Generating ideas is great, but an idea never fully developed is like owning a car without wheels; it ain’t going anywhere, it’s just taking up space, and it’ll probably piss you off every time you think of it.

I’ve written quite a bit about generating ideas for creative projects. The more ideas you have to choose from, the more likely you are to pick something that is going to be interesting, unique, relevant, or useful.

However, it’s too easy to end up with a pile of ideas and half-started projects….while never actually completing anything.

I’m beginning to believe that having a mountain of unfinished projects is just another form of procrastination. If you’re working on ten things at a time but rarely finishing anything, somehow it’s easier to say ‘well, I can’t get to this right now, I’m just too busy, I have too much going on.’

Why is it so important to develop the completion habit? I have enough reasons for a bulleted list. Here goes:

• Finishing feels good. Just like sex, it’s good to reach the end. When you’ve got projects that never reach their, ahem, climax, you end up frustrated. Much better to finish.
• Building the finishing habit reduces stress. Why? Because you know that the ideas you chose to develop aren’t dead ends or potential time sinks. You know you can finish them, and even if you can’t get to them right away, the knowledge that you eventually will finish them is relaxing.
• Profit. You can’t sell an unfinished product. Nobody is interested in an idea. Why? The idea might be original, but the hard part is actually developing that idea and turning it into a finished product.

How can you develop the completion habit?

I propose that the best way to complete projects is to dig yourself out of the busy trap and allow yourself to focus on just one thing. Single-minded focus leaves no room for excuses. Nothing else can get in your way. Just you and your project. Here are some 0ther tips to help you develop the completion habit:

• Fight your tendency to procrastinate and focus only on one thing. Once you finish that one project, move on to the next one.
• Know what’s worth doing. Focus on that. Ignore the rest. Know that it’s okay to move some ideas and half-completed projects to  the back burner while you’re working on that one main thing.
• Work with the end goal in mind. Visualize your project as you hope it will be.
• Plan the steps required to turn your idea into a finished product.
• Set a deadline. Between now and that deadline, create a series of mini-goals for each step.
• Do a regular review. Be accountable to yourself. Every week (and month, and year, if you’re this ambitious), check in with yourself on the status of your project. Examine your progress. If you’re missing deadlines, figure out why. Expand your time horizon if necessary.
• After you finish, celebrate. Bask in the warm glow of completion, savoring the feeling of satisfaction that comes from a job well done.
• For your next project, remember that warm happy post-completion feeling. During low points, use the memory of that feeling as motivation for finishing.

Yes, ideas need time to germinate and develop. Capturing, generating, and storing ideas is a worthwhile pursuit. But at the same time, you’ve got to develop these ideas into a finished product.

Ideas are as common as plastic. Completed projects are golden.

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Working on projects and goals, it’s really easy to become bogged down in a labyrinth of tasks and actions that aren’t as important as they seem. Some of these tasks are so time-sucking, their value so miniscule, that they aren’t even worth doing.

At the same time, they feel like they’re worth doing because, well, marking shit off the to-do list is a nice feeling. Call it inadvertent procrastination.

Completing these tasks provides a sense of accomplishment, a temporary boost in morale, even though its completion doesn’t have any bearing on the overall goal. This is like doing the wrong thing really well.

These tasks can be identified by asking the following question:

Does This Matter?

Let’s examine this phrase. “This” refers to any task, job, activity or step that ends up on your to-do list. “Matter” is a question of value: does the activity have any actual relationship to or bearing on your personal, professional, interior or financial life.

For example, imagine a person wants to write amazing fiction. They decide to write for a content mill (Associated Content, Demand Studios, etc.). The rationale: ‘I will make money and improve my writing.’ The problem? The content mill doesn’t do much to improve a person’s fiction writing, and the money is atrocious.

They find themselves bogged down in work that doesn’t help them achieve their goal of writing amazing fiction. They’d probably make more money (and generate more ideas for their writing) by working in fast food hell.

Look, I’m all for learning useless skills. This isn’t to deride activities of admittedly low utility. Neither am I saying ignore your responsibilities and obligations. We all have to do things we don’t like to do.

The idea here is to eliminate those elective tasks and actions that seem like they’re necessary but in reality are only vampires who prey upon your time and energy.

Every activity has some cost with it, and it’s not always financial. The cost could be paid in time, attention, or missed opportunities. The question is whether or not the activity or task will provide a benefit that outweighs the cost of doing it.

Sometimes, though, you have to start a task to figure out that it’s not worth doing. Once you realize a task or project has little or no utility for you, the challenge lies in knowing when to quit.

Choosing what not to do is just as important as what you choose to do.

Once you get in the habit of asking ‘does this matter?’ you’ll become more selective about how you spend your time and energy. By ignoring the things that don’t matter, you can take a less circuitous route toward your goal.

Here are some criteria for deciding if something matters:

• Will this help me achieve my goals?
• Will this improve my craft?
• Will this make my life more awesome?
• Is this necessary to meet my responsibilities?
• For us married/family people: Will this be good for my family?

