Linda Bonanno's Weblog

Lately I’ve had a harder time coming up with new topics for this blog. I haven’t really read anything all that interesting online that I want to share. I also haven’t had anything terribly interesting happen to me that I wanted to talk about either. Quite frankly I have been feeling like I might be running out of ideas. That isn’t a great place to be when I committed to myself that I would write a certain number of posts per month. My goal is to create and share coherent thoughts and opinions that hopefully aren’t just what everyone else is thinking. I want to apply what I read in unique ways to what I do every day.

This past weekend I planned on sitting down and coming up with 2 or 3 posts that I could squirrel away for when I am too busy to write. Nope, that didn’t happen. Then I thought to myself, well, Monday night would be a good opportunity to write. Nope, I wasn’t up to it. I started to feel the tug of procrastination and it was telling me to watch another show captured on the DVR last week when my TV went dead. Just one more show, and have a cookie and a glass of wine while you’re at it. That sounds good doesn’t it?

Today I decided that I was going to impose a deadline. Tonight. Period. There would be SOMETHING posted to my blog. I thought I would call the challenge “Creativity on a Deadline.”

I think that we’ve all been in this situation before – and some of us fair much better than others. I am usually not a procrastinator, but I do recognize that having a deadline – a hard deadline for a deliverable will bring my performance up and it will help my creativity. Sometimes I will create artificial deadlines (like this one). Sometimes I will commit to a date in order to force a deadline. Sometimes I will intentionally procrastinate for a few days before a deadline to help get my creative juices flowing. Yes, intentionally. I’m not an all-nighter type of person, but sometimes I like to cut things a little close, especially if it is something that I can knock out of the park. I don’t know about you, but for me it really helps me focus very very laser like at the task at hand. It also keeps me from over analyzing and over reviewing what I am working on.

Thinking this through, I don’t believe that creativity is best spawned by open-ended experimentation. If I can do whatever I want for days, weeks, or months at a time I find that I will still create deadlines for myself. If I don’t, I end up in the weeds without anything useful to show for it. How many hours can you spend playing games? Watching TV? or ahem, surfing the internet? (and I’m happy that you’re surfing here btw)

Planned creativity. Who would have thought that it works? IT DOES! Have you ever blocked off a few hours on your calendar to work creatively without interruptions? Then you have done this. Think about Google and their 20% initiative. That’s one day a week that their employees can just work on a pet project. that’s planning for creativity too.

When you’re stuck and you need to get something creative done – just make an appointment to do it – and set a deadline.