A Few Words Against Productivity

I have a confession to make.  I’m a productivity fetishist.  (Get your mind out of the gutter–I’m talking about the other definition).

I know what you’re saying.  ”What the heck does that mean?”

I read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People before I was 10.  I’ve got a whole shelf in my library devoted to titles like: The Power of Focus; The NOW Habit; Getting Things Done.  There’s a David Allen tattoo on my chest across my heart.

Okay, just kidding on that last one.  But I think you get the idea.

And while there’s nothing wrong with any of that, often it seems like productivity is a vice in my life.  For example, I always wait to do the dishes until the sink’s full.  Same with laundry; I may have plenty of dirty clothes to get in the wash, but as long as I’ve got clean clothes somewhere I’ll put it off.  For writing, I tend to wait for a deadline before setting off on a new story–if Writers of the Future didn’t have their quarterly deadline I’m pretty sure I’d never have anything to submit to them.

I’ve been this way all my life. College paper due? I’ll start it as late as possible.

Throughout my life I’ve tackled this problem as if it were Procrastination, but lately I’ve come to realize that’s only part of it.  I like the thrill of being massively productive.  That’s why I put  things off–not because I’d rather see what’s on TV (although I’d make an exception if Pushing Daisies was still on the air), but because I’d rather feel like I’m being insanely productive for a short period of time.

There are times in my writerly life that I’ve been very focused and productive without having a deadline poking me in the ribs.  Things like NaNoWriMo, for example.  Or when I wrote my partial and synopsis for Dave Wolverton’s novel writing workshop.  With these there’s not a deadline per se, but I’ve always succeeded in carving out a block of time in which I have nothing to do but write.  I’ve eliminated all other distractions from my life, taken time off of work–whatever it takes to devote myself completely to being insanely productive.

This is why, if you look back in the archives of this blog, you’ll see a lot of entries about absolutely crazy goals: NaNo; Mike’s July Writing Challenge; A Story a Day during the last Olympics.

I don’t believe in these goals any more.

This is new for me, so bear with me while I explain myself.

November was NaNoWriMo.  I’d been in touch with a few writing friends–most of them from last year’s Master Class–and had set a bunch of very productive goals for myself: I was going to write a play AND write two short stories a week.  At work, it looked to be kind of a down month with not a lot that absolutely had to be done. I’d cleared my plate.  Nothing was going to stop me from hitting these goals.

<sarcasm> Right.  </sarcasm>

First came the cold, which lingered for a week and became pneumonia.  While laid up I was unable to focus on anything.  I couldn’t read.  I had a hard time following story lines on TV shows. I tried to write, but after just a few minutes I’d start feeling antsy and jitery.  Can’t write–gotta blow my nose.  Gotta hack up a lung. What was I writing?  Oh yeah, it was… no, that wasn’t it.  Then my team at work got reassigned; another group was behind schedule and had an end-of-month deadline, so crank up the pressure and hold on to your hats.  A few family emergencies came up.

By the middle of the month I’d given up.  There was absolutely no way to meet my goals.  Productivity Fail.

I don’t regret it at all.  Here’s why:

As I was gaining lucidity and the ability to focus I had this insight about my “addiction” to productivity, and I realized that I’ve had the whole thing backwards throughout my life.  Productivity doesn’t matter.

Let me say that again:  Productivity doesn’t matter.

Oh sure, there are going to be times when there’s a deadline and I just have to get things done.  In the grand graph of time vs. stuff that gets finished, I’ll be able to look at the peaks and say, ‘Hey, I remember that deadline.  That was a crunch for sure.”  But if my life-graph is made up of peaks and valleys, I’m living life the wrong way.

It’s not about productivity.  It’s about consistency.

Or, as Dean Wesley Smith would say, “Do the math.”

In one of Dean’s lectures he breaks down what it takes to write a novel in a year.  Do the math.  I’ll wait here.   …….  Done?  Good.  250 words a day is easily doable, isn’t it?  I mean, that’s only 15-25 minutes, tops.  Want to write two books a year?  Spend half-an-hour to 45 minutes a day, and that dream can be yours.  I’d seen Dean break it down.  I believed it–after all, the math doesn’t lie.  But I was still so addicted to “insane productivity” that I didn’t really “get it.”  That failure of productivity in November may actually turn out to be one of the bigger blessings in my life.

And putting emphasis on being consistent works in all areas of life, not just in writing.  I won’t have to worry about when people might stop in for a visit if I’m consistent in getting those dishes done instead of waiting for the pile-up.

At this time of year, when so many are setting New Years Resolutions, I offer you this challenge:  Don’t set goals based on productivity. Be consistent instead.

“I want to lose 25 lbs. this year” is a productivity goal.  Don’t do it.  This is my goal: “I will exercise 5 days out of every week.”

“I will write at least 500 words a day.”

“I will have an empty sink three times a day.”

Take care of the consistency and productivity will take care of itself.

Brainstorms: Productive Obsessions

My friend and fellow Master Class graduate Mike Jasper propsed a day-by-day writing challenge for the month of July.  Before going any farther than that, let me just say this:  THANK YOU MIKE!!!

The past few months have been really interesting in the life of this writer.  I wish I could explain what happened–all I know is I stayed obsesssed with the idea of being a writer, but for some reason I had a really hard time actually getting down to writing.  It’s like the business side of things started winning out in my thoughts over the creative/productive side of being a writer, which is patently ridiculous if you think about it — there’s no writing business unless you have a product.

So, for some reason, I became obsessed with doing detail work–finding beta readers, getting latest updates on my writing software, mailing stuff that for whatever reason had yet to see the hands of an editor–everything but actually getting new words on the page.

Then along came Mike’s challenge.