Now I want to hear from you. What are your criteria for deciding what matters? Do you have things you’ve quit doing because you realized they don’t matter?  Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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“My filing system is my fetish.” -Chuck Palahniuk

In Two Strategies for Idea Generation, I gave you some tips for bagging ideas big and small. Today, I’m going to write what might be the geekiest post to ever appear on this fine site. My subject?

Filing systems. Or, how to become an idea archive ninja.

Go ahead and laugh.

While you’re scrounging for that awesome story idea you scribbled on the back of your overdue electric bill, I’m using my filing system to quickly locate a folder market ‘character sketches’ and (for example) and start writing a personal history about a businessman who has renounced his citizenship in order to build his international arms smuggling empire. Oh, and look, here are a couple clever lines I had entirely forgotten about. All those years-old, dead-on details, I’ve still got them (brown-flecked irises and a disdain for caramel).

Did you find your awesome story idea yet? Maybe it’s in that box behind your bed. Or in a pile. Somewhere. Eaten by gremlins.

Maybe this is an OCD pet peeve, but I despise scrounging, especially for something as small and discrete as a sheet of paper. All that dust makes me sneeze. Keeping track of things is much, much easier and gives you more time to spend creating.

This filing system isn’t foolproof and relies a little bit on memory. But it’s a quick and dirty solution to help eliminate piles of papers

I’ll go ahead and say this system is based loosely on the Getting Things Done filing system. My version, however, is considerably simpler. While digitizing everything might seem like a good idea, it’s never worked for me. Too many steps and physical barriers are involved. For some things like audio recordings, this is unavoidable.

Why is a filing system useful? When you remember something you need, you’ll be able to find it. Quickly. No searching, scrounging, sneezing, grumbling, or cursing.

Tools for Filing

• An inbox
• Manila File Folders
• A label maker. I use the Brother P-touch labeler (sounds dirty, works well).
• A filing cabinet – Check craigslist for a used one, or post a want ad. Millions of filing cabinets sit, disused, in people’s garages.
• A quality journal. I use a Moleskine.
• Pens, pens, and pens.
• Enough self-esteem not to hate yourself for getting excited about office products.

First,  a caveat. Not everything will go into the file cabinet. Some ideas will live in your moleskine, some on your hard drive (in the case of emails, word documents), some in your notebooks.

Before you start filing things away, eliminate junk papers, unusable/unactionable ideas, things like that.

The system works like this: You sketch out an idea. You can’t use it right now, but maybe later. Throw it in the inbox. Later, either once a day or a couple times a week, clean out your inbox and file everything away. That’s it.

I use one inbox for everything: blog post drafts, story ideas, unpaid bills,  court summons (just kidding…for now).

How to file papers.

By writing the headline above, I’ve sunk to a level wonkishness that borders on shameful. Whatever.

Most people never learn how to file things, especially if you don’t have a lot of experience in an office environment. However, even this experience is meaningless. I once worked in an office where I found a pair of muddy track shoes in a filing cabinet. I digress.

1. Start from the top of your inbox and work your way down.
2. For project ideas, story ideas, character sketches, business plans, and other bits of external thinking, put a date on the paper and do one of two things: use your label maker to create a folder marked with some descriptive name for your idea. For example, ‘story ideas 2010′ or ‘character sketches’ or ‘ipod app’ or ‘rejection slip.’  Never underestimate the power of naming things. For me, if I’ve only got a fragment of a story idea, I’ll toss the idea into a folder marked ‘story ideas.’
3. If you’ve got some other thing like a bill, tear off the part the company wants back, write out the check, stamp it, lick it, and set it aside. Write ‘paid’ on the bill and put it in a folder marked ‘phone bill’ or ‘electric bill,’ something like that. I just throw these out every time I move.
4. Put the paper in the folder and the folder in the filing cabinet. Arrange these alphabetically, A to Z. Or Z to A, if you’re really crazy.

I’ve got a two-drawer cabinet. The top level is ‘general reference,’ the lower level is ‘creative projects.’ General reference gets things like birth certificates, insurance policies, old resumes, and the other documents officialdom occasionally demands, as well as instruction manuals and receipts. ‘Creative projects’ gets the stuff that makes life interesting.

Okay, that takes care of the loose papers, but we’ve still got another category: keeping track of ideas in notebooks. Obviously, you can’t really file a notebook, and you don’t want to rip the pages out. To learn more about getting the most out of your notebook, check out How I Use My (Knockoff) Moleskine. Key points here include indexing and labeling the outside of the notebook with the date range (July to December 09, for example).

How to File Digital Files

Think of ideas stored on your computer as an extension or augmentation of your paper filing system. Everyone has their own preferences, but here are some things I’ve learned over the years.

