Climbing a Mountain of Work – part 2/2
This is the second half of a series of tips for making headway on a BIG HUGE SCARY PROJECT. Check out part 1 for more great tips and a rundown of what the heck BIG HUGE PROJECT is anyway!
Take all your problems and break them apart
Be like the squirrel, girl, be like the squirrel
If you're climbing a mountain of constant, similar tasks, find a way to divide it into chunks. If it's a novel, break it into sections, chapters, or 500-word chunks. Write it all out in one big list:
Chatper 1
- 500-word chunk #1
- 500-word chunk #2
- 500-word chunk #3 ... etc. You might mis-estimate. no big deal.
Chapter 2
...
CROSS IT OFF WITH SATISFACTION WHENEVER YOU FINISH A NEW CHUNK.
The key is having a VISIBLE way to see your progress. It motivates you. BIG HUGE PROJECTS are often so big they fall out of our field of vision. That makes the goal always feel soooo farrr offff.
When I had to draw in 200 artist editions of my book, I divided it all into 15 book chunks (10 was too easy, 20 too scary). I set up the little piles on my table, and brought them 15 at a time to my nest. When I finished 15 books, I wrapped them up for shipping then got the next batch. What was an invisible, impossibly massive task before now had a visible progress bar and that was enough to keep me motivated. I met what seemed like an impossible goal!
Make it Public
The great thing about having a blog or a webcomic is- compared to a book that you write by yourself in isolation-you can publicly show when you've finished a chunk and get feedback. It's AMAZINGLY motivating!! Once you've chunked your work out, find a group that cares, and a way to announce it.
Even if you don't want to show the world your rough drafts, sometimes it helps just to update your status: "finished 3 500-word chunks today! Onward to chapter 4! 
". A few "likes" reinforce that good feeling make it easier to repeat the feat tomorrow.
Dance Break
Sitting and concentrating for hours can get exhausting. I like to find a really upbeat song, play it really loud and DANCE VIGOROUSLY. It's a good way to break up the day.
Silence
Most people like to work with some kind of noise: a movie, a podcast, some music. If you're finding the music still too stimulating, try working in complete silence for awhile.
Make it a Party
Working on BIG HUGE PROJECT can be quite lonely. Especially if you're doing it day in and day out. Even introverts get lonely sometimes! It's nice to have a group of friends to call who ALSO have BIG HUGE PROJECTS of their own.
Of course there's a balance to be struck here. Make sure you all understand that you want to have a WORK party, where primarily you will be sitting in silence and working. You're basically just there to have the presence of another human and to keep each other from losing the day to time traps. Different people have different thresholds, sometimes one person will be too chatty, another will have too low a tolerance for any kind of talking at all! Experiment: if it makes you MORE productive with a partner, keep it. If not, ditch it.
Batch Processes
Say you need to sew 20 toy rabbits. They all have the same steps: first you sew the body, then you sew the ears on, then you sew the eyes, then the details... Instead of working on them one at a time, start-to-finish, try working on two or three at a time. First you sew 3 bodies, then you sew the 3 pairs of ears on... Batching processes like these can help prevent the "between chunk" downtime. We finish one chunk and then AUGFghgg... we go get a cup of tea. And then hey, I wonder what's on facebook...
"Rule your board" as soon as you finish
Similar to batch processing, I found this helped me a lot to reduce between-chunk downtime: once you finish a chunk, instead of IMMEDIATELY going on your break, FIRST do the VERY FIRST STEP of the next chunk. In the case of comics, my first step was "ruling the board". This is where you measure out and draw all your guidelines. It's very simple, and takes no creativity, but even the simplest first step helped to prevent the 'empty page fear' and it was easier to get back into my groove after the break.
Channeling Inspiration Away
Inspiration ALWAYS seems to strike when you sit down to do BIG HUGE PROJECT doesn't it? I mean... inspiration for anything BUT your BIG HUGE PROJECT! It's distracting, and infuriating. The first line of defense is to write it down. OH! I have a great idea for a new story! WRITE IT DOWN. As fast as you can, just enough so that you can remember what you meant later, and GET BACK TO WORK. If it's still bugging you an hour after that and it's DRIVING YOU CRAZY, take an "inspiration break".
