7 ms·

Don't worry about what this article talks about. If you're a writer, or an artist, or a musician, etc and are having trouble getting things done, the solution i

by kdamken 10y ago

Don't worry about what this article talks about. If you're a writer, or an artist, or a musician, etc and are having trouble getting things done, the solution is as simple as this: Set a time slot everyday where you will sit down and do nothing but work on creating your art. Doesn't matter if it's good or bad, your only job is to sit there and create for the whole time period. That's the key, is consistently trying to do it. I highly recommend reading the The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, he goes into this a lot more - https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1936891026/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/War-Art-Through-Creative-Battles/dp/1... He also talks about the concept of "Resistance", which is basically a force of nature that's works against you getting things done, and that gets stronger the closer you are towards doing work that is meaningful to you.

ggambetta 10y ago
Yep, I agree with this. I wrote my first novel during my daily commute (40 minutes each way), and part of the trick was getting into the habit of opening my laptop as soon as I sat down. I also discovered a lot about writer's block. I wrote about the whole thing here: https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-novel-during-my-daily-commute-e1d02c9447b9 https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-nov... (the companion article about the open source pipeline to get it published was discussed in HN earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- littleweep 10y ago
  Very interesting! Would love to see your Dan Brown novel scene breakdown spreadsheet out of curiosity if you were open to sharing it.
salemh 10y ago
I'm an amateur writer / hobbyist. Having had a decade+ practice of this back-and-forth procrastination with my writing, I'd add "blank page" to War of Art and your excellent comment. "Blank Page" refers to having a separate notebook, or open document page on your computer, that you write why you don't want to write, during your time period. If I don't want to write, I write that: "I don't feel like writing today. It's not going to mean anything, or I'm bored with the story. Today wasn't that good of a day.." etc. Eventually, it dumps the things distracting you, and after five minutes I'm typically back into writing my actual work. Creative endeavors/procrastination has always been interesting to me, as I haven't had an issue dumping 90-120 hours into different employers, but have the issue with my own writing. This is also a tool used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in various forms of use, namely, sleep. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes you need to dump everything in your brain on paper (which many times turns into a huge to-do list).
- barkingcat 10y ago
  Both of these are excellent ideas! I'll try them out!
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  This is very interesting. I'm going to give this a try for when I procrastinate at work.
- rpazyaquian 10y ago
  An important thing to note: I wouldn't call this a fool-proof way of getting creative, necessarily. I tried this just now, and writing down my concerns and "stoppages" actually brought up some pretty good points as to why not to bother. I tried this for gamedev, just for some background. I've been putting off starting some sort of one-off game in Unity even though people scream at me "just make something!!". I thought about why I was hesitating to do so, and wrote down a Blank Page. Here's a few notable things I came up with: --- > It's too hard on my own. Games are multimedia projects. They incorporate audio, video, input, networking, etc. Game development teams are composed of experts in each of the fields the game touches. It's like making a movie, and making an entire movie on your own is somewhere between extremely difficult and laughably impossible. > It involves a lot of planning. In order to make games the "right" way, you need to design the right way from the very beginning. There's a lot of prep work ("preproduction") that involve determining gameplay systems, art and sound direction, and a whole bunch of other things in advance. > It's not something I already know how to do. True, nobody is born knowing how to make a game. But that just means you need to gain the skills in order to do so, which involves learning said skills, which involves time and effort. Therefore... > It's a big time investment. Making a game is in fact a significant time investment. Even if you're offloading graphics and netcode work to someone or something else, you still have to write gameplay code, playtest, debug, redesign, and iterate. Games can and often do take on the order of years to develop. And even outside of developing the actual game itself, the skills needed to even start (e.g. programming, game design, art, etc.) are things that people spend their entire lives mastering. > I won't really be able to make something worthwhile. Even if you do spend your free time putting your game together to the point where you're happy with its polish and development, it can still ultimately be an uninteresting failure - in which case, all that time and effort is arguably time not well spent. That's a huge blow, especially in a day and age where free time is at a premium. This makes trying to make a game a much less appealing prospect. And even if someone can make something worthwhile, it'd be after a few games that aren't as great anyway, so that time and effort spent multiplies. --- Writing this down actually helped me put my concerns into words: games are not single-person endeavors, even for relatively simple ones. Books can be written by a single person since they only touch upon a very specific subject and field that's reasonable for a single person to handle, but games are a very different beast that tie together many different disciplines. To put it in software development terms, books are comparable to web apps and command-line utilities, while games are more comparable to operating systems and enterprise software. That's not to say the Blank Page exercise isn't worth it, not at all - it's very helpful for organizing your thoughts and for self-reflection, and you can see how it helped me. But sometimes, if you procrastinate so much over doing something, the reality is that you might just not want to do it in the first place.
