A lot of what I struggle with, in terms of work or creativity, boils down to one central tension: I need structure to get anything done, but I haven’t had much success imposing structure on myself.
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If there’s a deadline, I’ll meet it. I’m never late getting grades in at the end of the semester. When I have to give a report or a presentation, I’m always ready. I’ll usually have gifts in the mail on time.
But if there isn’t some extrinsic motivation — some institutional requirement, or the fear that I’ll disappoint someone or look like an idiot, or whatever — I’m basically screwed.
It’s worse than that, though: I’m also subject to Parkinson’s Law, which states that work will expand to fill the time available for its completion. That’s all fine when there are deadlines because my tendency to procrastinate in effect negates Parkinson’s Law (the Stock-Sanford corollary: “If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.”) Sure, sometimes the quality of work suffers a little, especially if I miscalculate how much time the job should take. But that doesn’t happen often. For the most part, I get things done, well and on time.
If there’s a deadline.
But without a deadline, the work — and here I’m thinking about creative work, like writing, though it unfortunately applies to parts of teaching as well — expands pretty much without limit. I work more slowly, and there’s always more that could be done.
I’ve been told — by friends with, I’m sure, the best of intentions — that I just need to set deadlines for myself. Simple! But I’ve never been able to make that work. It’s like when I tried setting my clock ahead a few minutes so that I’d stop leaving my office at the last minute: I always adjusted the time in my head. I can’t fool myself into believing in a deadline that doesn’t really exist.
So, while this isn’t really a resolution — it’s far too imprecise, and I don’t know how I’d even measure success — I’m going to try (again!) to impose some kind of structure on the time that I free up by procrastinating.
I’ve had some success over the past couple of months in one area, at least: I’ve developed night and morning routines, based mainly on Walker’s Why We Sleep (which I’ve written about, if you’re interested). Aside from the general benefit of getting enough sleep — I feel a lot better, and (when I have a deadline) I focus much better — there are downstream effects as well. Since I don’t stay up so late, for example, I snack and drink less. I manage at least half hour of reading each night. And to get that unfiltered sunlight on my eyeballs in the morning, I get in a good walk pretty much every morning.
Thanks to those routines, I’m healthier than I’ve been in awhile. I don’t always like the routines; without them, I’d stay up much later, which feels more natural to me. But staying up late makes it harder to meet commitments in the morning — at the very least, I have kids to get to school (even if school is across the room from their bed) — and anyways, I like feeling better. Sort of a mix between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, I guess.
So, over the next few weeks, I’ll try to replicate that success in other areas, honing routines that encourage creativity and productivity — not in that American “cult of productivity” sense, as a good friend of mine would warn against. But I do have things I’d like to finish — some writing, some recording, even some cleaning around the house — simply because I want to finish them.