Churn, Meta, Cleanse, Embrace

To work every day on an ambitious long-term project you must make all the usual cliché commitments, from discipline to routine to cultivation of a favorable self-image. But even together, all these commitments ensure is continued effort. To truly be productive—in the sense of actually prosecuting and improving the work—takes more than a Day Runner and a visualization of the award ceremony waiting on the other side; it takes a concerted, far more specific strategy. Today I’d like to share with you some of what I’ve learned about how to stay productive in this more specific sense of the term. It’s a long column but by the end I hope to have convinced you that there are four, technical facets to maximizing your return-on-effort with respect to that big job of yours, and that focusing on these four facets might just help you in the same way it has helped me. The essay takes about twenty minutes to read.

Busted-Day Gravy

All of us have busted days. You can be the most productive, high-energy creator on the planet, and every once in a while circumstances are still going to leave you feeling farted on by the universe. You'll wake up with the best of intentions, hop into an invigorating shower, pour that first piping-hot cup of coffee... and then settle in for four hours of un-openable e-mail attachments and crossed signals on just where things stood with that grant application. You'll spill something down your front, skid through a stop sign, get yelled at by someone close to you for no very good reason, and find a corrupted file in a critical location on your hard drive. And it will go on like this. For the whole day.

And then? Then, at some indeterminate point in all that mayhem, you will casually look down at your phone and realize that it's 7:28PM, and whatever it was that you'd set out to do that day will seem impossibly too far gone to start. Don't tell me it doesn't happen to you because it does. It happens to the best of us. It probably happens to Bill Gates, which is not exactly the same thing.

The point of today's column is that it's not how (in)frequently this happens to us that determines our maximum creative efficiency; it's how we handle it when it does. But in order to explore that question, it is first necessary to explore the opposite one--namely, just what an "un-busted" day might look like, for a benchmark.

The "Bad Idea" Trick

Way back in the summer of 2000 I attended a writers' workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, that was moderated by novelist Douglas Coupland. On one particular languid afternoon when none of us were reading anything particularly good to the rest of the group, Coupland suggested we adjourn to our studios with the idea that, the following day, we'd come back with the worst thing we could write, about the worst character we could think of, without intentionally sabotaging the prose. In the end we called the assignment "Bad lives, badly written." The next day we met, turned in our work without names on top, and had Coupland read each of them out loud.

Welcome!

My name is Dave O'Gorman. For the past thirteen years I have lived and worked in Gainesville, successfully completing seven full-length manuscripts (both fiction and non-fiction) while simultaneously working full-time as a member of the faculties at Santa Fe College and the University of Florida.

All large-scale creative projects carry one great trap: Just because we have the vision and the initiative to develop the big idea, that doesn't guarantee that we also already know the specific tactics it will take to work productively on that idea all the way through to its completion.

To avoid this pitfall I quietly developed a series of skills for the advancement of my own projects. These included not just the usual time management check-ins, but also a series of more customized exercises for staying on-task with something both daunting and creative. I began meeting regularly with friends and colleagues who had their own creative projects to face -- originally just for the mutual encouragement -- and in time I developed a reputation as the guy to see when it's time to get down to the business of finishing.

Over time the tools I've brought to these meetings have been progressively customized not just to the specific type of project the other person is attempting, but also tailored to that person's work habits, energy level, time frame and personality. Think of me as a "personal trainer of the mind," as it were: The person you can call on when grappling with the completion of a Ph.D. dissertation, an art commission, a novel or a screenplay.

For a free initial consultation please send me an e-mail with the word *productivity* in the subject line, or call me at area code three five two, two seven five, seven zero four zero. Multiple reference-testimonials are available. 

Thanks for visiting and I look forward to working with you.
Dave O'Gorman