I find myself frequently resorting to “band-aid happiness.”
What’s band-aid happiness? Here’s what it looks like for me: A glass of wine after a long day. Just one more episode of The New Girl. Video games. Seeking the thrill of getting to know a new friend rather than cultivating the deep closeness of a long time friendship. Scrolling endlessly through Facebook and Twitter feeds. Refreshing my inbox to see if anyone’s sent anything new (but not responding to the 10 recent unreads waiting for my attention).
Earlier tonight I was sitting reading the excellent Resonate by Nancy Duarte and was suddenly overcome by a feeling of calm contentedness. I’d been struggling through a week of overwhelm and rush and had been only half-reading while running through my open to-do’s in my head. Finally, something in my brain clicked over and I gave in to reality: the only thing I need to be doing right now is reading. All that other stuff is just noise.
And it was like a warm breeze blew over my heart. I noticed my breath and took three deep ones in and out. I realized I’d been hiding from doing just one thing at a time — wrapping myself in an invisibility cloak of busy-ness and rushing from alarm clock to bedtime every single day.
We spend so much time dashing from task to task. What if we stopped more and listened? Listened to our own heartbeats; to our breath. To the voice inside saying “Please, stop, I’m tired. I’m not happy.” That tiny voice is drowned out by the cacophony of social media, TV, video games, meetings, Slack, animated gifs, cat videos… a neverending waterfall that, because it makes us laugh or cry or think, tricks us into believing we’re connecting to our real internal desires.
But internal desires don’t work that way: you can’t satisfy them with external stimuli. Instead, that path is paved through introspection. And introspection requires quiet. It requires single-tasking and getting to know and understand that tiny little voice.
Your voice may remind you how much you love to read. Or write. Or put together puzzles. Or create stop-motion videos starring household objects.
Maybe your internal voice really is calling out for just one more episode of Orange is the New Black. Just make sure it’s not the reward center of your brain jonesing for another quick hit.
Take the time to find out what makes you calm. Reenergize yourself by committing to those activities for longer than feels comfortable. Our modern attention spans are shatteringly short — break out of the cycle by spending thirty full minutes immersed in one of these activities. See how it feels, then re-enter the fray renewed and (hopefully) happier.
The other day I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Ask Me Another, and lucked into hearing one of my favorite creators talking about his process. The special guest that episode was John Darnielle, a staggeringly-prolific artist and brain behind one of my favorite bands, the Mountain Goats. Just to put his creative exploits in perspective, he’s put out 15 albums under the Mountain Goats name alone since 1994, not to mention all the other creative projects he’s been part of. That’s a lot of songwriting.
During the interview portion of the podcast, host Opheara Isenberg asked Darnielle about the release of his novel, Wolf in White Van. Specifically, she asked him if his creative process in writing felt different from his creative process in making music. Darnielle responded:
“For me, I just like to make stuff. And there’s a sense in which the thing you make, the form it takes, is really only the aftereffect of the creative thing you did. Whether it’s a song or a book or a conversation you have at dinner — the creative thing is what happened in the process, not the relic of it that’s the event.”
— John Darnielle
This resonated with me, because to me it cuts to the heart of why we do the things we do.
Am I writing a blog post because I want there to be one more blog post in the world? Because I want to meet a quota or publishing schedule or have something to promote on Twitter?
Or am I writing because the act of writing itself is enjoyable, and the process of thinking things through on paper is valuable to me?
I like to think it’s mostly the latter. But there’s definitely some of the former in there.
I’m going to put a stake in the ground and say it’s almost impossible to create anything remarkable if you’re focused on the first thing. If all you’re looking for is the finished product, getting up the motivation and inspiration to create something special will be pretty tough.
I had the same feeling reading On Writing by Stephen King. King talks about the urge to set up “just the right space” for writing, with the perfect desk and the perfect beam of sunlight pouring in through the perfectly-placed skylight — and nothing coming out. King says, “Life isn’t a support structure for art. It’s the other way around.”
