In the previous entry — Just make it easy to win — I talked about a challenge I did with a friend (codename John), where every day, he’d send me a prompt, and every evening, I’d send him a song I’d made. In exchange, I did the same for him: I’d send him something to draw and he’d send me the drawing.
This worked remarkably well for both of us — as far as I could tell — and continued for several months.
At some point, my friend lost interest, and I went from having a functional system for guaranteeing creative output, to not having one.
I had outsourced constancy to a variable!
Codename John was my friend, but he had a life. He got bored. It worked for him until it didn’t, and then the whole thing collapsed.
My soul craved the cold certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. You cling to your flesh, as it will not decay and fail you…
...
Goodness gracious. Where was I? Ah, yes…
Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. —The Six Million Dollar Man
Okay... mostly the 2nd one ;)
How do I design my next creative project so it doesn’t dissolve?
When I start a project, what goes wrong?
Why do I stop?
I identified these Reasons Three:
Skipping Days: If I skip even one day, the chance of Total Derailment skyrockets. I just lose momentum, and it dies.
Putting it off until later. If I leave work undone beyond the first part of the day, I tend to forget, or run out of energy, or run out of time. It becomes increasingly difficult to begin.
Getting sidetracked by absolute nonsense -- roughly 100% of which comes in thru the internet. The “actual problem” is “task switching”, of course (alt-tabbing), but I found this impulse miraculously dissolved when I unplugged the wifi router... and removed my phone. Can’t be tempted by what ain’t there! See also: Steve Pavlina’s article Habit Change is Like Chess
Speaking of which... When did we decide as a culture, that we should spend the first part of our day, our precious, precious Morning Dopamine, on a bunch of random crap we won’t even remember by lunchtime? I find that I work better, and I’m more relaxed, when I don’t fill my head with a bunch of complete bullshit first thing in the morning. But maybe that’s just me ;)
For these, I found these Solutions Three... my Rules For Ultimate Winning!
Rule 1: Work every day. No skipping days. But I only need to work 1 hour.
(Inspired by plumshell’s article Work for only 3 hours a day, but everyday.) I can keep going if I want, though, and I usually did. (It feels good to get stuff done!)Rule 2: Begin working immediately, as soon as I wake up.
I mean literally. I’d wake up, go get my Caffeinated Beverage from the fridge (which I used to reward myself for getting up as soon as I woke up, and also for beginning work immediately.) A little ritual goes a long way!Rule 3: Internet and Phone stays off for the first hour.
After that, I can turn them back on, and destroy my productivity for the rest of the day. I found myself keeping them off until lunchtime most days, because... why would I want to break my momentum?
Side note: You are turning your phone off in the evening, right? For your Paper Book Reading Time? And moving it to a different part of the house? Right?
Study: Smartphones impair cognitive performance, even when switched off.
I later heard basically the same setup was called Monk Mode or Billionaire Morning Routine or whatever, and it made me laugh so hard, because they sell it as something so STOIC, so manly, while I invented it because I couldn’t even muster a single iota of will.
I have no will, but I must win. So I just designed around it.
I later designed miniGTD for similar reasons. Take a look, if you like the idea of GTD, but not the reality of it. (Actually, I think that’s most GTD users, lol)
But yeah. It turns out the way to win is to not fail. And it turns out failure is just... specific branches on the possibility tree of your lie. You can just ... cut them off. Maybe you should go do that.
Like, some time soon, maybe? I don’t know ... maybe you got a while...
That’s all folks!
Join us next time in Part 3, where I’m gonna talk about how I tried doing 50 game jams in a year but ended up at the banana factory.