As my laptop is currently in a state of non-animation, I bring you MS Paint-ables! I hope you enjoy this MS Paint monstrosity in lieu of the normal illustrations while I continue to come to terms with the idea of replacing my no-longer-trusty computer friend.
Office Survival Tip: Doodling
Part of office life is dealing with long, intermittent bouts of tedium. These can arise in the forms of meetings, telecoms, or waiting after hours for your boss/customer/supplier to call/email/fax you something of dubious importance. There are several ways to deal with these bouts of mind-famine. Sorting paperclips, shuffling papers, doodling, and playing Klondike on your BlackBerry are all viable options. Or you can focus on the feeling of your soul slowly being sucked dry by your speckled beige cubicle walls. Out of all of these enthralling options my favorite is doodling.
The best part about doodling is that you don’t have to be particularly skilled to do it. It’s like the drawing equivalent of dancing in front of your closet mirror in your underwear, only you can do it during meetings. How liberating! Just kind of let your mind go and let your pen do what it wants. If it only wants to do rudimentary squiggles at first, it’s cool, you can pass them off as snakes or worms. Stick with it! Soon enough you’ll progress to wonky circles and lopsided stars. Keep moving forward, and eventually, if you’re lucky, anthropomorphic sharks.
Your boss may not appreciate your new-found meeting hobby, but don’t let it get you down. True genius is rarely fully realized at the time of its creation. If you still feel the need to justify your budding talent to your boss, I think I heard a statistic once that Doodlers actually pay more attention when they’re allowed to doodle freely. As a Doodler I feel this statistic may be complete horse-crap, but I guess I do pay a lot more attention to the paper in front of me when I’m doodling on it. So throw it out there and say the study was backed up by lots of scientific research and published in an academic journal. I’m sure it probably was.
Who knows, maybe your PowerPoint slide doodles will somehow stir your creative muse and inspire you to start blogging or something.
sharkables 
I have a whole stack of doodles on my desk. I don’t let anyone touch them.
If doodling were a job, it would definitely be my pick!
I’m not surprised, it seems like you would be a preeetty accomplished doodler from your orc post alone
Thanks! I’ve had years of practice, secretly doodling while pretending to listen during class…
I am not a good artist but I do have something I do during those moments of tedium…it’s called writing my next post!
Productive time-killing is probably the best time killing… I’ll think about that while doodling on today’s staff meeting agenda
Ok, I take the blame. Although… I actually think the sub-standard “MS Paint monstrosity” illustrates the doodle theme quite poignantly.
A friend of mine published a post about doodling a while ago in which she shows that doodling can also be beneficial to your mental well-being when you don’t work in an office. You can check it out here: http://phytoplanktonic.wordpress.com/2011/03/12/the-doodle-index/
Haha, thanks for so willingly accepting my unnecessary blame, And I liked your friends post! it was a nice breakdown of the many layers of doodling
my desk calendar is full of doodles! Doodles rock!
Yes they do! Wait, you have a desk calendar? Do you actually use it?
Doodling is great! There are a couple of online sites where you can virtually doodle. They’re ScribblerToo and Sketchy. My doodling has mostly changed from physical to photoshopping funny images.
(If you need a laptop suggestion, I got a Samsung back in August. We’re getting along pretty well)
Samsung eh? Can’t say I’ve ever been particularly chummy with one, but I’ll check some out once my mourning period has passed and I’m ready to move on to a new computer.
Hi Cat,Thanks for featuring us! I becmae a designer, so I can doodle all I want 85 LOL, story of my life! :))) Well, if you have a doodlage overload, feel free to come over to our blog and be a guest doodler :-)p.s. I’m not sure if LeO saw your comment about banners. Sure, we’d love to have one. What’s involved?
I love to doodle, I’ve done it ever since I can remember: while talking on the phone, in class and now in my office’s daily meetings.
I work evenings and I used to bring my notebook to keep track of work that needed to be done the “regular” workday ended. But at some point I realized I don’t really need the notebook for that (especially since we now have on online system to keep track of tasks) and there are some points during the meeting where I have no clue what my coworkers are talking about. So I doodle. Mostly shapes, squiggles and patterns.
I do like your doodle, very befitting of the title and topic!
Hey I have a similar little notebook that I bring to all my meetings with the weird expectation that I might need to take notes. Similarly, I dont actually end up writing things and it just gets filled with doodles. But once in awhile I like to throw some words and bullet points in there so it doesn’t look like I’m carrying around a tiny sketchbook.
That’s a cool word! I think it’s interesting that the oo is not prcounnoed ew but ah . It is neat to learn different words and phrases from another country very cool!Where have you two been lately!? I have been enjoying your blog and am looking forward to the next post. It’s been too long! Hope to see a new post soon!
I doodle diagrams on boxes in our warehouse when I have “technical discussions” with customers.
It keeps me from stabbing the ignorant in the eye with my bic.
Haha that’s grea!. Well, your comment’s great, but I suppose avoiding stabbing people in the eye can be pretty great in it’s own way too…