Why you’re not doing creative work
every.to
every.to
This matches my experience. I finished writing a novel a few months ago. It took me ~2 years, of which very little time was spent actually writing. Gathering information, thinking about the book and day-dreaming took the bulk of the time.
The problem with so-called "exploration" phase is that you don't know what you're doing, you don't know why you're doing it, you don't know where you're going or where your general direction might be. It's not terrifying, it's aimless. It's like being in the desert or in the middle of the sea, with no compass but plenty of food, so there isn't even a sense of urgency to push you forward.
I think it's Duke Ellington who said "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline." Editors breathing on one's neck are underrated.
Do creative work if you want to. Or don’t. Not everyone has to do everything. The answer to “why you’re not doing creative work” honestly could be “Because I don’t want to and I don’t have to.”
for those who actually do want to do creative work, the article has some good insights, some of which i'll be trying out myself.
If you see the title and it inspires guilt, then that's a personal problem. Either you should be doing creative work, and you aren't, in which case the article might be helpful. Or you shouldn't/don't need to do creative work, and if you still feel guilty nothing in the article - or truthfully, any article - is going to help.
However, deadlines work best for me if I am genuinely helping someone. So setting an arbitrary deadline is less productive than asking something like "I need that tomorrow because I would like to show that to client". Possibly because helping others is always, in some sense, uncommitted.
I find I’m most creative, though, in the afternoon. I often start something in the afternoon, then get it working, the next morning.
Also, I’m constantly in “ship” mode. I write all my code (even the experimental stuff) as if it is shipping code.
That means a lot of “stopping to sand off the rough edges,” as I proceed.
I seem to strike a decent balance between creating and delivering.
1. If it goes from experimental to ship, you aren’t going to go back and make it shipshape.
2. Sanding time is meditation on the product. As I rework, I’m revisiting the code and design at multiple levels.
3. Before 10am is the old programmers 2am. It’s quiet. The hustle and interruptions of the day haven’t begun.
Also, I'm constantly mining my codebase for snippets, so I would like them to be quality.
The other main reason, is that I like to establish good habits. If I do all my code that way, I don't have to worry about taking extra care for the shipping stuff.
I write about my approach, here: https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/thats-not-what-ships...
I love WFH, but this is the one part that has seriously killed me. Before WFH, management was rarely in the office before 10AM or between 12PM-2PM and I would sneak out at 4PM every day. Now that everyone is WFH, the concept of work hours has died. I still have a hard stop at 4pm, but doesn't stop me from getting calls or texts even as late as midnight - I just refused to answer anything after I'm done working and put my phone on silence.
Nitpick: he means Bernie Taupin, a prolific song writer who wrote many of Sir Eltons songs. Credit where it is due: According to Bernie "I scribbled the lyric down on a lined notepad at the kitchen table of Elton's mother's apartment in the London suburb of Northwood Hills, breakfast time sometime in 1969. That’s it. Plain and simple." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Your_Song#Composition_and_insp...
> In the exploration phase, you don’t know what the thing is going to be, you don’t have all of the information or ideas you want to have, you don’t even know if what you’re thinking about is important, and any little breeze in the wrong direction might blow you off course. In the execution phase, you are inspired, you know what the thing is, you know how to make it, it feels urgent; all you need to do is sit down and do the thing.
That's pretty much the opposite of how I work on such things. In the exploration phase there are lots of interesting aspects to think about and I'm motivated to actually work on that, while during execution all the interesting parts are already done, therefore my motivation is completely missing and there's a good chance that the "sit down and do the thing" part never happens or if I start I use every possible excuse to explore another project instead.
When a game idea occurs to me, the exciting part is discovering the mechanics, the story, the gotchas. As soon as the idea is even semi-formed on paper or in my mind I lose interest.
The creative phase takes a lot of energy, it constantly runs in the background, grinding out the possible from the impossible.
If you go out of your way to take on another task unrelated to your day job - you are going to feel the pain. And your performance at work is going to drop.
Because the uncomfortable truth is that creative work is like a background task constantly running in the brain. And that saps up resources and removes brain power from your run of the mill tasks.
I can feel when a creative process has ended because the fuzzy veil over the world lifts and I can suddenly see more clearly. The resources that were tied up in designing a compressive sensing camera or a new lenticular screen design or a new physical theory of the universe are suddenly released and it's a relief.
To be honest, by judging the title, first I thought this was 'yet another journalist' writing a nice fluffy article. Glad I clicked and read though. The author has experience, that's very clear from the text. Thanks for submitting!
- But you can do things fast when you're already dripping in experience. (Explore/Exploit problem)
- So, you spend more time gathering experience and use some approaches from The Procrastination Equation.
- Then after all of that you realize thinking outside of the box is hard so you induce creativity using ThinkerToys.