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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can someone with access to google please search gwern.net please find the page where Gwern shows there's no documentary trace of this actually happening and link it please? I'd find it myself but bing isn't up to the task and Google is blocked in China.
I tried looking for it with Google and couldn't find it, either on or off his site. I did find an interesting article about the obsolete practice of sanding floors to clean them: https://www.gwern.net/Sand
From someone who is reasonably adept with ceramics and just bought another 100 pounds of clay this morning (aka I know how much 50 pounds of clay weighs) because I'm making a six foot tall piece in an intermediate/advanced ceramics class that I'm taking for fun: 50 pounds of clay is actually a lot, and not everyone can make a pot that big. So if someone managed to make one 50 pound pot, it would still require quite a lot of work. Plus, there's the assumption that the majority of the people in the class are interested in learning, so they will be trying to make something good.
My mom has potted for over 40 years. We had a kiln and a wheel in our house throughout my childhood. I know a fair bit about it, even though I haven't done that much of it myself.
At the end of the day, 50 pounds weights 50 pounds. it'd be hard to lift, but to make a crappy hugely thick base with something resembling a pot on top wouldn't take much effort.
If university taught me anything, it's that most people don't seem to be just interested in learning.
It's a story about students with some internal desire to be good at pottery, not just to get good grades. The grading system forces them over the hurdle of hesitation, to produce quantity without being paralyzed by anxieties over not being good enough, and then their own desire to improve nonetheless uses that imposed practice productively.
It would make more sense if they were just graded on number of pieces, considering it's a story not something that actually happened, they should just correct it.
Also "learn from mistakes" is taken for granted with quantity here, but it is very far from reality that learning comes inherently from practice. In the example, I would assume a student graded solely by weight couldnt care less about learning. I would create 10 pots reaching the minimum quality possible to be considered a pot and move on without looking back.
Also, it is very reasonable to assume that a student graded by quality would practice a lot and discard (and learn with) the worst pots.
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).
I don't keep a separate page, but this is pretty much what I do as well. If nothing is coming, i just write garbage until I find something I find interesting, gets the thought process going, and lets me concentrate on something other than "i can't think about what to write next".
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.
Here are some counter-arguments, for anyone who might be considering the dilemma:
> It's too hard on my own.
It can be, but it really does depend on the scale of what you're making: there's a large class of games that aren't too difficult for individuals, and a large class that are; and, in the class of approachable games, there are still fun, interesting, novel projects that can be undertaken.
> It involves a lot of planning.
This is one thing you'll learn to find a balance with by writing games. There is too much and too little planning. Don't worry too much about making them the 'right' way to begin with. In my own case I intentionally didn't look up any info. on the correct way of making games until I'd tried my own way first (which is much more fun and worked out fine). After doing that, looking up established practices was way more interesting (and my own approaches were laughably bad in comparison—but ya learn!).
> It's a big time investment.
Some are, some aren't. As others have mentioned, you can make a quick game in two days or so. More importantly though, I'd say to try it out and see if you enjoy the process: if you don't, then the time investment probably will be too much, and you could end up spoiling your love for games in general. If you do enjoy it then, whatever the final outcome of the game, it was time well spent.
> I won't really be able to make something worthwhile.
You may get ambitious about it one day after you've developed your skills to a certain extent, and find yourself with a greater interest in sharing an experience through your game than in working on it. If you get to that point, you're now in the realm of working on art, and that's got its own whole host of difficulties.
You should scale your expectations down, come up with the most simple, minimum viable product. If you still don't feel the scale is small enough, try to break off a chunk of that MVP you think you /can/ complete.
Then try.
You're probably going to make an initial version as you're learning, and your design is either going to radically change as you learn more about the problem you're actually trying to solve and the tools you're solving it with, or you'll end up throwing it away and refactoring the entire thing when you do have an understanding.
Then, when you've got something that works, you'll start tweaking it. Making X better, or adding Y; or even removing Z because you realize it isn't something that should be there.