I accepted the challenge, naturally–emailing the rest of the Master Class gang and saying I was going to shoot for 40,000 words during the month of July.  Now, when I’m really humming and in the groove, 40,000 words is still about a solid work-week of time.  When I’m in a slump I only get between 500-750 words an hour, so I figured I was looking at a week and a half of work (figuring I’d ramp up to full speed after the first calendar week of July and then go full-bore after that).

Enter LIFE.  You know, that big guy who wears a cowl and has a scythe.  Twin brother to DEATH, but LIFE attacks time and desire instead of life points.

Wham! literally the minute after I’d hit “send” on the email committing myself to Mike’s writing challenge, my manager at the day job called a meeting in which a bunch of new features were dumped on the team with the edict: “These need to be in the product that ships in 6 weeks — probably means we’ll be working overtime or weekends; whatever it takes to get it done.”

I decided not to let that stop me.  The crowd cheered my determination.  I stayed late at work during that first week or so, putting in a couple 12 hour days just to stay ahead of the curve and free up some time for later in the month.  One week in, only about 5K words written, but I was feeling pretty good about the rest of the month–with the exception that I was still at a slow pace on my writing speed.  Things hadn’t picked up for me yet.

Week 2 arrived.  Wham! I broke my glasses.  Right in the middle of the nose bridge.  Now, I’m pretty worthless when I can’t see what I’m doing.  Instead of writing that night I amused myself  with my broken glasses, holding each half by the ear piece and letting the lenses hang down like transparent feet, by doing the Charlie Chaplin dinner-roll dance.  For a little while my glasses were literally held together by tape and bailing wire and I had to adjust them every 30 seconds (no exaggeration) to keep them from falling off my face.  Week 2 ended with a visit to the eye doctor–new prescription and new glasses now on the way–and the discovery of a local jeweler who does eye glasses repair .

At my writers’ group meeting in the first week of July (we meet at the local Barnes & Nobel) I discovered a little book called Brainstorms, written by Eric Maisel.  Dr. Maisel builds on that oft heard premise that we don’t use our brains nearly enough.  His book’s purpose is to encourage people to cultivate “Productive Obsessions” or Brainstorms–something consciously chosen instead of the brain’s willy-nilly following of trends or interests as they happen upon us.  Much of what I read while waiting for my fellow writers’ to arrive that night rang true to me and I decided, along with Mike’s challenge, to spend the month cultivating a Productive Obsession about my writing.

Those who know me will probably be shocked by that statement.  After all, doesn’t Darren spend a lot of time writing already?  He’s working on a novel, isn’t he?  And he’s got several stories in the mail already, right?

Well… yes, but…

Like I said above, I’ve known something was a little off with my writing dreams for a while now.  Business side, mailing, seeking out good first-readers–no problem!  I’ve had a blast doing that kind of thing over the past couple months.  I even accepted an invite to sit on my first conference panel on writing.  Yet I didn’t even realize that none of that was really being productive.  Writers write.  I was living the life of an author.  Authors have written. Big difference.  And the transition from Writer to Author had been so subtle I hadn’t even noticed it.

So today at the day-job we demo’d the new features for the software and made the transition to debugging instead of developing new things.  I have repaired glasses on face and new glasses on order.  I gave myself permission to Obsess (productively) during any free time I had today about the stories I want to tell.  I turned off the car radio and used my commute to think Story! It was wonderful.  Any time I had even a few minutes to myself I reminded myself that I was Productively Obsessing and thought about my characters and the scenes I’m about to write.  I asked and answered a bunch of questions.

Despite the several thousand words i logged earlier this month, I’m proud to say that, as of today, once again I am a writer.

So thank you Mike!  And thank you Dr. Maisel!  Both of you provided exactly the spark I needed at exactly the right time.  I can’t wait to see how the rest of this month turns out.

So… how did it go with that whole Olympic thing?

Very well, actually. I learned a lot about myself as a writer. It’s funny, I always considered myself an advance-plotter, meaning I had to know where the story was headed before putting fingers to keyboard. The Olympics experiment proved me wrong. Several nights I’d sit down to write without any clue where a story might be headed. By the end of the first paragraph I’d know something about the point of view character, and that was enough of a jumping-off point to tell a whole story from it.

There were some lessons learned, though. First, going by word count was a bad idea. A couple of the stories completed during the experiment demanded to be much, much longer than they ended up, but because of the whole “Gold Medal” thing, I rushed the ending. When I do this again I won’t look at word count other than as a gauge of writing velocity.

The other thing was that–and I’m sorry to admit this–I put watching the Olympics ahead of writing a lot of the time. I wouldn’t start to write for the day until after the broadcast from Vancouver ended. Between that and some very long days at work I wasn’t getting a lot of sleep, and that hurt word production, too.

Also, the whole point thing–4 for gold, 2 for silver, 1 for bronze–didn’t pan out as expected. I did that to enhance my chances at staying in the “medal count” as if I were in competition with the countries competing in Vancouver; I was pretty sure of my ability to crank out a story a day.

Toward the end of the two weeks, though, I burned out. Lack of sleep played a big part of that. By the time that last Friday and Saturday of the Olympics rolled around I had a really hard time conjuring up the desire to keep writing. I’d proven my point — that I really could write a story a day– and I’d increased my writing velocity, so… Mission Accomplished.

Writing Oly’s: Day 12 Medal Report

Only a silver today, because the story fell short on word count.  This  was another dystopian sci-fi story titled, “The Older and the Past.”

Writing Oly’s: Day 11 Medal Report

I took Sunday off, as planned, and then I tried to make a major adjustment to my standard daily schedule for Monday and going forward from here. The change in timing threw everything off for a day, so I ended up missing Monday, too.

Started and finished tonight: Fish and Cut Bait, a 2100 word first person mainstream fiction piece.