When I wrote this chapter, it’d been almost seven years since I’d updated the design for the Rands in Repose web site. In that time, I'd done multiple designs, learned an entirely different publishing platform, and migrated the existing content over to that platform many times. What has always remained is an ever-growing list of details supplied by the act of starting.
The length of time since the last design update wasn’t surprising. Since Rands was last updated, I’d been busy. I’d written over 200 articles and published 2 books. What’s surprising is the amount of time I’d spend preparing to start via a vast array of impressive mental gymnastics on tasks I wanted to do. It was shocking. Since that last major redesign of the site, my rough estimate is that for two solid months I’d not actually been working on the site, but getting started. I’m not talking about actual measurable progress; I’m talking about the fussing, orienting, and random thinking surrounding getting started.
After the first three years of starting, I decided to get strategic. I decided to keep track. Clearly, I have starting issues, so rather than obsess about them, I will enumerate and understand them. What, precisely, am I doing rather than working?
A Critical Analysis of Beginning
Beginning is a three-phase commit: you’re either fretting about starting, you’re preparing to begin, or you’ve begun. It’s the middle state of preparation I want to explore, because it is during this time that we unnecessarily torture ourselves. We lie to ourselves about wasting time and beat ourselves up with guilt-laden words such as procrastination, slacker, and lazy. But I believe we’re actually getting important work done.
Specifically, I believe three things:
Your brain is smarter about thinking than you think. I believe the many states of preparation are your brain cleverly and proactively trying to help you begin. Unfortunately, many of these states really do look like goofing off. This is why . . .
Preparation, in its variety of forms, often gets a bad rap. You’re under a deadline and your boss walks in to discover you reading about a satisfying walk to Central Park West.1 He’s going to ask, “What the hell does this have to do with the deadline?” You instinctively know this creative excursion is somehow helping, but your inability to explain on the spot does nothing to help your plight. What your boss has done is his favorite move—he’s stressed you out—and . . .
Stress is a creativity buzz kill. When you’re stressed, you’re in reaction and survival mode. Your mindset when you’re stressed is, “How do I survive?” not “What is an elegant solution to this problem?” Survival—I’m a fan,2 but whatever immense task is in front of you will not be conquered by the defensive strategies of survival. The elegant solution requires offense, and the lower the stress, the better the offense.
As I’ve watched myself stumble through the various states of starting, I’ve discovered there are two base mental states where I begin, and they are tightly coupled with the time of day. Specifically, the moves I need are entirely different depending on whether it’s morning or evening.
Morning Stretch
The risk of morning is exuberance . Unbridled exuberance . Your body just spent a quiet night getting rid of all the mental and physical crap from the prior day and it’s ready to go—in every way possible. The issue with morning isn’t whether or not you start, it’s wrangling what you start on. Most mornings I’m just as likely to write an article as I am to read about every single Marvel movie that will be produced in the next two years.
Rands, just start. You’ve got a big task. Just start it.
Quiet.
Those who do not understand creativity think it has a well-defined and measurable on/off switch, when in reality it’s a walking dial with many labels. One label reads, for example, “Morose and apathetic,” and another reads “Unexpectedly totally cranking it out.” This dial sports shy, mischievous feet—yes, feet—that allow it to simply walk away the moment you aren’t paying attention. Each time it walks away, it finds a new place to hide.
I’ve spent a good portion of my life wondering where that damned dial is hiding.
For me, corralling and managing the creativity dial in the morning involves starting with an unrelated creative excursion. I have a bookmark group called Scrub , and contained within that group is a set of sites intended to focus the crazy enthusiasm into the creative. All it takes is a click and I’m looking at aggregated sets of words, images, and ideas. The idea of the unrelated creative excursion : creativity begets creativity. The act of experiencing the end result of others’ creativity is the single best way for me to figure where the dial is hiding and conjure the demon I need to begin.3
The risk of creative divergence is still there, of course. These sites are not a surefire focusing lens, but I’ve chosen them carefully over time to be mentally delicious while not overly so. For example, articles in the New Yorker are full of creative inspiration , but they have no place in the Scrub group because it is too easy to lose myself in them.
