Procrastinating or Creating?
And how to tell the difference?
I’ve come across a few things lately that talk about procrastination being an emotional problem. Meaning you avoid a task because you anticipate doing it will make you feel a negative emotion: anxious, annoyed, like you’re failing, or doing it wrong. This makes perfect sense to me and I’m as guilty of it as the next person.
But, is it still procrastinating if the reason you aren’t doing the task is because you’ve hit a block in the road with a project and there’s no clear way to continue? Is the resulting inaction actually procrastination or is it thinking time? Space to allow creativity to spread her wings?
Should you ‘work the problem’ and get stuck in, hammering answers out, thinking of 100 solutions, hoping that somewhere in all the inevitable dross a glint of brilliance will shine through? Or do you just sit back and ponder a while? And are those two things really that different? One more visible, one more theoretical?
Certainly I’ve heard a lot of advocates for the first option. Writing certainly seems famously to hinge on the ‘write something first, make it good second’ principle. I’ve heard it applied to all kind of writing and many other creative endeavours and again, it makes so much sense.
But when it comes to making (crafting), I’m wondering if diving in isn’t the best idea. If I knit half the sweater or crochet half the blanket and then work out the solution I needed all along, I could well end up having to undo all my work and going back to the starting line. Granted, this is often part of the creative process too. But if it was something I just needed some time to think through before I started? That’s going to be pretty frustrating. More a case of ‘look before you leap’.
I’ve been thinking about this because I recently made a sweater where I had a big gap between intending and actually starting it. I called it procrastination at the time, but now I wonder if maybe I was just stuck at a creative bottle-neck. Something needed to wiggle it’s way free and once it had, everything ran smoothly again.
I often have this with a project. I get to a point where I just stop and nothing happens for a while. I procrastinate over what to do or how to move it forward. But rather than procrastination per se, I think it’s because I have a problem that I haven’t solved, (at least to my own satisfaction1).
Quite often the way to ‘move forward’ when I am making is to just decide something. Should I go for option 1 or option 2? When I get stuck it’s because I don’t like either option enough to choose it. Sometimes I think you can ‘settle on’ one of those as being close enough and sometimes it even stops being a problem after a decision of any sort is made. But I often spend my a decent chuck of my time trying to think up option 3. But maybe this is the necessary step, the creative step. Allowing myself the time to think and come up with a new idea, a different solution.
“You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.” ~ Aaron Sorkin
Because I’ve learnt that creativity, as least for me, needs space. I can not come up with new ideas without some empty(ish) time in which to think of them. Sure, an idea might spring seemingly from nowhere, a sudden spark of inspiration. But I’ll bet that’s because the mind had the space to wonder and find the way to it in the first place.
So maybe what I’ve called ‘procrastination’ is just ‘creative process’ and something I should be more accepting of? Maybe the project stops until the project can move on. In fact, maybe it doesn’t stop, it simply enters the ‘thinking’ phase. When the time is right, when the decision is made, the creative avenues explored, the third option found, then the ‘making’ part of the project resumes? I think that might be it.
Or maybe I’m just adding combustible excuses to my hungry procrastination fire?
S x
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That’s another issue, some of these ‘problems’ are of my own creation, but let’s not go down that long and winding road right now.
May be call it crecrastinating? :)
This was excellent food for thought, Sandra. And I think you are right - we need creative pauses in a project to allow time for that often necessary problem solving. That's where a creative project that's less taxing is lovely to have on the the go while doing that pondering!