Getting caught up in the accessories of your craft is as bad as focusing only on producing the end product. It’s fundamentally about an exterior perception rather than an interior motive.
“I should have this desk because this is a writer’s desk.”
“I should write this blog post because my calendar told me so.”
Rather, creative motivation should come from a desire to do the act of creating, rather than to achieve the creative outcome. That’s what I mean by the question “Do you like to make stuff or do you just like stuff?”
“I don’t care where I write, I just need to get these words on paper.”
“I have something I’d like to think through; maybe a blog post is the right place to do that.”
I find this liberating. I can write without caring what comes out on the other side; I can scribble and doodle in a notebook without it being a finished drawing. There is value in the act of doing, perhaps more value than in the product itself. Every time we create we build up more creative energy to do more, better, faster, or differently next time.
“The creative thing is what happened in the process.” Thanks, John.
Everyone has a different process for getting great work done. As digital marketers, almost all our work happens in the digital space – whether managing a social media account (or a few), editing a company blog, or making a brand video. But behind the scenes, we might be working a little more analog. That is: more with paper and less with pixels.
I first heard the concept of “planning analog” in the great book Content Rules by Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman. Inspired by Garr Reynolds (Presentation Zen, 2008), they advocate: “Don’t start by firing up PowerPoint; start by mapping out an outline of both your story and quick ideas for accompanying charts and photos. You can use Word, a notebook, a whiteboard, or chalk on the sidewalk.”
I’m big on planning analog. Even though I grew up typing things out on a keyboard, it’s always easier for me to focus my thoughts on paper. I was curious how other creative people organize their digital lives in the analog world, so I went digging around the Internet for inspiration. The result is this roundup of the 11 most interesting ways to organize our brains in the real world before we start making magic in the digital one.
This method kept popping up during my research for this post – it’s a popular one. Designer Ryder Carroll devised this system to organize his own life through trial and error over many years, and is now sharing it with the world. The Bullet Journal method is a simple, organized system for quickly getting down the things you want to record. Whether it’s what happened today, what you need to get done, things you’re curious about, or personal musings, the Bullet Journal can hold it all. The full system is quite complex and worth looking into if you’re in need of a paper-based, tangible life-planner (and who isn’t?).
This rule, from Alex Cavoulacos at The Muse, keeps our daily to-do lists realistic. One of the problems I have with my daily task lists is they seem endless. The 1-3-5 rule makes my lists more achievable.
It goes like this: You get to pick 1 big thing you’re going to do today; 3 medium things; and 5 small things. It can be really, really tempting to pile on the Big Things. But be realistic. As Alex says:
“Like it or not, you only have so many hours in the day and you’re only going to get a finite number of things done.”
Alex also recommends writing out your 1-3-5 note at the end of your day to keep your groggy morning self focused when you get into the office. (Almost) better than coffee!
David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner is a helpful system for visualizing your tasks and the time required to complete them. The Planner gives you room to prioritize three tasks for the day, with 15-minute increment bubbles for you to allocate your time. Seah touts the Planner as “serving as an anchor for your mind” by reminding you what you should be working on and how long everything should take. It also prevents task overload by bucketing projects three at a time, keeping you (like the 1-3-5 Rule) realistic about what you can accomplish.
Sketchnotes are for the creative in all of us. “Getting more creative” is 100% about just creating more. Making our everyday note-taking more creative—sketch-based, even—pushes us to create more in all aspects of our lives. Push your boundaries, let go, and actually remember more from the notes you take with this method. Try it!
The Behance Action Method is an idea organizational process that helps people retain more of the great ideas that come out of brainstorming sessions. Use the lefthand page, a free-form dot-matrix setup, for brainstorming, and capture salient points or “action items” on the righthand page. Simple but powerful, you can use their special notebooks or repurpose one of your own.
This one hearkens back to before most of us had even heard of hipsters – 2004. It’s the simplest idea on this list: Get a pile of index cards. Clip ‘em with a binder clip. That’s it. Merlin Mann, who coined the term, points out you could color-code the index cards if you need to get fancy. But the main point is just to keep notes, keep ‘em handy, keep ‘em simple.