1. Keep your word documents separate from program files. ‘My Documents’ in windows (anyone know the Mac/Linux equivalents?) has a purpose. Within this folder, I have separate folders for fiction writing, articles, contracts, song charts and sketches, etc. Having a uniform structure between your main computer and your backups will make your life easier and help keep your digital ideas safe. You are making backups, right?
2. Ideally you’ll have a double-redundant backup system. Simple document/text/word files are pretty small, and you can keep these on a tiny USB solid state drive or an external hard drive. I gave up on things like CD-Rs and DVD-Rs years ago; they’re bulky and tend to degrade. Soon enough, they’ll go the way of the floppy disk.

For an in-depth look at the problems associated with digital archiving, check out Rethinking Personal Digital Archiving.

An extra note for songwriters and musicians

I keep a separate plastic file box, the kind with a handle, for all my music papers. Quite useful for easy transport and bludgeoning. The system is the same as the paper filing system described above. I keep all my rough song notebooks in there, as well as chord charts, tabs, and other ephemera. Also, and this is important, I keep a list of all my original songs. You can either keep this list in the box or on a spreadsheet with links to chord charts and lyrics.

For audio recordings of song ideas, I use a little digital recorder. Every month or so, I’ll dump all these into a folder in ‘My Documents’ called ‘sketches.’ I try and make backups of this folder onto an external hard drive called ‘sketches.’

Obligatory Conclusion

Keeping track of your ideas has a number of benefits: you can find things faster, reduce the paper clutter in your life, and stop worrying about forgetting great ideas you had/have.

Think of a filing system as an external brain that helps you keep track of all your ideas. Or your initiation into the curious kingdom of geekdom.

If you enjoyed this fine post, please subscribe to Happenchance or follow me on twitter

Do you have any kind of filing system? How do you keep track of your ideas? Do you enjoy scrounging? I know some people do. Go ahead, I won’t laugh. Let me know what you think in the comments, I’d love to hear from you.

Floppy disk photo credit: fortyseven
Full disclosure: all links leading to Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy through my links, they give me coffee money.

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Today I’m doing a review of The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield. Normally I leave the book reviews to the critics, but I saw this book in the library and thought the subject matter would be quite useful for readers of this fine blog.

In The Art of War, Sun Tzu coined the famous phrase ‘know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.’

Is the act of making art a war? Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art (also of The Legend of Bagger Vance and several historical novels), says so.

According to Pressfield, anyone who creates anything is engaged in a perpetual struggle. Their enemy? Resistance, the internal struggle we face to create something that goes beyond fulfilling our immediate needs. Or put another way, this is a struggle between the Self and the Ego. More on this later.

Sun Tzu also recommended (and I’m paraphrasing from memory) complete annihilation of your enemy, otherwise he could come back to torment you once he regains his strength.

Unlike Sun Tzu’s enemies, Pressfield’s enemy can never be destroyed. Resistance must be defeated anew every single day. Fortunately, this enemy is vulnerable, assuming you understand its nature…and your own.

The thesis of Pressfield’s book is as follows:

Resistance is the ever-present enemy of people who do work they’re passionate about, the work they’re meant to do. You can combat and neutralize Resistance’s power by adopting a professional attitude towards your work. Once you adopt this attitude, something ‘magical’ happens and your work becomes transcendent.

The War of Art is divided into three sections: Resistance (Defining the Enemy), Combating Resistance (Turning Pro), and Beyond  Resistance (Higher Realm). In this review, I’ll go over some key points from each of the three sections.

Resistance (Defining the Enemy)

Resistance is an internal force, the ‘enemy within.’ Defined as self-sabotage, resistance usually manifests as avoidance, procrastination, or inaction caused by fear paralysis. Resistance, according to Pressfield, is invisible, insidious, implacable, internal, impersonal and universal. Pressfield elaborates on each of these adjectives (and more), unafraid to use a clever metaphor or simile to illustrate a point. For example, in the section ‘Resistance is infallible, Pressfield writes:

“Like a magnetized needle floating on a surface of oil, Resistance will unfailingly point to true North-meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing.”

Here’s my first (albeit minor) point of contention.

Almost anything we need, want or have to do will cause some resistance to manifest. Just because I experience massive resistance when I think about fixing my broke-ass car doesn’t mean fixing that car is my life’s work. Perhaps I’m missing the point.

Pressfield goes on to point out Resistance in its many guises: the way peers may be recruited as allies of Resistance when an artist starts to conquer Resistance; the people around her “begin acting strange…they are trying to sabotage her” because they are experiencing Resistance of their own. They pressure her either explicitly or implicitly to backslide.

Resistance also pops up the artist’s tendency to quit at 99%, procrastinating work in order to ‘heal.’ (Is this a stab at Julia Campbell’s The Artist’s Way? People who’ve read this work will know what I mean.)

This section gives us a series of lucid and subtle definitions of the manifestations of Resistance. The causes of resistance aren’t really addressed, only the symptoms and manifestations. It’s not until the third section that Pressfield gives us the why of resistance.

As I read, I couldn’t help but identify where Resistance has dug its claws into me at one point or another. But like horoscopes, it’s hard to read this kind of work and not find descriptions applicable to your own life.

