March: Deadlines, Flexibility, and Breathing Room

Hello friends,

It’s the second Friday of March. Did you notice that this month’s newsletter didn’t come out on the first Friday of the month? Perhaps you didn’t. In fact, most likely you didn’t, because if you’re like me, then your inbox is already full of too much content and you’re overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world.

In the three years of writing this newsletter, I have only missed a first Friday two other times. Once because it was the 1st of the year and the other time because there was just too much going on and I needed to be reasonable about what I could do. This is to say: usually I stick to my self-imposed, entirely arbitrary deadline, mostly because it creates structure and routine. But I also believe in allowing enough grace for missing deadlines when necessary. 

There’s value in a deadline. Sometimes it’s impressive what you can do when one looms. After all, work will usually take up the amount of time that you have for it. If you have two days to finish a project, you’ll finish it in two days, and if you have six months to work on a project, you’ll finish it in six months (but most likely in the last two days of they six months and the rest of the time will be spent in the “I should be working on this” thinking phase). 

There’s actually a term for that: Parkinson’s Law, named for Cyril Northcote Parkinson who wrote an article for The Economist in 1955 describing this exact scenario. His example describing an “elderly lady of leisure” trying to do a fairly simple task of sending a postcard to her niece is a little gendered and outdated, but tongue-in-cheek and gets the point across. “An hour will be spent in finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half-an-hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar-box in the next street.” His point was actually more about the inefficiencies of bureaucracy but the general adage stuck: work expands into the time you have available for completing it.

I took on a writing project last month that didn’t really allow for expanding into a large chunk of time (mostly because that chunk of time didn’t exist in the first place). I had to stick to smaller daily deadlines to ensure that I hit the larger one. Forward was the only option.

Did I feel creative during this time crunch? Not particularly. I came up with some sentences that I was proud of, and I learned quite a bit. It was also nice to have a big project that required a strict schedule because it provided structure. The amount of work wasn’t sustainable on a longer term basis, but the routine of it felt like a life raft, something to cling to. This is all to say that I have been thinking about what deadlines really mean and what they do for our creative process. 

Paper mural I made with students in an after school art class I taught last month. Figured you all needed a little drop of color and joy. 

Let’s begin with the word, which I now feel like I have repeated at least a dozen times (actually, I checked, and it’s only 6 so far). The word "deadline" hails back to the Civil War when it was used to describe a boundary around a military prison. If prisoners went beyond it, they risked being shot. No wonder such a word would carry so much value in capitalist hustle culture. 

Despite their often negative connotation, deadlines can help us commit to doing and completing something. They’re sometimes the impetus that we need to take an inkling of an idea and actually turn it into something. As Rita Mae Brown once said, “a deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it's better than no inspiration at all.

Yet too many deadlines can be a bad thing, particularly as they have the potential of heightening our sympathetic nervous system and putting us in a chronic state of stress. We also have a tendency to focus on what’s urgent instead of what’s important, and be on an unending cycle of little deadlines, which can become a pretty severe impediment to larger creative projects.

Creative process needs a little more space, a little more breathing room. Researchers at Harvard found that people are able to be more creative under low to moderate time pressures. That is to say, a time with boundaries, but not the kind of deadline that has you sprinting for the end and still leaves room for exploration and contemplation. 

There has to be space for breaks in your creative work, even, especially, when there’s a looming deadline. When we’re stuck on a creative problem, the best option is usually not to keep pushing through. It’s the pause, take a break, and do something else for a bit. 

A tight deadline often means that we don’t get very much time, if any, for the essential but often overlooked parts of the creative process: research and incubation. We can’t sit around waiting for lightning bolts of inspiration—creative thinking and problem solving requires gathering all kinds of ideas and information, and then letting those sit and marinate. 

I’ve started to think of “procrastination” as simply fueling this process. If I have been good about researching for whatever project I am working on, then I know that in those moments of “procrastination,” I am in fact allowing those ideas to sink in, giving my brain a little space to do the incubating that it needs to form new ideas. 

For creativity, routine and ritual serve us well, but we also need to embrace a little less rigidity at times. As neuroscientist John Kounios said in an interview on creativity and insight, “...having a deadline, which carries with it the implicit threat of a negative consequence if you don’t meet it, can create anxiety and shift your cognitive strategy into a more analytical mode of thought. Deadlines can increase analytical productivity, but if an employer really needs something outside the box, innovative and original, maybe a soft target date would encourage more creativity.”

There’s a reason why good ideas come in the shower. Dopamine is flowing, we are relaxed, and we’re distracted enough so that our subconscious can do the work. If you want to fuel your creative process, you don’t need more deadlines, you need more of the activities that do exactly this. But we don’t get a lot of those unless we actively plan for them, certainly not right now as all kinds of negative and stress-inducing things swirl around us. Those are having a very serious impact on our stress levels right now. I think this Christoph Niemann drawing sums that up pretty well. Which means that when it comes to our creative lives, why not cultivate a little more softness, a little more grace, a little more kindness? 

After all, creativity is one of the things that allows us to process what’s going on around us. It allows us to think differently about how we move forward, it allows us to be a little more flexible, a little more able to adapt when things change. We always need creativity, but in dark times, it's a lifeline. 

As Rebecca Solnit wrote this week, “We need to have confidence that surprise and uncertainty are unshakable principles, if we want to have confidence in something. And recognize that in that uncertainty is room to act, to try to shape a future that will be determined by what we do in the present.”

If you’re trying to navigate the world right now, a creative deadline can provide a little structure. It can encourage you to show up even when you feel like you don’t want to. But don’t forget to also allow yourself a little more grace, a little more softness, a little more kindness.

Push the deadline when you need to.
Get more rest.
Take more walks.
Drink more water.
Cultivate more joy.
Be gentle. 

-Anna

ps. I'm working on something kind of big for Creative Fuel. You'll probably hear a little more about that in next month's installment, but for now, it's helpful to keep growing the Creative Fuel community. So if you want to help out, you can forward this email to a friend.

pps. I am writing a new monthly column for Big Cartel called The Creative Fuel Series. The first installment was all about how we need creativity for our wellbeing, and features this great quote from my friend Andrea: "Art gives us a way to talk about our feelings or express things that is connected to something tangible and a vocabulary that can be shared."

ppps. I was asked to put together a short prompt for Freeflow Institute's Cold Weather Craft podcast series and you can catch it here.