SET YOUR TIMER for one hour. (Again, you don't want to lose TOO much time to this - inspiration distraction is a CLASSIC lizard brain tactic.) Use the hour to burn yourself out on the inspiration. Whatever it is you were desperate to do. Wanted to paint? Cool. Paint something. For an hour--- then get back to work.
BIG HUGE PROJECT is usually the project that is closest to your heart, which is why it's the scariest to work on. Your lizard brain desperately wants to do ANYTHING IT CAN to keep you from working on it because it's afraid of failure. Or success. Know thy enemy, and use these tips to get back on track.
Hope it helps!
Climbing a Mountain of Work PART 1/2
Many of the tips that I've described so far (action lists, perfect project planning, prioritizing) work great when you have a large variety of different tasks to do.
But what about when your primary project -your next most important task- is a single, monumental task. There really aren't many little tasks to climb over to motivate yourself, you're just getting them out of the way to carve out times of day for you to work on BIG HUGE PROJECT.
What's a BIG HUGE PROJECT?
- It's long: something that will take weeks and months of solid constant work to achieve
- The work is always the same, with little variation.
- examples:
- Writing a book, or drawing a graphic novel.
- Reading a textbook, or studying for a final.
- Knitting 20 scarves as Christmas Presents for relatives
- It's either really boring or really scary to you
- It's generally something you need to sit alone and CONCENTRATE on
Quite often, you can get quite good at carving time out for the BIG HUGE PROJECT, but when it comes time to just sit down DO IT it's so hard to motivate yourself.
You stare at the blank page and can't seem to make the pencil move.
All those amazing thoughts you had running through your head have conveniently run off to find something better to do. (Yeah, thanks guys, while you were totally keeping me distracted when I had that expense report to do! JERKS)
If you can just GET INTO THE DAMN GROOVE of it you know you can do a good job and you can make yourself happier for having made progress, but right now you just want to... make another cup of tea. Check facebook. Get zoned into just one more episode of Dr. Who. Clean the stove.
ANYTHING BUT THIS!
What do you do!? How do you keep yourself on track!?
Of course if I had the secret to this I'd be a brazillionaire by now. Below are a bunch of things that I've tried that sometimes help to get myself un-stuck. Try them in isolation or in combination, see what works for you!
Build a Nest
You sit down to write and.... oh, damn - you should have your phone in here. Just in case. Oh! you forgot to get some tea. Oh!and you need your reference book. Augh! Why is this chair so uncomfortable... Where are my notes?
When I'm working on BIG HUGE PROJECT, I try to always go to the same place, physically. Setting this place up for the task at hand is a bit of a ritual. A way to tell my brain "okay, we've arrived at the place. Now we are setting it up so everything is ready. Now we are working."
Your nest needs to be:
- comfortable: but not so comfortable that you drift off to sleep!! Comfort means not too hot or too cold, and ergonomically set up.
- set up with everything that you need within reach: with practice, you'll build the habit of collecting everything you need to work so you're not constantly getting up to fetch something.
- AWAY FROM THE INTERNET
- If this is a problem for you (and it is for most of us) find a way to unplug. For me, working in a different room from my beloved internets is enough. Of I course drift over to twitter when I need a stretch, but I am (usually) disciplined enough to wrench myself away. When I have to do computer work, on the other hand... that's a totally different story.
- If you know your personal time trap websites, add them to a blocker using this tip: http://lifehacker.com/146448/geek-to-live--ban-time+wasting-web-sites
- Or you can use this Chrome extension http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/stayfocusd-block-time-wasting-websites/
Of course, there are ways for your lizard brain to get around anything. You can turn off your computer, but you still have your phone. You can block facebook, but oh! Didn't block wikipedia... eventually you're just going to rely on motivation. Remember why you're doing BIG HUGE PROJECT. Remember that you really WANT to do this, and it's worth more to you than random wikipedia article #35.
