How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?
Originally published at Life, by John on February 22, 2015
Willpower Management, Creative Energy, and Productivity Morale
I think people obsessed with productivity are often the least productive. We’re all searching for some creative crutch to regain (or maintain) control.
Productivity scares me as a topic. It's this ethereal, immeasurable thing that we all aspire to do more of without fully comprehending what it is. We can measure outcomes of productivity (most simply, how much we produce) but not productivity itself. When we're doing it, we feel it, even if we haven’t checked a specific item off a list. We have a sense of satisfaction at the end of each day. When we're not doing it, we sense the fatigue. Sometimes we are doing it, and have resigned ourselves to the fact that being highly fatigued is a part of being highly productive.
Then again, haven't we all seen those people who go to sleep satisfied and feeling accomplished, but in our eyes they've accomplished nothing at all? Then we second-guess our own habits, wondering if we really are getting things done or if we're just psyching ourselves out. I'm going to show some of my personal implementations of these thoughts next week, but I wanted to write this post while these topics were VERY fresh on my mind.
I've found that two things tend to be most true when it comes to my high intuitive/creative friends and their projects and goals.
1.) They feel productive in the wrong way.
They're productive, and know they're highly productive, but feel like their 'real goals' or objectives get further and further away from becoming a reality.
This could be an entertainment project like a film, a book project, or video game, or it could be personal aspirations for emotional success like finding a spouse, mastering a a skill, or achieving new health goals.
2.) They don't feel productive at all.
This might be true, it might not. They feel like they're busy, they fill their days and don't have enough time to actually move things forward, personally or professionally. Maybe they don't even want to move forward, they just want to catch up. It's a weird cosmic void that they live in of self-loathing and then helplessness against the prevailing currents of life.
The snowball effect goes both ways. Winding up productivity and winding down productivity not only change the temperature of your professional and personal ambitions, they adjust the thermostat.
What works for me.
I don't have productivity solutions. My productive life is much like a slinky. Moment by moment, I am starting new projects, reopening old projects, and abandoning projects. I may have a ton of momentum, but I have to transfer that momentum into the next project or the slinky stops.
I don't have an employer. I have clients for my small production company, and I do the occasional freelance gig outside the scope of what my business offers, and I try to stay always outside my comfort zone with new projects that stretch my boundaries.
As a result, I don't have a boss to be accountable to. I don't work certain hours. I am responsible for 100% of my productivity, and more importantly, 100% of my 'productivity morale'. This means that my day is completely at my mercy, and simultaneously, my morale is completely at the mercy of my day. Sometimes I have felt most productive on days where I was doing nothing that produced real dollars or cents- and yet creative satisfaction is worth more than gold to people in our industry.
Here are a few things I've learned as a result.
#1. Momentum is Rare and Sacred
Once you have productive momentum, guard it with your life. It will run out, don't expect it to be eternal. But it is something you should expect to come and go at a predictable rhythm. Don't try to keep it going forever, or beat yourself up if it dies, but definitely understand that each 'momentum' cycle can be stoked and maintained, so that it lives longer each time you catch it. Keeping momentum isn't about making sure every single day is filled with wall-to-wall exhaustive productivity. It's about making sure that once you catch a feeling of productivity, you don't go celebrate; instead, plug in just as much effort as the day before. Don't burn yourself out, but go do it again. Repeat the productive process. You can celebrate once the 'harvest season' is over. Which brings me to my next point.
#2. Know your Seasons.
Maybe this isn't as true for a nine to five situation. But for freelancers and creatives, it's really important that though you need to do work every day, the TYPE of work you need to do is going to change a lot. And for some of us, the season is very different and takes a very different type of energy. For me, certain 'seasons' naturally draw and feed me energy in a perpetual loop. I could do creative meetings 'blowing up' potential projects all day long. Spinning up new ideas with new characters, challenges, markets, etc, are fantastic. And live events. Working through the emotional arcs of a live event is a blast. I could do it day after day. Production budgets? Accounting? Invoicing clients? Navigating terms of a deal? I find myself drained for days after just one day focused on budgets. This radically reduces my 'productivity morale'. I feel like I accomplished little in comparison to the amount of energy it took, and I have no energy leftover to do the things that I normally love doing. My productivity morale is at an all time low, if I'm not careful.