I really like this simple, Post-It Note based time management map from Jordan at Create Like Crazy. She has four sections – Categories, Tasks, This Week, and This Month. Each category gets its own Post-It color and tasks are collected in, you guessed it, the Tasks area. She can then move tasks over to This Month and subdivide them into Monday-Friday in the This Week section. Straightforward, visual, organized. Works for me!
Robert Krulwich (of Radiolab) wrote a wonderful piece about Leonardo DaVinci’s notebook, including his to-do list. Thanks to the illustration abilities of Wendy MacNaughton, it looked something like this:
He had a million things going on! And was, as we know, astoundingly creative (and productive). Krulwich uses the example of DaVinci’s brain-dump to talk about the virtues of uninhibited curiosity.
“Minds that break free, that are compelled to wander, can sometimes achieve more than those of us who are more inhibited.”
Many of us have creative roles that are also bound by productivity goals. If you’re ever feeling stymied by the pressure of a deadline, shake off some of those inhibitions and let your mind wander. You might find something amazing.
This one is definitely my favorite – and not just for the slick soundtrack. This video showcasing the first prototype was released in 2010 and I haven’t been able to find any updates online, so it might never become widely available. But it is a really cool idea. These designers built a set of building blocks that connect to your laptop via USB to create a hybrid tangible-technical time-tracking system. Bricks are color-coded for work, play, and personal tasks, with different sizes for different chunks of time. As you work (or play, or tackle personal tasks), you build up your stack in the real world and sync it to your computer. You’re left with an electronic record of how you spent your days, and a little bit of joy every time you add a new block. I’ll sign up for any system that lets me feel like I’m back in kindergarten for a few minutes every day.
The snazzy folks at 3M launched a new app that “captures physical brainstorm sessions, storyboards, project plans, and other projects and makes them digital.” It even stores each note separately, so you can continue your physical brainstorming session – moving notes around, re-prioritizing, reorganizing – digitally. It looks pretty powerful and a much easier way to record brainstorming sessions than typing all our notes into a third-party software.
Ok, this one blew my mind. I know I’ve already said several of these are my favorite, but this one is just so dang cool. Very clever designers built a LEGO wall calendar that syncs to Google Calendar to organize their activities in their firm. A video’s worth 1,000,000 words – watch it.
Writing is hard. Like, really hard. Writers are expected not only to put words together in a coherent order, but also to make deft strategic choices about which words to use to make a sentence POP into the forefront of our readers’ attention. We have to draw readers in, tempting them to read the next sentence. And the next. Possibly all the way to the end.
All this is very tough, and, like anything difficult, requires a ton of practice. I’ve written previously about my favorite “writer’s writer,” Ernest Hemingway, and I find myself now writing again about him, writing about writing. Here are his thoughts on his daily work, from a wonderful interview he gave The Paris Reviewin 1958.
“When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. ”
— ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Many writing coaches will offer this one piece of advice to aspiring writers: write every day. Stephen King wrote in his memoir On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
Since it’s the time of year to pick up new habits and routines, I wanted to spend this post outlining how to develop a daily writing practice — whether you think of yourself as a “writer” or not. (As Ann Handley so astutely put it, in Everybody Writes.)
How to Establish a Habit
Habit expert Charles Duhigg writes that there are three components to any habit: the routine, the reward, and the cue. Whether you’re looking to break a habit or build a new one, you need to consider each of those components separately to effect a real behavior change.
THE ROUTINE
In this case, we need to establish the routine. For me, the routine is sitting at my desk and writing without distractions. If I had a perfect setup, I would be able to write without distractions or meandering off into the internet for a predictable amount of time — 30 minutes or an hour.
Part of what I’ve been working into my routine is a form of aural conditioning. I got this idea from an interview with Shane Snow, founder of Contently, recently posted on Copyblogger. In the interview Shane says, “I listen to a single song on repeat over and over again to simultaneously create psychological movement and white noise. I’m about 500 plays into Timbaland’s “The Way I Are” and am considering finding a new track.” (FYI — that’s almost 30 hours of straight Timbaland.)
