Todo-lists vs. the creative habit

It happened to me on several occasions that I mixed up todo-list style working mode and creativity working mode, although every single time I was convinced that I did things the right way. In order to boost my creative output I have put several creative items on my daily todo-list and hoped that somehow getting things done and creativity would magically match. Not so! What happened, in fact, was that while checking off my todo-items I would postpone the creative items on the list. They would be postponed to the next day and then to next and so on. Since I have scheduled different creative endeavors on different days, you might already guess what happened. I got my regular tasks done but all the creative items kept piling up. Looking at this pile did not really inspire me to do anything creative at all. In fact, it scared me off. To conclude, during these experiments I haven’t achieved anything creative at all.

In the meantime, however, I have come up with a different strategy to get my regular things done and increase my creative output as well.

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Using your extendend memory

I have recently re-read a private memorandum of events that happened some time ago in my personal life. In this memo I wrote that “those two events will always stay intertwined in my memory”. Well… I didn’t take into account how quickly my memory of those events faded. If I hadn’t written them down for one, I wouldn’t even know about them any more. Both events have completely vanished from my active memory. It is not that I didn’t remember them when I read about them: the re-reading served as a refresher for my mind, the events are present again. But: I would not have been able to recall even one of them, left alone both and remember that they were intertwined without this refresher. Was it long ago? Maybe, it depends on your definition: about one and half years ago. And at that time I felt and believed that those events were pretty big in my life.

That showed me one thing very clearly: our memory is extremely faulty.

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Personal goals – do it yourself!

There is an old saying that if you want something done, then you have to do it yourself. Obviously this is one way to do it. And more and more I come to think of it as the one true way of doing it. Why?

If you do it yourself, or better, if you have to do it yourself, because you don’t get any help or the wrong kind of help, then you decide very quickly if you really want to have it or not. Because doing it, for most of the time, requires an enormous amount of will power and work. Therefore, you decide fairly quickly if you want to see your wish or dream come true or if you want to let it be just that – a wish. You will find out very quickly if you want to achieve it badly enough.

Now obviously this strategy does not work for everything. However for personal goals and fulfillment of dream projects I think this is a very good strategy to weed out cool projects from the ones which are not important. Additionally it helps you grow personally since you are managing and creating your dreams at every single step yourself. You become a mover and shaker. You do something with your life.

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How to get more done – chunk it down

Being a todo-list aficionado, I keep items for every aspect of my life on my lists. Even the enjoyable things, like painting, poetry, or writing prose. In fact, exactly because they are enjoyable but require overcoming an initial barrier to start, I found it very useful to have them on my todo-list. If I put an item like “write a poem” on my todo-list, the probability that I actually start writing it is significantly higher than when I just plan to do something nice after work. It works similarly well for sports or any other endeavor. Besides, there is a double mental satisfaction to have a creative product finished and to strike the item through on the todo-list or mark it as done. However, there is also a downside to the list-business, as I have noticed the last couple of months. Having between 20 and 30 items on my daily todo-list, I will emotionally pick always the ones, which seem to be least trouble. These are most likely not the ones, which are most important or urgent to do. If there is an item, which indicates the slightest doubt about how to do it or poses a certain level of difficulty then it is postponed indefinitely, unless, of course, there is time pressure from a deadline. Thus, at the end of the day, I will have done maybe 15-20 easy items and will have left the hard ones on the list for the next day, that is, I removed the sand, but left the rocks.

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