haraball 10y ago
John Cleese talks about the same as you're saying in his lecture on creativity: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creativity-1991/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-crea... The videos in that link seems to be down, but the whole talk is worth a watch: https://vimeo.com/121544005 https://vimeo.com/121544005
feklar 10y ago
Mason Curry also wrote a book about artists and their schedules http://masoncurrey.com/ http://masoncurrey.com/
ramblerman 10y ago
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. -- From "Art and Fear"
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  See also T.P. Wright's Law governing the rate of process improvement with the volume of production. This focuses on labour input, not quality output, but is on the order of 10-15% with each doubling of output. Good discussion and references here: http://tikalon.com/blog/blog.php?article=2013/technology_progress http://tikalon.com/blog/blog.php?article=2013/technology_pro... J. Doyne Farmer discusses this extensively in his work (referenced above).
  - i000 10y ago
    Another example is how patient outcomes improve with the size of the healthcare facility a.k.a patient volumes e.g. http://www.mexicobariatricsurgerycenters.com/analysis-bariatric-hospitals-surgeons.php http://www.mexicobariatricsurgerycenters.com/analysis-bariat...
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Interesting. I'm familiar with the concept and have been for decades, though I don't know that I'd previously seen actual data. A sixfold difference in mortality outcomes strikes me as pretty significant. Usually you'd want to see a caseload severity index when comparing data such as these, though I suspect for elective surgery that isn't a major contributing factor. You're making me want to dig deeper into this area of study. Thanks.
JohnStrange 10y ago
I have no troubles with writing. When I start a new novel, I start with the plot and quickly lay out each chapter by starting it with 1-2 summary paragraphs, which are later discarded. Then I simply write until the novel is finished. I write only in cafés, so watching other people is my main distraction, but surfing the net and checking emails is also nice from time to time. Procrastination is an important part of writing, I don't see what the problem is with it. Are there still writers who are paid by page/minute? Personally, I don't trust machine gun writers' writing very much. Whether it's creative or scientific writing, nobody can think that fast, and producing good texts takes a lot of time, corrections and rewriting anyway. Now if I only knew how to sell my German Sci-Fi novels and make at least a little bit of money from them. That's the real problem. :-/
- mkaziz 10y ago
  Can't you sell them on Amazon?
  - JohnStrange 10y ago
    Of course, I'll do that with one of them very soon. Not that I will sell many copies without marketing... Sadly, in the German book market Sci-Fi is almost dead. The reason for this is not so bad, though. There are so many outstanding English writers that originals and a few translations here and there cover almost the entire program segments of the traditional publishers. Unfortunately, Amazon is not the ideal solution either. They are kind of evil and universally hated by bookstores. It feels a bit like selling your soul to the devil.
- throwanem 10y ago
  A break here and there isn't a problem; I wouldn't even call that procrastination. Never starting, or starting too late to do the job right - that is the problem.
spaceisballer 10y ago
I also second that book. I think the other possibility that people who are struggling with getting things done is maybe they like the idea of something more than actually doing it. I came to that realization when it came to programming. I discussed with one of my teachers (who also happens to be a life coach) my struggles, and when he suggested maybe I just like the idea of being a programmer more than actually wanting to be one. It definitely got me to think about things. Now I'm just spending more time learning about what I'm good at and focusing on my strengths.
6stringmerc 10y ago
You're completely spot on about consistency. I was told long ago that when practicing guitar (scales, ideas, etc) it's important to actually focus on the activity, not just half-way paying attention while watching TV or something. The focus made the connection, and from there growth and results came forward. After 20+ years of guitar, not as my source of income, granted, I gave the Eric Clapton method (myth?) a try: Put it down for 6 months. That was really refreshing. Callouses come back. Also, totally a personal experience thing, but I've tended to favor music creation when in "cheerful" head space (usually summer) and gravitate more toward writing projects when in "downer" like conditions (usually winter). They barely overlap, and the pattern has taken me years to notice, but it's there. I've frequently felt like creativity in my realm is not often controllable, but more like an eruption to be harnessed. Thus the discipline and "making time" for hobby-like efforts in the creative realm is where the real effort and hang-ups tend to happen for me.
jsprogrammer 10y ago
>That's the key, is consistently trying to do it. Laziness is a virtue; at least among programmers. "Writers" just use different language. Writing to say you write is just creating needless noise at best, and perhaps a kind of technical debt at the worser ends. If you have something to write, write it. If you don't, you don't (because you are doing something else).

