The Ability to Produce
EPISODE 069: THE ABILITY TO PRODUCE
If the last episode of A Beautiful Anarchy was about the pressure to produce, this one is the (loving) kick in the pants you might need to stop worrying about it and start doing what it takes to widen the margins. I've got 3 ideas about reducing the pressure of time, expectations, and scarcity of ideas; let's talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
If the last episode of A Beautiful Anarchy was about the perceived pressure to produce and get more work, more quickly, into the world, and the way that pressure can paralyze us and, frankly, just make our creative efforts much less fun, then this episode is about the undeniable reality that we do need to create–most of us want to create–more, and doing so without the pressure can be not only tremendously liberating, but it can result in better work.
There are practical ways to reduce the pressure and still remain productive and even prolific, especially when we don't have options in terms of getting the work done. None of those ways, however, are much good in the moment. They aren't tactics for making that looming deadline any easier, but rather strategies for longer-term and more sustainable creation. I'm David duChemin and this is episode 069 of A Beautiful Anarchy, let's talk about it.
Music / Intro
I talked in episode 068 about building in longer lead times and wider margins, but how? I've got 3 ideas for helping reduce the pressure, but these ideas piggy back onto a bigger question that I feel like we need to get out of the way first. Here it is: are you, in the time you do have, committed to–or open to–doing your work without distractions? You can make all kinds of changes to how you approach your work, but there's just no point until you finally accept that you are not the only person in the world who can actually multi-task. I don't mean there are others who can. I mean you can't.
The science is clear on this: we just can't focus on 2 things at once. And so in trying to do more than one thing at once we attention-switch and in every switch we lose some of that attention. We are all so busy so you're not the only one checking text messages, emails, or just looking to see what's going on in your social streams in little moments while you’re working. What could be the harm? Well, the harm is a loss of flow, which is where we perform our best.
I wonder, have you ever audited your attention or focus? Have you ever tracked how often you check your phone in one day or even one hour? Or noticed how willing you are to be pulled away from a conversation by the ping of an incoming text? "It could be important," we think, as if what we're doing here, right now, isn't important. As if being pulled constantly back from the threshold of flow doesn't affect how much we can do, and how well we can do it, in the limited time we all have.
Here's how I picture it in my mind, perhaps this will help. Imagine your day as a blank piece of paper on which you can do today's important work. Or perhaps that paper represents just the 2-hour block in which you can do today's work. Now imagine that for every time you get distracted, you take a hole-punch from your work surface or your pocket and you punch a random hole in the paper. In late 2019, a global tech company called Asurion did research showing the average American picked up their phones 96 times in a day. So if you’re average, that's almost 100 holes in your piece of paper, and that's if your phone is your only distraction and I know it's probably not. And those 100 holes aren't all lumped up at the bottom, either, so you've at least got, you know, half a page of useful paper on which to do your work. They're all over the place, and what’s left of your paper is basically useless for anything more than little bite-sized bits of anything but your best work, because deep work just doesn't happen in whatever little space remains around your tattered focus and time.
You can't address a lack of time separately from a lack of focus. It just doesn't work that way. We only have so much time, and if you can make more of that time, reclaim it by refusing to punch it full of holes, you'll have more to work with.
I'm willing to bet that for many of you, this change alone - by which I mean proactively changing your relationship to distractions - could result in dramatic changes in your ability to get your work done. More work and better work. The 3 ideas I want to offer up for your consideration won't be nearly as helpful to you if you're not willing to aggressively clean up your attention and focus. But if you can do that, then starting sooner, starting uglier, and the twin practices of stockpiling and staggering will help reduce three of the biggest pressures we face in getting work done.
Starting Sooner is an effort to lower the pressure of time. The more we compress the timelines in which we have to work, and reduce the distance between starting and finishing our work, the greater the buildup of pressure, unless you also take out some of the work to be done, which is usually not an option. It'll always be a temptation to thin-out the work a little when the deadline starts getting close, and if not that then certainly to allow other trade-offs in our work that come from less time to explore, take detours, and allow for the incubation of ideas. This is one reason start-lines are at least as important to me as deadlines. If the idea of start-lines is a new one to you, consider going back to the archives and finding episode 36, The Problem with Deadlines. A deadline without a start-line is a recipe for procrastination and mounting pressure as every day you put off starting your project forces that project into greater compression, or of course the risk of missed deadlines. Fine if your work doesn't have anywhere to be, lousy if you do want or need to ship it and get it into the world.
Practically speaking, giving yourself a bigger buffer by starting sooner means you've got more time for screwing around and engaging in the playful kind of work that often makes the final thing you're making really special, something bigger than your initial, and sometimes kind of limited vision for a thing. I have found longer lead times just to mess around with outlines and prototypes and to let the project be a little uglier for longer has always paid off and made the next stage of whatever I'm working on, much easier.