What does this mean? It means I need to anticipate the way I'm going to spend my emotional energy on certain projects. Ironically, it means I need to 'budget' my creative energy, and make sure that I don't do budget work at the beginning of the week before needing to do a lot of other high energy projects. Instead, projects that drain my 'productivity morale' should be planned near intense play time.
Tip: Make a list of the types of work you do, then 'rank them' based on how much 'productivity morale' they leave you with after you're done, and how much 'creative energy' they take to complete. Projects that take a great deal of creative energy but leave you with low productivity morale, are big scary demons trying to kill your productive life.
#3. Write Everything Down.
Not some fancy schmancy organized list. And I mean it, write everything down. Things you're thinking, things you want to do. Things you HAVE to do. The next immediate action step towards every goal, project, or idea you might have. Your questions. Your answers. Things you never want to do.
Just start writing things everywhere. Because the brain is linear in it's thinking model, 'mind mapping' or just putting things to paper allows your mind to form reality out of abstracts by connecting dots between 'two thoughts at one time'. Paper extends the power of your brain by adding 'RAM' to your computer. By adding newly available, randomly accessible memories to your thinking power. But not only does it make abstracts a reality before your eyes, it allows you to derive abstracts from reality. By writing down ten real problems, your mind can suddenly seek patterns in your problems, and derive an abstract conclusion.
I've explained a thousand times that it's not what you write, it's the simple fact that you are writing everything that makes list making a powerful tool. If you have to process everything into tidy little details first, you probably won't start. Especially if it takes a lot of creative energy to do this. (note: if you gain tons of productive morale from detailed listmaking, you'll enjoy this process more than others; but don't forget the importance of making messy lists too. Those will unlock secrets you don't know you have lurking around in your task lists. Being too tidy can keep your problems from manifesting on paper, which is one of the best areas to tackle them.)
#4. Willpower is Finite
I'm going to do a full list of books to recommend on the topic of productivity. It's a lot shorter than you'd think. There are a handful (five or so) books that are transformative in terms of understanding productivity and fully utilizing your energy. Books filled with tools to transform every aspect of your being into productivity perfection. Unfortunately, with these, you're fighting an uphill battle. Because most of them involve complex systems that require energy and willpower to integrate, on top of requiring will power and energy to complete tasks within those systems.
But a book that forever transformed my understanding of what Willpower is, where it comes from, and how to manage it, is called (wait for it!) Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. The book is far more than you'd expect from a science writer and psychologist, and I promise you won't regret reading it.
#5. Life is a Highway
Thinking of your life as a highway with multiple lanes is important. You can be on any lane at almost any time... but you can't be on two lanes at the same time. If you're working on one project, you're not working on another.
Yes, you can manage multiple projects. But you can't do multiple projects. In fact, you really can't even do one project. You can only do tasks- drive a mile- on any given project at any given time. And it's important to make sure you finish the mile on one task before switching lanes. I have tried to constantly switch lanes on my projects, but much like traffic, it's the illusion that other lanes are going faster. Sure enough, traffic can stop in any lane, and you may need to switch to another to get out of a traffic jam. But when all lanes are stalled, just stay with it until you break through. Or pull off and get lunch. Traffic will be flowing again when you get back on the highway.
Just know how far you're going today, and don't take the exit until you've driven far enough to meet your goals. If you don't, you'll go to bed with the 'unfinished lane' in your head, which will slowly whittle away from your productive morale, and you'll start the next day depleted of the creative energy you need to get back on the highway. Leave yourself in a place where your productive morale grows while you recover, instead of being drained.