by kdamken 10y ago

ggambetta 10y ago

Yep, I agree with this. I wrote my first novel during my daily commute (40 minutes each way), and part of the trick was getting into the habit of opening my laptop as soon as I sat down. I also discovered a lot about writer's block. I wrote about the whole thing here: https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-novel-during-my-daily-commute-e1d02c9447b9 https://medium.com/@gabrielgambetta/how-i-wrote-my-first-nov... (the companion article about the open source pipeline to get it published was discussed in HN earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12311200)

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
littleweep 10y ago
Very interesting! Would love to see your Dan Brown novel scene breakdown spreadsheet out of curiosity if you were open to sharing it.

salemh 10y ago

I'm an amateur writer / hobbyist. Having had a decade+ practice of this back-and-forth procrastination with my writing, I'd add "blank page" to War of Art and your excellent comment. "Blank Page" refers to having a separate notebook, or open document page on your computer, that you write why you don't want to write, during your time period. If I don't want to write, I write that: "I don't feel like writing today. It's not going to mean anything, or I'm bored with the story. Today wasn't that good of a day.." etc. Eventually, it dumps the things distracting you, and after five minutes I'm typically back into writing my actual work. Creative endeavors/procrastination has always been interesting to me, as I haven't had an issue dumping 90-120 hours into different employers, but have the issue with my own writing. This is also a tool used in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in various forms of use, namely, sleep. If you can't sleep at night, sometimes you need to dump everything in your brain on paper (which many times turns into a huge to-do list).

barkingcat 10y ago
Both of these are excellent ideas! I'll try them out!
DigitalJack 10y ago
This is very interesting. I'm going to give this a try for when I procrastinate at work.
rpazyaquian 10y ago
An important thing to note: I wouldn't call this a fool-proof way of getting creative, necessarily. I tried this just now, and writing down my concerns and "stoppages" actually brought up some pretty good points as to why not to bother. I tried this for gamedev, just for some background. I've been putting off starting some sort of one-off game in Unity even though people scream at me "just make something!!". I thought about why I was hesitating to do so, and wrote down a Blank Page. Here's a few notable things I came up with: --- > It's too hard on my own. Games are multimedia projects. They incorporate audio, video, input, networking, etc. Game development teams are composed of experts in each of the fields the game touches. It's like making a movie, and making an entire movie on your own is somewhere between extremely difficult and laughably impossible. > It involves a lot of planning. In order to make games the "right" way, you need to design the right way from the very beginning. There's a lot of prep work ("preproduction") that involve determining gameplay systems, art and sound direction, and a whole bunch of other things in advance. > It's not something I already know how to do. True, nobody is born knowing how to make a game. But that just means you need to gain the skills in order to do so, which involves learning said skills, which involves time and effort. Therefore... > It's a big time investment. Making a game is in fact a significant time investment. Even if you're offloading graphics and netcode work to someone or something else, you still have to write gameplay code, playtest, debug, redesign, and iterate. Games can and often do take on the order of years to develop. And even outside of developing the actual game itself, the skills needed to even start (e.g. programming, game design, art, etc.) are things that people spend their entire lives mastering. > I won't really be able to make something worthwhile. Even if you do spend your free time putting your game together to the point where you're happy with its polish and development, it can still ultimately be an uninteresting failure - in which case, all that time and effort is arguably time not well spent. That's a huge blow, especially in a day and age where free time is at a premium. This makes trying to make a game a much less appealing prospect. And even if someone can make something worthwhile, it'd be after a few games that aren't as great anyway, so that time and effort spent multiplies. --- Writing this down actually helped me put my concerns into words: games are not single-person endeavors, even for relatively simple ones. Books can be written by a single person since they only touch upon a very specific subject and field that's reasonable for a single person to handle, but games are a very different beast that tie together many different disciplines. To put it in software development terms, books are comparable to web apps and command-line utilities, while games are more comparable to operating systems and enterprise software. That's not to say the Blank Page exercise isn't worth it, not at all - it's very helpful for organizing your thoughts and for self-reflection, and you can see how it helped me. But sometimes, if you procrastinate so much over doing something, the reality is that you might just not want to do it in the first place.

