Pick a day. Not just any day, but a realllly crowded day. You know the kind:
You’ve just wrapped up one mandatory, semi-demanding task and you have 88 minutes before you’re committed to something else, and this is IT, this is your time to CREATE, and you’re acutely aware that every moment has to count, so ready set GO, except part of your mind is still on what you just finished, and another part on where you have to be, 87 minutes now, and you desperately, frantically feel the pressure, and oh yeah, you’re almost out of milk—
Sound familiar? I’ve been there more times than I can calculate.
A few quiet minutes of strategically doing nothing can short-circuit this entire pressurized process … if you let it.
And therein lies the problem. So often we don’t give ourselves that permission.
The Two-Minute Test
Not to worry. It’s so simple it doesn’t require you to do a thing. In fact, that’s the point. All you have to do is go here and do nothing for 2 minutes. Just promise to come right back.
Sounds like a doddle, but judging by a substantial portion of the feedback on the forum where I first saw this, a surprising number of people have trouble making it through the full 120 seconds. Past a certain point, every second without some sort of activity or stimulation became uncomfortable, something to endure.
If you’re one of them, more’s the pity. Because a brief interval of nothing can be one of the best tactics to keep your creative bearings in an overcrowded day.
So What’s The Problem?
Philosopher Blaise Pascal was onto it centuries ago:
“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
How much worse would he consider it today?
A great many of us feel antsy doing nothing. We’ve been conditioned to regard doing nothing as some sort of sin, at least until we’re off the hook awhile by collapsing into a heap of deep-fried exhaustion and temporary brain-death. I know people for whom it’s a genuine struggle to let themselves relax and do something for the pure enjoyment of it, on a weekend, because they feel they should be accomplishing something, anything, even though they’re taking no joy in it.
They’re accomplishing something, all right: blockage and burn-out.
“Your To-Do List Will Be Legendary, Even In Hell”
Here’s the way I took to describing February: that I was going in about as many directions as Frank at the end of Hellraiser.
Which is funny only if you’ve seen the movie. And maybe not even then. Because, really, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who will happily watch the demons tear apart the fratricidal hedonist who double-crossed them, and … you know the rest.
February’s to-do and tend-to list was especially long, varied, and mentally and physically demanding. And it’s the short month. Pretty much, though, everything got done and/or handled.
Confession: I can switch gears only so many times in a day before the important things start to suffer. It all gets to feeling like one of those movie scenes with ten people trying to claw through a doorway at once.
For lots of activities, however mandatory, the impact is negligible. They dip from the shallow end of inner reserves. “Roach-stomping,” Seth Godin calls this. Knocking them off one-two-three is just a matter of showing up and keeping moving.
But creative work, the deep work, demands more. Doing your best here essentially requires going into an altered state of consciousness. When you’re in the flow, it’s all-encompassing. It’s easy to forget about the rest of the world.
This is not the same mindset you use for reformatting text, answering e-mail, or balancing your checkbook.
And, usually, it takes awhile to get there. It’s not something most of us can turn on and off, instantaneously, like a light switch. It takes some transition time.
One of the key things that helped me most, in transitioning from one February project to another, was stopping for a few minutes to just. Do. Nothing. Nothing but breathe and wipe the mental slate as clean as I could.
Call it recalibrating. Call it meditation. Call it hitting the reset button.
Ultimately, what it really is is a miniature pattern interrupt.
Welcome Interruptions
Pattern interrupts are often referred to in a communications context, either for breaking through routine expectations or halting a confrontation before it gets worse.
Different context here, but the same principle.
Every activity we engage in puts us in certain frames of mind, imposes particular patterns of thought. They don’t always reinforce each other. Sometimes they interfere. When they’re jammed next to each other, the patterns of roach-stomping are almost certainly not going to be a helpful lead-in to the more nuanced patterns of diving deep to create something from the heart.
In this context, a pattern interrupt is a buffer zone. I’ve long made a habit of breaking up brain-work with physical activity: working out, a quick walk, taking out the trash. All well and good, but while physical activity may be a pattern interrupt, it’s still another pattern.
But nothing, just breathing, emptying your mind to let the previous pattern slip away, letting yourself steep in the spirit of the work you’re about to begin, or rejoin in progress … it’s so minimal it has almost no pattern of its own.
And, so, helps make room for that next critical pattern.
By any standard, that’s a smart investment of time.
You can’t launch the arrow until you’ve drawn back the bow.
You can’t rev the engine without sufficient fuel.
And you can’t breathe the breath of life into your creation until you’ve first inhaled.
[Photo by Tobyotter]
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