I have a Spotify playlist called “Work on Repeat” of 10-15 songs I’ve found work well in repetition. I usually pick one and listen to that for a few days at a time, and move on to another.
Maybe your new writing routine starts out much smaller than this — maybe your goal is to just write 50 words without stopping. Then bump it up to 100, 200, 500, 1,000.
The next steps to turning this routine into a habit are nailing down how to get yourself to start, and how to reward yourself afterward.
THE CUE
Duhigg writes that habits are triggered by five primary cues — location, time, emotional state, other people, and the immediately preceding action. BrainPickings recently published a great article on the psychology of writing, citing a 1994 work by cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg on that same topic. Kellogg wrote that certain factors served as powerful cognitive triggers for effective creative work: “The room, time of day, or ritual selected for working may enable or even induce intense concentration or a favorable motivational or emotional state.”
I’m working on establishing a few different cues for my writing practice. The first is time: I try to write before I go to work, shortly after I wake up and make a cup of coffee. Sitting at my desk with my coffee and my music-on-repeat has gone a long way to establishing “now is the time to write” in the dusty corners of my brain.
THE REWARD
Habits stick because our brains learn to associate something good with the routine we’ve established. The reward can be as simple as a pat on the back or a feeling of accomplishment. James Clear recommends giving yourself an emotional high-five after a successful execution of your new routine: “Give yourself some credit and enjoy each success.”
For me, my reward for writing for an hour is two-fold: the feeling of accomplishment at having (briefly) defeated my short attention span, and the nice new chunk of written material I now have to work with. There’s always time for editing later — first, I just have to get the words on paper.
Get Writing!
Now we have the building blocks of a writing habit. But why should we set up this habit in the first place? Why not just write when we feel like it, and not force ourselves?
As I said at the top, writing is hard — and it doesn’t get easier, better, faster, or more fun just by wishing. We have to struggle through the crummy parts to get to something great. Ira Glass did an amazing series on storytelling that includes this advice to beginning creatives:
“For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. … We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work.”
So go out there. Start writing – just putting words together, one after another. Write down things you like that other people wrote; write down song lyrics. Write down favorite words. Make it a daily routine to write, and good things will follow.
I was just reading this great article on Copyblogger about becoming a more productive writer through planning and preparation. One point the author raised was the importance of setting up a consistent writing environment, whether it’s a physical space or a type of music or a preferred beverage.
I’m really into this idea. I love productivity hacks, and psychology hacks are even more fun. If there are ways to trick my brain into working better and getting more done, I’m on board.
As a kid I would go over to my dad’s house on weekends and make nachos. I would’ve eaten nachos – simple chips and mozzarella cheese nachos – for every meal, if they’d let me. To this day, my dad keeps nachos materials stocked in case I decide to drop by. We also had these amazing natural sodas – Blue Sky Root Beer – that I drank alongside my nachos, every time, without fail. Unsurprisingly, I now have a profound sensory association between these two foods, especially if I’m sitting in my dad’s kitchen. When I went away to college, my dad asked me how many times I’d made nachos already, and I had to tell him: “none.” That craving was so specifically tied to his house and that soda that it hadn’t even occurred to me that I could make nachos anywhere else.
So I know my brain is capable of wiring and rewiring based on environment – I just need to harness this power for good. Nachos are great, sure, but they’re not exactly making me a smarter or more productive marketer. As a remote worker, I’ve ended up establishing a “focus-and-produce” space in various coffee shops when I need to get out of the house. Ideally, I could set this up psychologically without having to commandeer an outlet at a café.
Solution: Write every day, in the same place, with the same tools. I’ve started blocking off hours on my work schedule to dedicate to writing projects like blogs and ebooks, and will try to cordon off part of my mornings for personal writing. I’ll turn off the internet, get my cup of coffee, and turn on something good on Spotify. Let’s do this.