The Scrub group might strike you as avoidance, but it’s not; it’s an alternative. There is something daunting about the task in front of you, and my suggestion is to admit that it’s daunting. A frontal attack on daunting works for some, but creative solutions rarely involve straight lines. A random search for unrelated inspiration allows your brain to sidestep whatever weight you’ve built around the task. You get to sneak in a heretofore hidden side door that can only be discovered with the help of an unknown creative stranger.
My Scrub group is full of strangers. A current favorite is Hacker News.4 Look, someone is describing how they did the effects for TRON: Legacy .5 They really did go out of their way to make those Unix screens authentic. You know, I have an article about the beauty of the command line. I should write . . .
An Experienced Evening
The dial reads “Tired.”
Whatever magical chemicals my body stockpiles during a night of sleep are gone in the evening. The day has occurred, and when I sit down at my desktop to look at my Scrub bookmark group, it feels as if gravity has increased and my mental wiring has been clogged with all the crap I’ve seen and heard during the day. I see words and images, but nothing gets through the heavy haze of the working day.
No . . . no work for me. How about some mindless World of Warcraft?
Mornings have the gift of optimism because nothing has screwed up your day, yet. Evenings are dark, repetitive reminders that no matter what you do, time is going to pass and you’ve likely wasted some of it. In this mental state, the creativity dial easily moves to the depressingly lowercase “uninspired and listless,” and hides not just under your couch, but inside of it.
I discovered that I need to switch sides in my brain in my quest to find and adjust the dial in the evening. Rather than stimulating the creative side of my brain, I work the logical side. I give myself a task such as, What is the smallest piece of research I can do relative to the project? The new site needs footnotes . OK, I will find a single web page that describes the history of the footnote, I will take notes, and I will form a footnote opinion.
This exercise is not the creative wandering of the morning. This is using my structured research skills to understand and build a thing. It is a discernible to-do that, when complete, I can productively check off. It is a practical excursion in intellectual illumination geared to focus my tired brain so it can approach inspiration .
I have less success in evenings than mornings, but structure, logic, data, and facts—for me—are the best starting ingredients to invoke an evening of creative progress.
Happenstance
I need to disclose that I wrote a good portion of my last book in the evening after watching reruns of Sex and the City, and after weeks of thinking and writing about the act of starting. I cannot tell you why, but I can tell you why it’s important.
Perhaps it was the show’s complete dissimilarity from my day that reset my brain. Perhaps it was Carrie Bradshaw’s Doogie Howser–like closing where she sums up the key lessons of the episode on her MacBook. Maybe seeing her write reminded me that “Hey, she can write, so maybe I can start, too.”
My Sex and the City kick start wasn’t a creative excursion or a piece of research; it was happenstance. I watched a few episodes two weeks back to see if I could repeat the effect—nothing. Thank god.
Whatever it is that you’re not starting, I know it’s hard to do, otherwise it’d already be done. Otherwise you wouldn’t have spent weeks of time considering it rather than doing it.
We’re addicted to quick fixes, top-ten lists, and four-hour work weeks, but the truth is that if it wasn’t hard, everyone would be doing it, and a hard thing is never done by reading a list or a book or an article about doing it. A hard thing is done by figuring out how to start.
You’ve been spending a lot of time thinking the result is what matters. You have a bright-and-shiny goal in mind that is distracting you with its awesomeness. It is this allure of awesomeness that is the continued reason why you keep searching around your house looking for that mischievous walking creativity dial.
At the time of this writing, the next major redesign for the Rands web site remained safely in limbo. The comfort of completion was a distant goal, but in the meantime, each weekend, I’d find something to start. A CSS tweak here, a new page there—the site may not have been revolutionized, but it is certainly satisfyingly creatively evolving.
My guarantee is that what is going to make this bright-and-shiny thing awesome isn’t finishing. It’s all the little, unexpected details you discover trying to start. It’s all the small pieces of unexplainable execution that will not only make it yours, but also continue to teach you how you get things done. And when you’re done, you’ll discover that finishing, while cathartic, is just a good reason to go start something else.