That's the programming equivalent of the 50 pots thing. Each iteration you run being like a small test-firing, and each deployment being like a pot you actually feel like putting through use tests.
I think it's really cool to see Casey walk through all the steps that go into figuring out how to make the game on stream. I skipped the very beginning, as it was pretty windows specific, but the first episode I watched was really cool:
He sets up auto-hot reloading of the C++ game code, to cut down on dev time.
It's actually a large body of work, (more than 100 hours!), and even watching at x2 speed, it'll take a long time to get through all the videos, but I think they are pretty informative, and fun to watch.
I think you're overthinking it. Making simple games isn't hard. Just sit down one day and write a clone of Tetris in 24 hours, adding some twists of your own if you want. If you do that, you'll be a million steps ahead of anyone who thinks, "I should make a game someday." You'll have learned more than any book or tutorial can teach you, not just about technical matters, but about your own abilities. Or just join a 48 hour game jam and make some small thing with some friends.
After making some small things like that, you'll see how easy it is to just jump into some cool idea you've been thinking about. If you don't do this, and instead just plan out some big multi-person hobby project, there is literally 0% chance it will ever get finished, or even started. It's literally never been done before.
I've never been a game developer, so I'd have to say the latter.
It'd certainly be fun to work as a game developer and learning about game design is fascinating (if mindblowingly complicated), and I might be open to working as a game dev on a team sometime in the future, but at that point, it's much like any other dev job. I like games, I can tell you that, and I want to see more games of the kind that I like, but I'm certainly not learned or developed enough to put those games together myself.
To expand on this: there's a difference between being interested in something, and being motivated or driven to become something. I'm kinda meh on all sorts of software engineering fields like networking and systems programming, but I was hella motivated to get into the software industry so I could get a job and become independent. Likewise, I find game dev and design interesting to read and learn about, but I don't really have any motivation or drive to dive headlong into the game dev and design industry like I did software dev. They aren't mutually inclusive.
>An important thing to note: I wouldn't call this a fool-proof way of getting creative
I didn't interpret it as a way of getting creative in the qualitative sense of "creative" but rather in the "productive" sense. To that end, the exercise you went through and shared supports that notion.
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-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)
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. :-/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Someone needs to make a writing editor that disguises itself as forum threads, because I can write paragraphs off the cuff in response to Reddit and Hacker News no problem, but when I sit down to a blank editor I ...well it's hard to even sit at the blank editor to begin with, but it takes a lot of effort to get going.
If it weren't for Nanowrimo and being reminded consistently to participate in a short story anthology every year, I'd be a writer who didn't write (except comments on HN/Reddit).
I'm really not kidding all that much. I'm tempted to make an app that's basically this idea. I have heard of that story, but haven't really sat down to read it yet. Is it pretty good?
So ... the fifty thousand dollar question is: would you, as a writer, pay a meager fee to have real people read your Writers' Forum App posts and make engaging replies? Or, perhaps the writer might leave tips for audience members who contribute meaningfully to their forum writings?
I think the reason writing in the forum style is exciting is because having an audience for anything you do is exciting. Also, you can teach, moralize, scandalize, etc and get near-realtime reactions to the thread being teased in the writings.
I think the risk would be that if a writer edited too heavily based on feedback, the work ceases to be purely the writer's and now it's a collaborative effort, which may lead to an impersonal writing style or threaten one's claim to copyright.
In my opinion, the best place for an app like this is within Reddit. You have the willing audience already in-place to offer you the feedback. Although, I could imagine an unfiltered forum might present a distraction. There might need to be a separate forum moderator that can control visibility of comments to the writer.
Hahah, I was thinking something a lot simpler than that. Something more like 'Insert subject:' -> fetch recent article about subject -> You give your thoughts about that subject -> you get a 'reply' that's like "Your opinions are wrong because <basic common argument pattern using keyword(from reply)>" or "That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate more on <keyword(from reply)>?"
And then when they're done they could export it to a text editor of their choice, or save it to dropbox or something.
