checklist for a month or so, I decided that I needed a separate checklist for my podcast. This is what I’d call a procedural checklist. It contains a series of steps for a single task or project. Usually the tasks should be completed in a particular order. The checklist for my podcast has been evolving over the past few episodes and it now has 28 steps, from the first email to ask someone if they will do the podcast, to backing up all the audio files when I’m done.

It may seem like I’m creating a lot of work for myself, but I think it’s really the opposite. I’ve found that if I do some preparation before the interview, the interview will go much more smoothly than if I wing it. I’ve also found that if I conduct the interview well, the editing goes much better and takes less time. Finally, by codifying the steps for promoting it, I get that part done quickly and painlessly.

Of the two types of checklists, the weekly “To Do” list and the procedural list, I think the latter is more effective and worthwhile. I don’t think there has been a single week where I have accomplished every task on my weekly checklist. Perhaps I have accomplished more than I would have otherwise. But I think checklists really begin to shine when you use them to walk you through a process you do over and over again. I am really happy with the result. A checklist helps me eliminate mistakes, keeps me focused on only the task I’m currently doing, and raises the quality of my work overall. It also provides me with a method to review my work and improve every time I do a podcast, by translating what I learn into new steps.

I think this might have a profound impact on my teaching in the future. I’ve always had a plan for my classes. Sometimes there is a curriculum to follow. Sometimes I come in with a number of options. Sometimes I figure out what I’m going to do on the way to class or drastically change course in the middle. I’m sure there are things I have learned when teaching something that are now long gone from my memory. In the future, I’m going to write out my plans more carefully, probably with branches and options, but definitely with steps. Each time I come back to a particular lesson plan, it will contain within the procedure many of the nuggets I’ve learned from the previous attempts to teach that lesson plan.

Over the last few days, I’ve taken what I’ve learned from the podcast checklist and tried to apply it to other things. I have a short procedure to go through when I sit down to practice my guitar. I’m working on some lesson plans for practicing improv by myself. I even came up with a procedure to write blog entries. This is the first attempt to follow that procedure and it seems to have been beneficial, keeping me focused and on track and producing a post which I hope is more useful than if I used my previous method: stare at a blank page, type stuff and edit until I have something I’m not embarrassed to publish. I’m convinced that using checklists would be beneficial for other creative uses like rehearsal procedures, show checklists, video projects, etc.

A checklist app for the iPhone and iPod Touch

I downloaded a checklist app for my iPod Touch. It is quite useful. It’s called Quick Checklists. This is a great app for those shorter lists that you might use often, like writing a blog post or working out at the gym. You can create a template for a list and easily make changes to it on the fly, or change the template for future use. It’s perfect for my purposes. I’ll keep my paper checklists for more involved projects, but for day to day stuff, this app is great.

My checklist for blogging

For those of you interested in my blog checklist, here it is (some of these only apply to WordPress blogs):

• Choose a topic
• Research via the web, books, talking to others on the subject, etc.
• Brainstorm thesis or basic point of the post
• Write outline
• Write post
• Take a break
• Edit for clarity
• Read aloud
• Edit for readability
• Title it
• Add links
• Find image or media to accompany it
• Insert the “more” code
• Choose excerpt
• Add tags and category designations
• Publish
• Plug it on Twitter, Facebook, etc

In the mean time, I’ve been working on the IRC Improv Wiki. I wanted to get a few more pages going. I realized last week that there were no articles on Tina Fey, Jack McBrayer and Inside Vladimir. I have written a cursory entry for each and hope I can get some other people to chip in and expand them.

There is also a lot of stuff going on which is taking a higher priority right now. In the last couple of weeks, we have lost some of our staff that helps us take care of my mom, so we have been busy finding and training new people. That is somewhat stressful. Our longest standing worker gave notice two weeks ago. Today was her last day. She worked first shift with me and did a terrific job with my mom. It made things much easier for me to have her working first shift. We have found a good replacement, but it will take time getting her up to speed. I will be spending more time here at my mom’s in the interim, and that may translate into some more posts since I do most of my writing here.

I have been running again for the last couple of months, and I’m ready for some 5K races. As soon as the weather warms up a little bit, I’ll be out running different events on the weekend. I hope to run a dozen or more races this summer including some 10Ks and perhaps even a half marathon. Also, I picked up guitar last fall and I’ve been practicing a few times a week. I started a group class with the park district in Peoria. My goals with guitar are simply to keep it up, learn as many useful chords as I can so I can play a few songs. Both of these things are competing with my desire to write more. However, next week I will likely be able to complete a few of the posts I’ve been working on.

For instance, I have long wanted to be a runner. I have many times started exercise programs and incorporated running or walking into the program. Last winter, when I was working out at the gym I realized that I especially like walking or running for long distances. Once I was on the treadmill, I preferred going for 45 minutes rather than just doing 20 and being done with it. But what I really wanted was to run and walk longer distances outside. I tried a few times to run outdoors in winter and I couldn’t stand it. The cold was simply too much.

Later in the summer, I decided once again to give it a try. This time I was walking and running outside and I was enjoying it, but what really got me hooked I think was when I started using Nike+ with my iPod. To use it, you need a small chip which you put in your shoe (or put inside a little pouch that attaches to your shoelaces). The chip acts like a pedometer, transmitting a signal, presumably whenever you take a step. You have several choices for a receiver to keep track of your progress. iPod Touches and iPhones have an app built into it that you can use to track your runs. You can also buy an attachment for other iPods or you can buy a separate bracelet to track your runs.

The Nike+ system will keep track of your distance, time, and even calories spent. Every time you sync your iPod, your data will be uploaded to the Nike website where you can graphically see your progress, set goals, and participate in challenges with other runners. It does need some calibration, but it’s accurate enough to at least tell you when you are making progress. For me, it’s just the kind of nudge I need to keep going. So far, I’ve run or walked over 200 miles with Nike+ and my goal is to do another 700 – 1000 miles this year with it. In part because of the Nike+ system, this fall I ran my first 5K and 10K races.

Anyway, there are a number of things that I’m working on that I’d like to keep at it, things that if I did every day, I would see significant progress in the next year. I’d like to practice playing guitar each day (a new hobby I took up in the fall). I’d like to keep up better with my online business, making sure to do a few key tasks each day. I’d also like to keep this blog up (I’ll refrain from stating a goal, since I think it will be doomed as soon as I choose to make such a blogging goal public.). There are a few other things I’m sure I’ll want to include.

This brings me to a story I heard today on the radio. It was about some research that indicated that if surgeons followed some simple changes to their procedures, like instituting surgical checklists (similar to the checklists that pilots use when preparing to fly), they would likely have better outcomes and fewer mistakes. It got me thinking that I may want to develop a simple daily and weekly checklist for myself. That’s what I intend to do. I’m going to keep it simple at first, with a minimum of things to do and then slowly add things to it. Perhaps I’ll publish it after I’ve revised it a few times.