Motivation vs. Productivity: The 2020 Story (non-fiction, writing)
My motivation and productivity are at odds. Two metrics, two modes, one tiny link. Motivation is connected to my state of inspiration, ideas, and workaholism. But productivity is more difficult. I like to get things done in an order that prioritizes important and well-meaning things over perhaps more personal tasks. If you were to go through all the notebooks in my apartment, and at my office desk, you would find stacks of half-finished bullet journals and very uneven plot outlines (scribbled randomly on a quarter page I cut from a discarded 11 x 17 show poster, which I never hung). Life comes in waves of productivity.
Often, I make plans to do work on the weekend – or maybe at the end of the day, after dinner. “Okay,” I tell myself, “there will be plenty of time on Friday to take this fresh motivation I have and mold it haphazardly into productivity.”
The weekend comes. Friday: I get my coffee and some breakfast. I sit down and get to frickin’ work. I have a list. I have paper and pens and notebooks, and the laptop is charged. The house is quiet. All I have to do is work. But nothing comes.
By the time motivation is supposed to meet productivity, there’s a kink in the chain and everything slows down. Twitter starts to look compelling. There are TV shows I want to check out. “For story structure,” I think, “it’s research.”
There will be a number of things in your way when you go to create. Some are external: the bills piling up, the construction work outside, the global pandemic, the month-long election process for the President of the United States. Some will be internal: self-doubt, worry, self-censorship, or insecurity. Painful resistance is obvious. But behavioral, systemic, and societal resistance hide behind other more obvious things.
Steven Pressfield, the author of The Legend of Bagger Vance, writes about resistance in his book The War of Art. I’ve ordered it and it should be here this year, so maybe I’ll do a Books on Writing 101 after I’ve read it. Pressfield is big in the Story Grid community because he co-founded Black Irish books with Shawn Coyne and helped develop some of the Story Grid tools. In the community, Resistance is a concept you’ll hear about a lot.
The surface-level takeaway is this: You have to get out of the way and do the work. It’s impossible to write strong, inspired work if you’re preoccupied. I haven’t learned how to get out of my own way yet. I’ve focused on productivity tools and methods, I’ve tried to capture inspiration and turn it into future motivation, I’ve planned and outlined and abandoned projects to make space. But I haven’t gotten out of my own way enough, mentally, to do the work.
Sometimes when we focus on learning and craft, we get too in the weeds. In Robert McKee’s Story and in Story Grid, there’s an emphasis that most of what they’re trying to teach you should happen after the work is done. Don’t worry about Obligatory Scenes or The Negation of the Negation in your character arc yet. In the beginning, that’s all resistance. It feeds into productivity and motivation and slows down creativity.
If you have any tips on how to get out of my own way, I’d be happy to try them! But for now, I’m focusing on setting time, letting my mind relax, and not worrying about the structure or the changes. Just the work.