On Productivity

Category

Risk Tolerance in the Creative Life

The past two years of not writing very well have been instructive. I would rather they had been instructive and productive, but such is life, because what they’ve been instructive about is why they haven’t been productive. One major reason has to do with uncertainty. Writing novels is an inherently uncertain activity. Both in the day-to-day—I can plan out what a desk job day will look like, but dead ends and writer’s block can play havoc with an author’s best laid plans—and...

Frictionless routines

I’m obsessed with morning routines. I constantly tweak my morning (and evening) routines, with the goal of doing them without thinking. I want to get all of the miscellany out of the way so that I can get to mentally demanding tasks after having made as few decisions possible. That leaves me with more energy to write books. I’ve found that the key is to make the routine frictionless, especially in the morning. My willpower is always low in the morning, so I’m prone to slacking off rather...

My morning routine

For me to be productive, I find it’s important to have a strong morning routine, and to never break it. The less decisions I have to make early in the day, the more cognitively rested I am for the important work (in my case, writing) I want to do after I’m up and moving. The reason for this is that humans are cognitive misers. A simple way to explain this: Imagine that the number of decisions you can make in a day is finite. Those decisions are your mana...

A lifestyle designed for productivity

I’ve been thinking about procrastination a lot lately, mostly because I’ve been doing so much of it. Okay, maybe that’s not fair—it’s not that I’ve been procrastinating, I just accidentally constructed my life to constantly generate interruptions in my writing. Whoops. It turns out that being a wandering author isn’t the best thing for one’s productivity, at least for me. Seeing my friends (and staying for cheap) is great, but every time I get into a groove, something shakes me out of...

Don’t have enough time

I don’t have enough time. There aren’t enough hours in the day. There’s too much to do, not enough time to do it. I often say phrases like these. Maybe you do too. There’s something important you should know about them. They’re a lie. Every single one of them. It’s not that there’s not enough time. For most of us, there’s plenty of time. It’s that we haven’t made certain things a priority. At RandomC, people often tell me I need to watch this or...

Goals & expectations

One of the challenges of my new private accountability system is that it gives me concrete goals. When I’m on track or ahead of the game, it’s great – I’m more productive when there’s some pressure, but not too much pressure. But when I get behind… My muse I don’t do creative work well under pressure. The key, then, is to give myself plenty of time and get ahead of the game, because then I’ll fly along. But with a full-time job, side work,...

Private accountability

In my ongoing battle for productivity, let me tell you about my latest weapon. A few months ago, I told you about Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret about not breaking the chain. After that I began publicly tracking how long my “chains” were, but I stopped doing that a while ago. Why? Because even though I’m not published yet, and am therefore not a professional, I prefer to act like I’m one, and I feel that constantly talking about how much I am (or...

The root of procrastination

Most people have a procrastination problem. I know I do. How do we move past our tendency to procrastinate? Do we push through, expending willpower to force ourselves to get started? No. Willpower is finite, and the more we expend to just get started, the less we’ll have for the task in question. It’s better to search out the root cause and attend to that rather than the symptoms. So what’s the root cause of procrastination? It’s fear. Fear of failure, fear of...

The fear of doing nothing

“Work finally begins when the fear of doing nothing exceeds the fear of doing it badly.” – Alain de Botton I will not be the first person to tell you that writers are inveterate procrastinators. Writing is a mentally taxing endeavor, and getting started is often the most difficult part. But here’s how I know I’m a writer, and likely always will be – I get antsy when I don’t write. I write every day because that’s the best way I know...

Combo counter update – It’s going well, it’s going not so well

For those of you who recall my Don’t break the chain post, here’s an update: Combo counter: Editing chain, 10 days. Writing chain, 0 days. So in some ways it’s going well, and some ways not so much. On the one hand I’ve been keeping up with the editing, and it’s helping me make some serious progress through this draft. On the other, I’ve been completely falling down on writing new content, and my failing has gotten so consistent that...