Creative People and Procrastination

Are you a dreamer, or are you a doer?

I would say that I’m a reconverted dreamer.

My brain produces a never-ending stream of ideas: products to launch, systems to put together, businesses to start… Once I am past the delectable phase of playing around with ideas, and once the work has to actually get done, life usually kicks me in the face.

You have probably felt it too. I think this is very common for creative people.

You are sitting in front of a blank page, some piece of code, or a whiteboard, and all you can feel is this anxiety and that internal resistance. Something seems to be pulling you away from what you know you have to do.

You may have 100 rational reasons to get down to business now, but somehow, you have a 101 reasons to delay it for just one more minute.

I have pinned down a few reasons why this keeps happening. I hope that this can help you develop methods and processes to overcome these walls, and allow your creative juices to flow.

I have identified 3 main causes for procrastination:

• Fear of failure or negative feedback
• A high level of uncertainty
• Too many distractions

Fear of failure

This one will be familiar to you if you are perfectionist by nature.

You may have learned through your formative years that perfection was the only acceptable outcome. You may have been praised when you brought home a perfect grade, and dismissed for anything subpar. You may have been told that you were “smart”, or “talented”, rather than hard-working as a kid.

When the outcome is valued more than the process during our formative years, we become paralyzed in our adult life.

We learn that succeeding is good, and that failing is obviously bad. We learn that intelligent and talented people succeed, and that stupid people fail. So we do anything not to appear like a loser. We avoid getting into the arena altogether.

Social media isn’t helping either.

When you browse your feed, keep in mind that it is made up of the top 0.1% (if that) of the best content in the world. If you think “I have to meet that standard, otherwise my thoughts/projects are not worthy of being shared”, you will never share any of your work. As such, you will never actually improve.

Too afraid of being invisible. Too afraid of negative feedback. Waiting to be competent enough to be propelled straight to the top.

So you never iterate. You keep aiming at grander ideas that you never see through, because perfection and the absence of criticism are the only acceptable outcome.

Remedy

• Lower your standards.
• Be willing to lose, because this is how you learn.
• Don’t take yourself so seriously
• Treat everything you do as an experiment: feedback, negative or positive, is an extremely important metric

High level of uncertainty

You may be trying to bite off more than you can chew. Or you may simply be trying to chew it the wrong way.

Let me explain.

If you are very creative, your ideas are not always anchored in reality. This is where creativity comes from: your ability to temporarily break away from the constraints of the real-world in order to think freely, feel freely, and connect dots in a broader way.

In the real-world though, your ideas have to be grounded in reality.

• Material and physical constraints
• Time and space
• Practical execution

All of these are very important to bring any project to life.

When something feels very uncertain, it gives rise to anxiety. We can’t see an obvious path forward, only some sort of dense, unsettling fog.

Instead of facing that fog, we procrastinate.

Remedy

There are several fixes for this. The first one is to?aim for less ambitious projects and ideas.

If you lower your standards, your ideas should be simpler to execute. Only when you have successfully brought dozens of simple ideas to completion, can you think about aiming for more ambitious ideas. At some point however, you will have to tackle larger-scale projects.

In that case, you should aim to?manage your expectations, and focus on the process.

Thinking that “you have to make x amount of progress in the next y hours” is an unrealistic target for most complex projects.

You will reach a point where you don’t know how to do something, and you will have to learn a new skill. Even worse, you may reach a point where?you don’t even know what you don’t know.

You have no idea what you should learn because you don’t even have enough knowledge about the field surrounding your idea, especially in the early stages.

If you don’t know how to do something,?take a step back, and learn the skill. If you don’t even know what you don’t know,?take a two step backs and focus on getting to know the field.

What has already been done, what existing solutions or approaches are available, what concepts do you have to investigate? Paint a landscape surrounding your project until the map clears up in front of your eyes.

Too many distractions

In the age of social media and unlimited information, there is always something else to be doing.

There are several types of distractions:

• Total distraction:?watching a movie, playing a game, doing something totally unproductive (there is a time and place for that, it is essential to have some balance)
• Intermittent distraction:?the insidious pull to check social media, check your notifications, because “something new might have popped up on my feed”.
• Divided attention:?the pull of your brain telling you that “you could be working on another equally important project instead”. This leaves you questioning whether you are being as productive as possible. Here again, perfect is the enemy of done.

Remedy

Here are a few prescriptions to deal with distractions:

• Total distraction

Set out a clear divide between the time when you work and the time when you rest.

If you know that you should be working, close everything else and put your phone out of reach. Once this is done, do not jump straight into work.

Take 5 minutes to plan your next hour of work.

What are the priorities? What are the most atomic steps you have to take? This process can take more than 5 minutes if you are in a particularly fuzzy period.

Prioritize and execute.

• Intermittent distraction

To put it bluntly:?nothing important ever happens on social media.

There is no single post or news that can’t wait for a few hours for you to see it. We end up being over-connected, and we develop an addiction to that constant stimulation. Social media has created an artificial FOMO (fear of missing out). It’s not real.

Your task should be your priority.

• Divided attention

This is another interesting cop out.

As soon as you meet a roadblock on project 1, you may try to talk yourself into doing something else instead. Either project 2, or cleaning your room, sending unimportant emails…

Anything to feel productive while delaying the hard part of the work, hoping that it will somehow solve itself.

There are times to push, and times to pull back. Sometimes, hard problems really require taking a step back, sleeping on it, and coming back the next day.

Other times, you just have to tell yourself:?“There is nothing more important on the planet for me to be doing at this moment”. It sounds dramatic, but you have to make your current task a life or death situation. Everything else should become noise.

When you become fully engaged is when you get your best work done. Work also stops feeling like work, it becomes play. Remove any sense of urgency, or external anxiety, and dive fully into the task.

Focus on one goal at a time.

Conclusion

Procrastination is usually just a signal that something is wrong in your:

• Belief system
• Expectations
• Processes

Keep in mind that any task you start will come with an initial resistance. It is very difficult to get in a flow state at the snap of a finger.

I encourage you to experiment with routines such as:

• Planning out the work of the day in the morning
• Working in timed sessions and defining clear objectives for each session (pomodoro method, but keep going if the creative juices are flowing)
• Periodically zooming back and evaluating the “unknowns” to clear through the fog
• Taking a full break when you feel the need for one
• Telling yourself that there is nothing more important than the task at hand every time your attention wanes and the temptation to “check something else” increases. It’s an invaluable skill to develop (no-go circuit)

In a lot of my previous positions, I was able to do a week’s worth of work in less than 10-12 hours. This estimation was based on my output vs. my peers’ output.

This is simply because 2 hours of laser focused work are better than 8 hours of distracted work a day.

Anytime you feel this anxiety rising, or this resistance to the task, ask yourself these questions:

• What am I feeling?
• What is it about the work that I am dreading/uncertain about?
• How can I dispel this uncertainty?
• What am I using as a cop out to avoid the hard task?
• How can I minimize this reliance and focus on the task?

Cop outs can be sneaky.

I know that I've used physical exercise to avoid doing mental work and solving hard problems. Sure, it's still healthy and beneficial, but in my case, it was a misallocation of my resources. Your case may be different.

You are not a robot, and you are not meant to have a linear, measurable output for each hour of work. You are not meant to work continuously and make every single hour of your life as productive as possible.

There will be periods to do shadow work, and periods to do visible work. Periods of rest, periods of grind.

Be very realistic with yourself. Put systems in place to dispel uncertainty and make gradual progress no matter what.