The next idea is Starting Uglier, which is a lowering of the pressure of expectations, specifically the expectation that the beginning of our work should look better than it does at this stage, that it ought to look much more in the beginning like the thing we hope it will be at the end, and again, it just doesn't work like that. Starting Ugly is beginning sooner but with lower expectations and a willingness to let the work guide us, and surprise us. Starting Ugly is about giving that perfectionist within you the permission (or the mandate) to loosen their grip on the whole thing, to entertain bad or partly-formed ideas, and to be willing to take the scenic route. It's about recognizing not only that things can start messy, but that they must. But you're not alone if this sounds easier than it is. Most of us have a lifetime of believing that making what is excellent or meaningful is synonymous with making something perfect. And we're trained to evaluate the beginning of something as either good or bad, on-track or disastrously heading off the rails long before we have any idea of it's real quality or trajectory. The first dozen steps in a journey of thousands can't possibly give you any real sense of where you're heading, and if they can't do that, then they also can't be judged relative to your expectations. Not yet they cant. So lighten up. Embrace the ugly beginnings. And if you can do that and start ugly sooner, the pressures of expectation and time will begin to ease off.
There's one more pressure I want to talk about and I think it's particular to creators, artists, and makers, and I include in that anyone that innovates in any field. That's the pressure we feel over the scarcity of ideas, and I mention it here because it's what makes my own work, well, work. When my work gets really tough is when I lack an idea. What do I write about, what do I photograph? What's my next project? The pressure I feel when I'm facing a lack of ideas can be paralyzing. Once I've got an idea I know how to bash it around, dismantle it, and push it back together in new forms. I'm comfortable with how ugly it can be and with how long it might take to show some promise. But the blank page, with no ideas waiting in the wings? Those are my worst days. I feel lost, or in my own version of the doldrums. The doldrums is a nautical term for a belt of ocean around the equator known for windless waters, and the word itself has come to mean stagnation and inactivity. To avoid my own doldrums, and the pressure caused by a scarcity of ideas, I use the twin strategies of stockpiling and staggering.
Stockpiling is just keeping a reserve of ideas on the back-burner. I use notebooks and swipe files and the Evernote app for this, always writing down questions and ideas to explore later, and never kidding myself, when a fragment of an idea does comes that I'll either remember it later, or that if it seems like a bad or incomplete idea now, it won't be worth something later when I have more of the pieces. If creativity is connecting dots, stockpiling dots, in all their many forms, gives me a ready source of ideas when they seem to otherwise have vanished, or the one I'm working on now needs a break for a while. Stockpiling is nothing more than paying attention and being willing to capture those fleeting thoughts as raw materials for later. Staggering seems to come out of stockpiling. As those random ideas accumulate, assuming you revisit them now and then, they combine, and the dots themselves suggest connections and new, slightly more developed ideas. Where once you had just a what if? or a curiosity, and you wrote it down, now you've got an inkling. Maybe something you wrote down in one sentence that kind of trailed off into nothing, now gets a full paragraph and some bullet points, either on paper or in your head, and you begin to make some sketches. You noodle around with some chords or a colour study. You're not really starting anything, that would be too much pressure, but you're also not not-starting. You're staggering. You're putting, to use my metaphor from episode 065, more irons in the fire.
In a creative pattern that is defined by hard starts and hard stops, entertaining only one project at a time, the challenge when that hard stop does come, is in the anti-climax. The feeling of, well now what? For many of us, certainly for me, this is that band of windless weather and the sails hang limp, which should probably be the last time I use those words in this podcast. For me the antidote to the doldrums has most effectively been always having a couple of ideas in various forms of development, sitting there in various forms of incompleteness, but with enough there to engage my curiosity and encourage further exploration. And if I've done it right, and I often don't, there is no question at the moment one project finishes as to what the next one might be, because it's already started, several projects having been staggered rather than waiting for one to finish before looking for something new.
There are pressures enough in the creative life to make us all feel a little flattened at times. I've found the pressures of time, expectations, and the scarcity of workable and interesting ideas to be among the most challenging. Being more honest about my willingness to get distracted, and being more willing to do something about it, has helped. Once you've got fewer holes in that paper, then starting sooner, starting uglier, stockpiling and staggering, might help you lean into your work without having to hit the purge valve so often.
And if these ideas are helpful to you then I'd be cheating you if I didn't remind you that my book, Start Ugly, the Unexpected Path to Everyday Creativity, can be found at StartUglyBook.com in various formats and I'd be thrilled if it made your own everyday creative life a little easier. While you're there, scroll to the bottom of the page and let me send you On The Make. This podcast is published 3 times a month, and in the week that it takes a break I send out something like an emailed version of this podcast, a creative kick in the pants sent with love your inbox. All you have to do is tell me where to send it.
Thanks so much for being part of this with me. If A Beautiful Anarchy is meaningful to you I'd be so grateful if you told others about it, and if you ever want to tell me, you can always get me at talkback@abeautifulanarchy.com. Thanks again for being here, now go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0