The key is to STAY AWAY FROM TIME TRAPS. If it's too hard for you, you may need to build an ISOLATION ZONE. For me, the cafe made a great isolation zone. Being in public means I can't just flop over when I want to. Surfing the internet is *just* inconvenient enough. Libraries and friend's houses also make great isolation zones.
Warm Up
If you can't quite break the silence of the page and just GET MOVING, treat yourself to a warmup period.
SET A TIMER (you don't want the entire precious block of time you saved for yourself to get wasted on something random!) 20 minutes usually works well.
Use this time to be ridiculous.
If your BIG HUGE PROJECT involves drawing, use the time to draw crazy looking monsters. Sexy ladies. Weird cartoons. Whatever you want, who cares if it's good or not.
If your BIG HUGE PROJECT is writing, use it to write stream of consciousness, or try to write the opposite of what you NEED to write. If you are trying to write an amazing drama, write THE WORST melodrama. Write as BAD as you possibly can.
Be LOOSE and FAST.
I like to write outlines, point form thoughts, random threads at the top and bottom of the document to warm up and then stitch the piece together slowly.
This list of tips ended up getting too long, so check back next week for part two!
5 Ways to Fight the Blahs
We all fall prey to 'the blahs' sometimes. You know how it is:
You're not sick, you're wide awake (usually the middle of the afternoon), but you're bored and unable to get motivated to do much of ANYTHING. There's things that you should do, could do, might do, but you can't even get into procrastinating. You're not necessarily sad or depressed, just... uninspired.
When you're suffering from the blahs, it's easy to get sucked into passive timetraps like TV. You know you should get up. You know you should finish that thing or work on something or call so-and-so back... right after one more episode of Lost.
The blahs are one of the enemies between you and your goals. Here are five ways to fight:
1) Shut down your time traps.
Turn off the TV. Close distractions on your computer. Better yet: step away from the computer altogether for awhile. The first step to getting out is to make the choice to NOT get sucked into something. Even if you're just staring at a wall, that's better than being amused to death.
2) Get a pen and paper.
Put the pen on the paper. Move the pen. It doesn't matter whether you're writing or drawing or just making random marks. Making your hands move is the first step to getting your thoughts flowing. As thoughts flow, energy flows, and soon you will be moving again. (writing not your thing? As an alternative you can bounce a ball against a wall...not recommended for <800sqft apartments)
3) Go outside and explore. (ON FOOT)
Often I find that the blahs are a result of cabin fever. Find an excuse and a destination - it can be anywhere as long as it's farther than to the corner coffee shop and back. Stretch your eyes (focus on things at a distance), take the time to look and examine your surroundings. Investigate shops you've never taken the time to enter before. Take a bus somewhere random (the same bus will always be able to take you back).
Find somewhere new. It's stimulating, and a sure cure for the blahs... as long as you can get yourself motivated enough to get out the door!
4) Go see a friend, or just give them a call.
Is it too cold or rainy to get motivated to go outside? Seek stimulation from other people - just NOT on the internet!! The computer is a timetrap. If you can't get through, call a parent or grandparent. Trust me - they ALWAYS want to talk.
5) Don't fight it.
Sometimes the blahs are a sign of creative burnout. If you're an introvert, you may just need some alone time. Instead of forcing yourself back to the grindstone, take some time to creatively recharge. Get inspired - read or re-read an interesting book, lay back and listen to an audiobook or your favourite album.
Sometimes we just need a BREAK.
If you choose option 5, think of it as a sick day for your brain. You're proactively electing to lose one day to the blahs instead of a week to lackluster creativity. If you're in day 2 or 3 of the blahs, get off your butt and try some of those earlier tips!!
The blahs are no fun, get inspired and go kick some ass!
Your Secret Weapon Against Procrastination: a Count-Up Timer
Some people might say that using a timer is taking the term "Time Management" a bit too literally, but I've found my simple count-up timer to be an invaluable asset. Here's what you need, and five different ways you can use it to get a productivity boost.