I once made a chat app in Flash a long time ago called Mimic, that would take in whatever you said, infer connections between words (based entirely on what words were next to other words, so you could use just about any language or slang you wanted), and then build a sentence off that in response, that would almost kind of make sense. I would a good hour or more at a time responding to that thing trying to train it and getting a kick at the silly things it said.
This would be kind of like that. Yes, it'd be a pretty dumb app, but I could see myself being entertained by it, so maybe it'd be entertaining to other people as well.
I find it's way easier to write stories when I have a known audience (i.e. I'm posting on Reddit).
Heck, one of my favorite plot ideas came when I was taking a SciFi lit class in college, and the final had a short response where we had to sketch an original short story concept.
I've turned lots of off the cuff reddit posts into full length blog posts. In fact, it's my default when it's been two weeks since I last posted and I need to write something. Just go through comment history and find one that's at least a hundred words long with a lot of upvotes, and spin it out.
Problem is that information snacks like news and forums are the intellectual equivalent of vending machine junk food. We know it's better for us to cook our own food but we get lazy. Same with forum posts. We feel like we're actually doing something when we're not.
There are comments that are superior to the article they're responding to. There are books that are better off not being read at all. Forums also serve a few purposes that raw reading material cannot.
I think moralizing the activity brings with it the peril that you may start feeling good about consuming information the "right" way, and feel bad about consuming it the "wrong" way, while what you should really care about is the information itself. How you get it doesn't really matter.
Granted, I don't see anything particularly virtuous or advantageous about cooking your own food, either, so perhaps we're at an impasse...
Well, it's better to get your spouse to cook for you....
But baring that, restaurant food is generally too salty and fatty and light on fresh vegetables to be healthy to rely on for most meals. There are exceptions, but those restaurants tend to be drastically more expensive.
I seem to be able to find plenty of restaurant food that's not too light on vegetables, and it's not significantly more expensive. Price is a factor, but I think it's an overall factor: it's drastically more expensive to eat out than at home.
But there are alternatives to cooking and going to restaurants that are often frowned upon, yet nonetheless allow you to get everything you need and are already drastically cheaper in many cases:
Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN? I mean I'm taking time out of my work day to write this. There are plenty of things I could be doing otherwise, and fully 100% of them are better than writing this comment.
>Does anyone actually feel like they're being productive on HN?
Mostly no, but sometimes yes. I've not found a more thought provoking place of discourse than HN, and have been referred to a number of good books on here.
There have been successful epistolary novels and plays. Maybe two or three people writing dialog in a forum as the characters would be an interesting way to attempt a collaborative work.
Hardly unique to writers, I've had much of the same issues with procrastination when working on personal programming projects. Much as they describe writer's fear of writing a bad novel, I give up when I think no one will want to use the app I'm working on, I think the project be too difficult to finish, or I'm worried about letting people see my badly written code.
Obviously there are some differences - there's a more specific barrier to making software that is functional serves it's intended purpose, compared to a story that might be badly written. But I think "I'm working on an app" may be our generation's version of the "I'm writing a novel" cliche
If the managers call it "content", it's yeoman's work, and you're not going to get a lot of good writing in; the writers will phone it in.
Also, the longer the writing project, the more potential for procrastination. 1000 word articles are easier to wrap up than 10,000 features or books...
It's staggering to me how practice on a keyboard has transitioned to very, very fast train of thought typing. Compared to "thoughtful" writing - such as a fiction piece - it's easily 3 or 4 times faster.
I'm getting a strong impression that the article wanted to talk about hard work, growth mindset, and participation trophies, and not actually analyze why writers put off writing.
I believe things like this can only be properly understood through empathy, and all the talk about millennials and hard work and procrastination, being blame behavior, is already putting one in the wrong mindset.
Perhaps the author should try writing some heavy books, herself.
One simple explanation is that procrastination starts as a symptom of breadth-first search behavior (which can look like slow progress, and is slow progress if you have a poor algorithm/memory), and then it gets significantly aggravated by a shame/guilt feedback loop.