I would add one thing to this section. I think Pressfield wrote this book on a typewriter while living in a tent. He makes no mention of digital distractions (email, internet research, SMS) nor of learning to separate proactive and reactive work. It’s safe to assume, though, that mindless internet browsing is just another manifestation of Resistance. Pressfield does, however, imply that he follows something of a low-information diet. In one section he mentions completely missing Watergate because he was too busy writing. Impressive.

Combating Resistance (Turning Pro)

By turning pro, Pressfield doesn’t mean ‘making money.’ Turning pro is a shift in mindset. He wrote that from the time he ‘turned pro’ until he made his first real money was about a decade.

Turning pro here means doing what anyone does for a regular, ‘normal’ employment. To paraphrase Pressfield’s definition: A pro shows up every day no matter what, stays on the job all day, and is in it for the long haul. For the pro, the stakes are high. Pros accept payment for their work (even if they don’t always make an income). Pros also master the technique of their work, have a sense of humour about their jobs, and receive real-world praise or blame.

Pressfield makes an interesting point in his definition of a professional: Professionals “do not overidentify with [their] jobs.” A professional’s identity is separate from their job descriptions. This is necessary because, when a person strongly identifies with being a writer, musician, painter, etc., they are ‘overterrified’ of failure and ‘overly invested in its success.’ A professional is objective and disassociates themselves from their work. They are not their work. If their work fails, that doesn’t make them a failure.

Some other points worth noting about turning pro:

“A pro views her work as craft, not art,” even though she knows there’s still some magical stuff going on. In other words, she doesn’t wait on inspiration. She starts working with or without it, “in anticipation of its apparition.”

A professional ‘accepts no excuses;’ she doesn’t choose to take a day off because she has a mild hangover or needs to fix her car(my own notorious excuses).

Beyond Resistance (Higher Realm)

The third and final section talks about the muse and, finally, identifies the cause of Resistance. Muses, angels, daemons, geniuses, an input from the collective unconsciousness, all these Pressfield calls our allies, “equal and opposite powers…counterpoised against [Resistance].” These allies join us when we make the shift from being an amateur to a professional.

How does one summon these allies? Through work. That’s it. Sound familiar? It should. But I’m doing a disservice to this section by summing it up in such a way, so let’s look a little closer.

Pressfield explains when divine inspiration occurs:

“When we sit down day after day and keep grinding…The muse takes note of our dedication. She approves…we becomes like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come.”

Following this simple but powerful truth, Pressfield talks about the day he finished his first book. He received this sage advice from his friend Paul: “Good for you. Start the next one today.”

Pressfield continues on in this vein for awhile before coming to the root cause of Resistance: the battle between the Ego and the Self.

Resistance springs from the Ego. The Ego is concerned with its own preservation and comfort, with stasis and the physical, material world. The Ego likes things the way they are. It likes to be in control.

The Self, however, is all about growth and moving to a higher plane. From the Self we get dreams, ideas, access to the collective unconscious. According to Pressfield, people meditate, dance, pray, and drug in order to access the Self.

Why does the Ego hate the self? According to Pressfield, “because the more awake we become, the less we need the Ego.” The Ego, because of its jealousy, employs Resistance to protect and preserve its power.

Pressfield ends the book with a simple call to action: listen to your Self and take action in order to find out what you were meant to do. Once you figure it out, do it like a professional. If you don’t explore and utilize your gifts, you hurt yourself and everyone around you.  If you do, great; you’re sharing your gifts with the world.

Pressfield was a Marine, and true to his past and the title of the book, he uses language that evokes the battlefield: “The writer is an infantryman. He knows that progress is measured in yards of dirt extracted from the enemy one day, one hour, one minute at a time and paid for in blood.” At other points in the book, he talks about against Resistance as one with life-and-death stakes. This brings me to one problem I had with the book.

Other reviewers have noted that at one point Pressfield implies that not following your creative dreams leads to cancer. This is indeed a dubious assertion. Pressfield briefly profiles Tom Laughlin, a psychologist who helps people facing terminal illness do things they’ve always dreamed of. Referring to cancer, Pressfield writes that Laughlin asks “is it possible…that the disease itself evolved as a consequence of actions taken (or not taken) in our lives?’ The work Laughlin is doing is laudable, but this section is best taken with several salty grains and washed down with warm bourbon. To be fair, the point of this section is to show that when people learn they’re going to die, their priorities shift dramatically. But to suggest neglected ambitions may cause cancer isn’t helping anyone.  We already know the stakes are high.

Overall, Pressfield is self-effacing, confident, competent, and occasionally funny. He’s been there, he’s done the work. And not to brag, but in the past year of blogging about creativity, I’ve come to many of the same conclusions about creative work and inspiration; I’m happy to see similar ideas from a guy who has been ‘in the trenches,’ doing the work, and has some respectable credits and credentials to show for it.