haraball 10y ago

John Cleese talks about the same as you're saying in his lecture on creativity: https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creativity-1991/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-crea... The videos in that link seems to be down, but the whole talk is worth a watch: https://vimeo.com/121544005 https://vimeo.com/121544005

feklar 10y ago

Mason Curry also wrote a book about artists and their schedules http://masoncurrey.com/ http://masoncurrey.com/

ramblerman 10y ago

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. -- From "Art and Fear"

dredmorbius 10y ago
See also T.P. Wright's Law governing the rate of process improvement with the volume of production. This focuses on labour input, not quality output, but is on the order of 10-15% with each doubling of output. Good discussion and references here: http://tikalon.com/blog/blog.php?article=2013/technology_progress http://tikalon.com/blog/blog.php?article=2013/technology_pro... J. Doyne Farmer discusses this extensively in his work (referenced above).
- i000 10y ago
  Another example is how patient outcomes improve with the size of the healthcare facility a.k.a patient volumes e.g. http://www.mexicobariatricsurgerycenters.com/analysis-bariatric-hospitals-surgeons.php http://www.mexicobariatricsurgerycenters.com/analysis-bariat...
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Interesting. I'm familiar with the concept and have been for decades, though I don't know that I'd previously seen actual data. A sixfold difference in mortality outcomes strikes me as pretty significant. Usually you'd want to see a caseload severity index when comparing data such as these, though I suspect for elective surgery that isn't a major contributing factor. You're making me want to dig deeper into this area of study. Thanks.

JohnStrange 10y ago

I have no troubles with writing. When I start a new novel, I start with the plot and quickly lay out each chapter by starting it with 1-2 summary paragraphs, which are later discarded. Then I simply write until the novel is finished. I write only in cafés, so watching other people is my main distraction, but surfing the net and checking emails is also nice from time to time. Procrastination is an important part of writing, I don't see what the problem is with it. Are there still writers who are paid by page/minute? Personally, I don't trust machine gun writers' writing very much. Whether it's creative or scientific writing, nobody can think that fast, and producing good texts takes a lot of time, corrections and rewriting anyway. Now if I only knew how to sell my German Sci-Fi novels and make at least a little bit of money from them. That's the real problem. :-/

mkaziz 10y ago
Can't you sell them on Amazon?
- JohnStrange 10y ago
  Of course, I'll do that with one of them very soon. Not that I will sell many copies without marketing... Sadly, in the German book market Sci-Fi is almost dead. The reason for this is not so bad, though. There are so many outstanding English writers that originals and a few translations here and there cover almost the entire program segments of the traditional publishers. Unfortunately, Amazon is not the ideal solution either. They are kind of evil and universally hated by bookstores. It feels a bit like selling your soul to the devil.
throwanem 10y ago
A break here and there isn't a problem; I wouldn't even call that procrastination. Never starting, or starting too late to do the job right - that is the problem.

spaceisballer 10y ago

I also second that book. I think the other possibility that people who are struggling with getting things done is maybe they like the idea of something more than actually doing it. I came to that realization when it came to programming. I discussed with one of my teachers (who also happens to be a life coach) my struggles, and when he suggested maybe I just like the idea of being a programmer more than actually wanting to be one. It definitely got me to think about things. Now I'm just spending more time learning about what I'm good at and focusing on my strengths.

6stringmerc 10y ago

You're completely spot on about consistency. I was told long ago that when practicing guitar (scales, ideas, etc) it's important to actually focus on the activity, not just half-way paying attention while watching TV or something. The focus made the connection, and from there growth and results came forward. After 20+ years of guitar, not as my source of income, granted, I gave the Eric Clapton method (myth?) a try: Put it down for 6 months. That was really refreshing. Callouses come back. Also, totally a personal experience thing, but I've tended to favor music creation when in "cheerful" head space (usually summer) and gravitate more toward writing projects when in "downer" like conditions (usually winter). They barely overlap, and the pattern has taken me years to notice, but it's there. I've frequently felt like creativity in my realm is not often controllable, but more like an eruption to be harnessed. Thus the discipline and "making time" for hobby-like efforts in the creative realm is where the real effort and hang-ups tend to happen for me.

jsprogrammer 10y ago

>That's the key, is consistently trying to do it. Laziness is a virtue; at least among programmers. "Writers" just use different language. Writing to say you write is just creating needless noise at best, and perhaps a kind of technical debt at the worser ends. If you have something to write, write it. If you don't, you don't (because you are doing something else).