The point about being too worried about writing something that isn't good is likely why I write about half of what I should be writing. Because every time I consider it done, I go back through the article, reword the intro, change a bunch of sentences that don't sound right this time around and still keep thinking "no, this is nowhere near as good as it could be".
I don't believe talent is innate or anything like that (which seems to be the main assumption in the article, that people who procrastinate believed skill is fixed). I believe full well anyone can become a better writer.
It's just my ambition is probably higher than my actual skill level, and I simply can't accept anything I don't see as 'perfect'. So I get stressed, take a break to do something else, get stressed even more and only get the determination to finish on some random day when I feel like finishing everything.
On another note, I wonder how much worse this 'imposter syndrome' and 'perfectionism' has become with the move to CMS systems like WordPress?
Because if you install certain plugins for those scripts (like Yoast), it grades everything you write according to a Flesch–Kincaid readability test. As a result, I find it's very easy to get distracted and worried by the giant warning saying 'improvement required' and end up focusing more on that than what you're actually supposed to be writing about.
Makes me wonder how many writers have been left paralysed with the fear their work isn't 'good enough' simply because of the script they use to write their work in...
My thesis is that procrastination comes from cognitive dissonances. And that's the reason, why I don't understand these articles. They make a "science" out of something rather simple. The reason I (as a hobbyist) "can't" write a book or finish a piece of music is that I have ridiculously high, idealistic standards when it comes to producing a work of art. I much rather produce nothing than something mediocre. I don't even feel bad about it. I embrace fatalism in this area. If I don't produce anything worthwhile, so be it. I can't help it but start one musical project after the other. On rare occasions I've got the feeling I am onto something. In that case finishing is no problem. It could turn out that nobody likes what I do but in that case it doesn't matter because I absolutely feel that I did the right thing.
On the other hand, there are professionals: people who create for a living. (I am not talking about extraordinary people like J.K Rowling or J.R.R. Tolkien but people who have to work every day just to fulfill a need of the market) If you decide to go this route then idealistic thinking is (mostly) out of the question. If I had to write a pop song or light fiction I'd just do it. All that is required is knowing the basics of your craft and top down planning and then you just work through the list like a maniac. It may be hard work but it's easy to do because there are no contradictions. It's like knowing that you have to walk 10k to get back home. That may be inconvenient but you quickly realize that you have to do it and then you simply do it.
Nobody starts out creating things that meet their idealistic standards. The only people that create such wonderful things are the people that trudged through that period where they knew they were making crap, but kept going.
you can't trivialise procrastination. Multiple books have been written on the subject, many of which go into the details of biology and economic theory.
1) I may not like what I write even though I _know_ I won't be any good at the start (or ever).
2) Although I know the style I want to write in and read that style a lot, I can't think of a good plot and so I convince myself that I need to do this before even beginning to write. If that makes _any_ sense at all.
Just about every group of people does that (including programmers). Belonging to a group is one of the basic desires of every human, and one easy way to create a feeling of belonging to one group is to differentiate its members from everyone around.
This is a great article thanks for posting it. My SO, in her not-day-job is a writer and stand up comic.
She has set a self imposed 100 word minimum per day and has been going over 3 months now in an attempt to combat this type of procrastination.
It seems to not only be working for her but people who read about what she's doing have also been motivated (but not me, and it's past my bed time ;)) to work on their own projects whatever they may be.
One of my favorite recent fantasy series is Kingkiller Chronicle, but its author is notorious for procrastinating. It sucks because his books are so beloved by the community, but he spends a ton of his time committing to other projects like his podcast and video series, without ever providing any updates on the status of his writing. It's like having a loved one missing and never knowing their whereabouts.
Well, I feel like I could write the same thing except swap "writers" for a different profession and then swap "English" for a different school subject. Engineers are inveterate procrastinators because they easily did well in math. Politicians, because they did great in social studies. And so on.
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/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.