We all encounter Resistance in one form or another (procrastination, avoidance, distraction, paralyzing fear, etc.). Pressfield has done a great job of defining the enemy, offering a strategy for beating it into submission, and providing a clear picture of the victory spoils.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to Happenchance or share it with your friends.

Photo credits: kylemay and johnonolan

Full disclosure: The Amazon links are affiliate links. If you buy a book, they throw me coffee money.

No related posts.

In the popular imagination, creativity is like the element aether: it’s invisible and it flows through living things. Hard to pin down, impossible to bottle and sell, a little spooky, and frequently misunderstood. Creativity is quite similar: definable, but tough to quantify.

However, creativity is definable.

Creativity (from an old Random House dictionary):

1. the state or quality of being creative.

2. The ability to create meaningful new forms, interpretations, etc.; originality

In the first definition, the word state is interesting. Why? Because this implies that creativity is a mindset, a mood, whim or emotion. The second definition implies action; having the ability to create or reinterpret things.

Take these two keywords out, and you have a state of ability. And what is an ability but competence based on natural skill, training, or other qualification?

Looking at creativity from this perspective, then, creativity could be defined as the way a person uses their talents, natural and acquired, to create, reinterpret, and improve upon things in the world. Note that none of these definitions implied creativity was limited to artistic fields of human endeavor (visual art, literature, music, etc.).

In my opinion, this is where the problem comes in. Obviously, creativity is vital in these fields. Without innovation and reinterpretation, we’d be living in a world of tourist-destination art dealers and commercial radio. Each of these has their place and appeal, but they don’t really push the boundaries or explore new territory. They play it safe, give the people what they want, etc. Yes, they’re expressions of creativity in their own regard, but if you were to ask Seth Godin, he would say ‘they’re not remarkable purple cows. They’re boring old brown cows.’ (link to In Praise of The Purple Cow)

But let’s back up. The point is this: creativity needn’t be applied only to the arts. Everyone has inborn creative abilities and skills. No one starts from zero. The difference is in how people perceive their own creative abilities as well as their regard for creativity and innovation in general.

Perhaps because the use of the adjective creativity has been used in limited scope to describe artistic achievements, a number of ideas myths have taken root in the popular imagination regard the creative state of ability. Let’s look at some of those myths.

Being creative means having big, profound ideas. Some creative ideas are indeed profound, but most big advances build upon a thousand little innovations and reinterpretations. These little innovations are easy to overlook, easy to discount, because they themselves are not spectacular or age-defining. Henry Ford’s assembly-line business model was built upon thousands of tiny little innovations: advanced lathes, interchangeable parts, ball bearings, improved files, etc. Without the little ideas that led to these staples of industry, the big ideas wouldn’t be possible.

Some people are born creative. Everyone else is S.O.L. Every individual has some degree of creativity and capacity for innovation, but only some people engage in these traditionally ‘creative’ pursuits. These folks are labeled creative to the exclusion of everyone else (going back to the fundamental misunderstanding that the label ‘creative’ should only be applied to these pursuits).

Yet, anyone who has thought ‘I can do this better/differently,’ or ‘I can make this’ and has followed through on that thought has shown creative ability.

Creative thinking cannot be learned or taught. This relates to the last point: the idea that some people have it and others don’t. And for those that don’t possess the ethereal qualities of a ‘creative person,’ no one encourages them. ‘Don’t bother trying,’ people say. ‘They’re just going to be fry cooks.’ It’s a self—fulfilling prophecy, like the one described in this study

Great ideas, creativity and inspiration are like lightning. They only strike in random flashes of brilliance. This is partly true. Truly innovative ideas can strike at any moment. But some people have far more ideas than others. Is it because they’re born creative? No, far from it. The reason? These people are already working diligently in their field, on their craft. They’re not waiting for inspiration to strike. They’re already doing the work, putting in the time, holding that lightning rod.  The more they work, the more they gain an understanding of their own creative process, and the more they eventually create.

When an interviewer asked acclaimed songwriter Leon Russell about his recent outpouring of new material, Russell said

“I finally learned how to write without inspiration, and can write whenever I need to. It only took me about twenty years to figure that out.”

Creativity originates entirely from outside ourselves: muses, genetics, whatever. Maybe this is partially true. We as people derive a majority of what we think, feel, believe and do from the world around us. And isn’t one part of the definition of creativity to ‘create meaningful new forms’ (implying the new form is based upon an older one)?

Maybe creativity does come from some Jungian collective-consciousness idea stew, but to rely wholly on that supposition may lead a person to look into the stewpot and one day find it dishearteningly empty. If ideas come from outside ourselves, that’s fine, but this view neglects two crucial details: somebody has to keep adding ingredients to the stew, and that stew is worthless unless someone is around to ladle it out.

When creativity is attributed wholly to outside forces, it’s also quite easy to shift the responsibility for not creating to those uncontrollable forces. As if it’s the muse’s fault that one’s ass is not in their chair, working on that big project.

