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.
One of the most durable misapprehensions about working productively on a large project is what we might call the fallacy of unrealistic time-allotment. I myself am a chronic offender. Even after a decade and a half of dedication to working every day on my creative efforts I still find myself rising at the crack of 8:30 in the morning with the good-faith presumption that the subsequent day is going to unfold something like this:
...If you're keeping score at home, that's a total of eight hours of highly resource-demanding output that I seem to convince myself I'm going to pull off, every single morning as I roll out of bed.
There is much research out there to show just how unrealistic such a plan really is. Professor K. Anders Ericsson found in a recent study that the elite artisans of the world are able to maximize their efficiency when they confine themselves to ninety-minute work sessions totaling no more than four or four and a half hours in any given day. For the rest of us -- for the non-elite artisans of the world -- there is instead this recent study by none other than Microsoft, which found that the average office worker opens and reads forty-two e-mails per day (frankly I'd have thought it was more than that), replies to more than half of them (ditto), and that nearly half of all the time that such individuals are ostensibly concentrating on their actual tasks, they don't feel like they're really being productive.
I myself keep a log of what I've accomplished in any given day, albeit a totally cursory one: Each evening when I'm wrapping things up I write a series of four numbers in that day's spot in a by-the-week calendar. These numbers correspond to how many hours I've spent on each of four distinct areas of creativity I've set down for myself: Finishing the first draft of my novel, revising a collection of short stories, planning and editing my next film, and researching markets. In a day characterized by the graphic up above, this would mean that these four numbers should add across to eight -- and here's the thing about that: they NEVER add across to eight. (Actually, they very occasionally do add across to eight, after which I am so exhausted and the rest of my life is such a careening mess that it's usually the best part of a week before there's a single entry anywhere in the calendar other than zero.)
Ignoring the statistical averages and research-based predictions, then, a much more realistic plan of attack for my own personal day of productivity might look something like this:
...And this for me, you understand, is a GOOD day, not a busted one. A busted one is that much worse. But this is actually really, really good news if we want it to be, so do bear with me. Because, of course, if in a realistically good day I can only manage about two and a half hours of productive effort, then that also means that no day can ever be really and truly busted until it's essentially time for me to go all the way to bed. And if I stay grounded and drama-free about this fact, I can salvage much of a "good" day's productivity with a single, early-to-middle-evening burst of stubbornness.
In other words, instead of a busted day that looks like this:
...I can instead will myself to have a busted day that looks like this:
My busted-day productivity is thus increased from zero hours to one -- which may not seem like all that much of an improvement until we remember that it constitutes nearly 50% of what I can realistically get out of a good day. This thought has made an enormous difference in my creative life. Back in graduate school I began referring to the phenomenon as "busted-day gravy": The idea that once the day was already busted I couldn't really fuck it up, and accordingly any evening effort that I decided to undertake would be -- well, gravy. Poured atop the world's least tasty dish, perhaps, but gravy nonetheless.
Okay, now suppose that over the course of one's creative year he can expect to have, what, forty busted days? Sixty? I don't know about anyone reading these words, but if I have sixty busted days in a year, I'm having one of the memorably good years of my not-so-young life, so let's put it at sixty. This means that busted-day gravy will add sixty hours -- or about twenty-five days, roughly a thirteenth month -- to my calendar.
There are secondary benefits, too: the psychology of the busted day is a complicated animal (I didn't find any citations despite spending a goodly chunk of a busted day, trying), but even without the appropriate credential I think I can safely declare that whatever project a person is working on is going to be harder to face on the morning following a truly busted day. If instead the creator manages to squeeze out a single hour of output, then by definition that hour must come at the day's conclusion. This in turn means that any intriguing new directions he or she might stumble across will have to be left partially explored, raising both the energy level and the optimism for the morning session of the following day.
I don't have any research to support this notion, but it seems vanishingly unlikely to me that the true winners of the world ever have completely busted days: There just aren't that many days, overall, for any one of them to get casually written off. Instead they stay productive, they see their large creative projects all the way through in this imperfect world, not by maximizing the output of the most productive days, but by maximizing the output of the least productive ones. That's something that all of us can do -- regardless of intellect, talent, background, or competing demands on our time. And the best part is we don't have to feel scolded about it: At the end of a truly busted day, we can feel like we're getting something for nothing just by carving out a single hour to think about the thing we'd been wanting to think about all day, anyway.
If there's a better word for that idea than "gravy," I'm all ears.
Dave O'Gorman
Gainesville, Florida
If you are struggling with a large-scale creative project of any kind, be it a Ph.D. dissertation or an unfinished novel or an art commission or a musical score, I am here to help. Send me an e-mail with the word "productivity" in the subject line, and the two of us will sit down for free initial consultation. I have numerous references available from satisfied clients, and I can definitely help you finish.
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