I should add that if the idea of mythical muses makes it easier to write that memoir, great; set up an altar and burn some incense for the daemons in the walls. But ultimately, only one person is responsible for their won creativity and creative work.

Creativity just means having ideas. This myth is half-true. Yes, ideas are required for creativity, but so is the development of these ideas into something tangible. An idea without action is like a horse without legs; fun to talk about, but unlikely to do anything useful.

I’m not writing this to be exclusionary. Everyone should have ideas. Lots and lots of ideas, practical and whimsical. But to be creative you need to do or create something with those ideas.

Creative people are, by nature, self-destructive. This myth has an understandable basis: a list of ‘eminent creative people with probably mood disorders’ reads like a who’s who of artistic overachievers: Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolf, Twain/Clemens, Dickinson. More than one of these folks offed themselves. Further, according to Maureen Neihart (Psy.D), mood disturbances (madness) are more likely to appear in people who demonstrate high levels of artistic creativity. Neihart writes:

“Both by their nature and by their identification with eminent artists, creatively gifted individuals may put themselves at risk for serious emotional disturbance.”

This leads us to a problem when people apply a strange logic and take this finding to its terrible (and false) converse: engaging in self-destruction as a means to enhance or increase creativity.

While self-destruction may be a symptom of extremely high intelligence and creativity, being self-destructive for the purpose of increasing intelligence and creativity is moronic…and dangerous.

If you want to learn more about this fascinating topic, check out Neihart’s excellent article Creativity, the Arts, and Madness

Forgive me if this post is a little heavy, a little too serious. But in years past, at one point or another, each of these myths inhabited some nether region of my brain. I believed them consciously or otherwise. Now that I’ve learned a little more, I realize they’re mostly bunk.

Finally, before you go thinking that I’ve gone all serious-confessional on you, I’d like to close with a quote by Edward Albee, a playwright best known for the terribly funny play ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

“Creativity is magic. Don’t examine it too closely.”

Image credit: Helga Weber

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One year ago today, I started Happenchance: Creative Techniques for Creative People. After three designs, a couple disasters, and a lot of back-of-the-envelope brainstorming, I feel like I’ve built a rockin’ resource for people who create things great and small. My reasons for starting the blog shall remain shrouded in mystery, but just know that writing for you has been great fun…and one hell of a learning experience.

In the past year, I’ve published 58 posts from 5 countries and two continents. Traffic is growing and more people are subscribing.

Any commemorative occasion calls for some kind of retrospective. Today is no different. So, to answer the question that’s on everyone’s mind…

What Have I Learned?

More than I can remember. Seriously. The question is too broad. Let’s say ‘what have I learned about creating stuff?’ That’s easier to answer, and more relevant to the mission of this blog. Here goes…

1. You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to start and build your inertia.

2. Idea capture is everything. When you capture lots of ideas (bad and good), you have the luxury of selecting the best.

3. Talk is cheap. Results matter. Ideas are nothing but hot air…until you pump that air into a balloon and let it fly.

4. Our brains can function even better when we learn how to use them. For example, by understanding associative techniques and the use of spacing.

5. The only thing to fear is fear itself. Especially the fears and neuroses we create for ourselves.

6. Hard work is underrated. Thanks to my former South Korean students for this lesson.

7. The perfect time is now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Now.

If you want to get a better idea of what Happenchance is all about (and the preceeding wasn’t enough for you), check out my page for new visitors.

What Comes Next?

Long range: The same as before, only better. I’ll continue to provide you with useful, high-quality (if occasionally infrequent) content. I’m also developing a couple of excellent products, but the deadline is still pretty far out. I want to take my time on them in order to really make them shine.

Short range: The next post will  be an exploration of creativity and some common myths surrounding it. Look for that within the next few days.

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Photo credit: 3boodnasser

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For the past six months, I’ve had one ridiculously easy project stuck on my big-ass to-do list: select 100 good Cambodia photos (from over 1,000), upload them to Flickr and order prints. During weekly reviews I would look at this item on my big-ass to-do list, nod, debate its importance, think about the magnitude of the task, shudder, and go on to the next list.

However, I have a family reunion coming up soon and I’ve received emails from several folks who want to see travel photos.

All of a sudden, I have a reason to finish this slow-moving, brain-eating task and a deadline for doing so. I gave myself three days to pick out the highlights and order prints.

With one day to spare, I uploaded and tagged the last of my Cambodia photos (check them out) and even went on to sort through another 2,000+ travel photos. Talk about a relief. I shudder now not from the actual difficulty of the task but from the amount of time and mental energy I used imagining how difficult this would actually be.

How did I get unstuck? I used an Evil Deadline!

The only difference between a deadline and an evil deadline is this: a regular deadline won’t rend your flesh from your limbs and eat you alive if you don’t finish.

Seriously, though, having an evil deadline just means means planning to finish something within one to three days. Evil deadlines don’t give you the time to second-guess or mentally weasel your way out of something. Write down your task and deadline on an index card, tape it to your keyboard/wall/hand, and do the damn task.  That’s it.

This works best with one of those projects where you’ve already got the materials together, you know what you need to do and have a rough idea of how to do it…but you just haven’t put the time in yet.

This probably wouldn’t work so well with something still in the planning stages, or any kind of ongoing project. For the former, you’d need to know your steps. For the latter, rather than say ‘finish the whole thing,’ just break the big part down into component/sub-parts and set evil mini-deadliness for them.

For more caveats, check out this excellent post called The Uses and Abuses of Setting Deadlines.

Why are evil deadlines effective?

Evil deadlines are effective because they put a real, tangible limit on how much time you can spend putting off a task. When you’ve got projects you want to finish but no pressing, external force pushing you to finish them, it’s really easy to ignore them. To put them off. To procrastinate. And all this leads to getting stuck.

And when you have spare time, whether fifteen minutes or two hours, you can’t just sit there and not work on your stuck project…you have an  evil deadline to meet. And if you don’t, zombies will eat you.

Setting deadlines takes some discipline, but when you resign yourself to the fact that you have to finish something by a certain time, it becomes that much easier. Maybe this has something to do with eliminating the tyranny of choice.

If you enjoyed this post, subscribe to Happenchance for more creative techniques. And remember… by becoming a subscriber, you keep the zombie apocalypse at bay for another day.

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Binge: A period of unrestrained, immoderate self-indulgence.
Inspiration binge: A creative technique involving the unrestrained, immoderate, and self-indulgent consumption of cultural entertainments, usually for the purpose of generating ideas.

Even without purging, binges get a really bad rap. In most cases, this is deserved; too much of any substance (fried chicken, dry martinis, trailer meth) is going to cause long-term harm. Even reading too much over a long period of time can have some detrimental effects…but don’t take it from me:

“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.” -Albert Einstein

However, when you’re really out of ideas, when your soul is as ‘thin as a playing card‘ (Oates), an inspiration binge can help you generate new ideas, induce inspiration, and help you get unstuck.

Think of an inspiration binge as a mostly harmless nudge, a break from the usual routine for the purpose of making new neural connections and refilling the creative well that is so easily drained.

My experience: Returning to America after 1.5 years in Asia kicked my ass. Readjustment and basic day-to-day stuff drained me. I tried to go with the flow, to keep up the momentum on my projects, but that didn’t work.

So I stopped trying. For a short time.

No worries, no stress; I just said ‘screw it, I’m going to do whatever I damn well please.’ For me, this meant burning through three books, watching a couple good films, going to a concert, listening to some new tunes, and killing several hundred zombies. I didn’t do much else, save a bit of journaling and a blog post.

After five days, I realized I was ready to get back to my projects. While not intending to, I had a boatload of story ideas, a solution to a rather sticky problem, and a generally left more excited about the work I had been doing.

So, in my case, an inspiration binge allowed me to:

• Renew my focus.
• Generate new ideas.
• Refine old ideas.
• Experience inspiring creative work.

Consider this: great ideas are either totally original concepts and ideas (rare) OR a combination and synthesis of existing ideas and information. You think Shakespeare came up with all those funny dramas on his own? Of course not; he collected stories, folktales, and histories. The guy practically invented the ‘ripped from the headlines’ genre, the headlines being Holinshed’s Chronicles.

Hey, I’m not advocating patent theft of ideas. There’s no need; we have Hollywood for that. I’m just saying that a) most ideas are synthetic derivatives of other works or ideas and b) other works can be one hell of a source of inspiration.

Sometimes it just makes sense to overload your mind with new material for the purpose of generating new ideas. How many times have you had a cool idea while reading, listening, watching, or making?

Like anything else, an inspiration binge might not work for everyone. And like other binges, it’s probably not a good idea to go on too many of these. Yet, for me, in this instance, an inspiration binge was just the thing I needed to get back on the rails. If you’re interested in such a pursuit, here are some ways to make the most of your very own inspiration binge:

• Pick out stimulating works. Read reviews. Seek out the good  stuff.
• If a book bores you, find something more engaging. No shame in not finishing a dull work.
• Keep an idea bank or notebook (knockoff moleskine) handy. Record ideas…but don’t act on them immediately.
• Determine how long your binge will last; set an end date.
• Don’t do an inspiration binge as a time waster. Non-engaging, passive activities (television) aren’t going to provide much stimulation or inspiration.
• Allow yourself to indulge without guilt.

That’s it. Have a nice binge…but don’t get lazy, and stay away from the trailer meth. Good luck.

If you enjoyed this fine post, subscribe to Happenchance for more creative techniques. And remember…every time you share a Happenchance article, someone sighs with satisfaction  (though maybe not because of the article).

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Procrastination pisses me off. Some days it’s easy to manage procrastination. Other days procrastination runs amok like a drunken elephant. You’ve been there, sitting at your computer for hours, intending to work on some amazing project, but instead you spend several hours studying Napoleon’s exile on Elba. You really really want (need) to work on your project, but the only thing you’ve done is allowed yourself to procrastinate, creating a boatload of cognitive dissonance between what you wanted to do and what you actually did.

I believe that procrastinating a task is harder than actually doing that task. Why? You’d think that procrastinating a task would be easy, but that only takes into account the surface-level physical action. If you could somehow look at an image of a procrastinator’s brain, you’d find that procrastination uses a great amount of mental energy, an ongoing argument that probably goes something like this:

I’m doing this one thing, but I should be working on that other thing. I’ll get around to that other thing…later. Not right now. Laaaater. Damnit, I need to do that now. But Napoleon is so interesting!

If you know of a better recipe for low-level neurosis (with a side of guilt and shame), let me know. I’ve never seen one.

The worst part about procrastination is this: the time spent procrastinating is usually more than enough time to finish at least a large chunk of that all-so-important Task.

Why Procrastinate?

Dr. Timothy Pychyl, award-winning professor and diligent studier of procrastination, calls procrastination a ‘lack of self-regulatory abilities.’  According to him, low conscientiousness is a predictor for procrastination. Conscientiousness is influenced by the following factors: order, dutifulness (carefulness), achievement, self-discipline, deliberation.  Other predictors for procrastination include worry, anxiety, and a fear of failure. (I’ve written about managing the fear of failure before).

Further, your personality type will affect the how, why, and when procrastination affects you. Some of us are worse than others, so we all have to be cognizant of our own penchants for procrastination.

I’d hate to suggest that some people are born procrastinators. However, since this might be the case, then for those of us who do procrastinate (a staggering majority?),  we need to deploy some creative techniques to manage procrastination and get to work. Here they are…

Identify All Your Tasks

If procrastination is a result of low conscientiousness, and conscientiousness means being “painstaking and careful” (wikipedia), then an accurate inventory of tasks will help. Procrastination is also a symptom of uncertainty. So to avoid procrastination, you need to be certain and clear about your task. How can you do what you need to do if you don’t know what you’re doing?

• Make a big to-do list of all your separate tasks. This is your starting point. A ‘mind sweep,’ in the parlance of Getting Things Done.
• Break large projects down into a series of small, discrete tasks.
• Be specific in what you need to do…and how you intend to do it.

Lasso Your Time

Procrastination turns your time into a crazy cow, running this way and that. You need to rein in your time and make it heel. Here’s what works for me:

• For three days, keep a time log of your daily activities. You can be as detailed as you like, so long as you at least get the time down to fifteen minute intervals.
• Set up a fixed-time schedule. Plan to do the same things at about the same time.
• Work in 30 minute blocks (give or take). Set a timer and do only one thing until the timer goes off.
• Identify your time suckers (web surfing, television, pursuit of snipes), become conscious of them, and learn to avoid them.  Once you get them under control, you could even use them as a reward system for completing certain tasks.

Other Creative Techniques to End Procrastination

• Eliminate perfection and aim for results. Perfectionism will only create anxiety and a fear of failure. It’s far better to create something with a 90% amazing factor than to intend to create something that is 100% amazing. Never mind that 100% amazing is damn near impossible to achieve. Just get started and make creative inertia work for you.
• Have a clean and tidy workspace. I’m sure there’s some debate between order, tidiness, and creativity, but I know that when my workspace is a mess, youtube and digg become very alluring. Other the other hand, if I’m making a mess while I’m working,  that’s cool; that just means I’m making progress.
• Take a break and take a walk. As you’re walking, think about your task and the separate steps you need to take to finish it. The extra air and increased blood flow should offset some of that procrastination-stress and help you clear your mind.
• Focus on only a few items from your to-do list. We’ve all got about 1,000 things on our lists. For me, working from a super-long list makes by brain shut down. Seriously. Things get fuzzy. To combat this curious phenomenon, I’ll write down only two or three items from this list and focus only on those items. When those are finished, I can either engage in idleness or pull a couple more tasks off the list.
• Eliminate distractions. I’m sure you’ve heard this before. Shut off the email, chat, cell phones, etc. In short, anything that might popup, ring, flash, scream, etc.
• Give up. If procrastination is a form of a avoidance, you’ve got to figure out why you’re avoiding that task. Maybe you really just shouldn’t be doing it. Drop it, forget it, pay someone else to do it, whatever. Learn to know when to quit.
• Take tiny actions. Just do one little thing. Forget the big picture, the final product, all the different steps. Just take one single step. After that, take another. Then another. Take a break. Shake. Rinse. Repeat. Finish!

I hope this helps. I’ve used each and every one of these techniques in one form or another over the years. You’ve probably seen some of them before, but hopefully you’ll find something new that works for you. If you’ve used any of these techniques or if you have other creative techniques for managing procrastination, I’d love to hear from you. Drop me a line in the comments and let me know what works.

If you enjoyed this fine post, subscribe to Happenchance for more creative techniques. And remember…for each new Happenchance subscriber, I will drink a liter of coffee. Without cream. Or sugar.

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