How I fix a lack of creativity

Do something truly boring and let your brain do the walking

Photo by Pedro Forester Da Silva on Unsplash

Hello!

I’m going to come clean: I am procrastinating and I’ve taken multiple lengthy breaks this year. I haven’t posted consistenly since December 2022, which felt like a lifetime to me. My excuse/explanation was: life got in the way; at least one person in our house was sick on and off over the last few months, work started to pick up and because of it, I just wasn’t feeling it. Struggling with what to write and say is hard and I’ve already dealt with it before.

As I learned, procrastinating isn’t a laziness or motivation problem. According to Psychology Today, it's a physiological process, because “your brain perceives a real or imagined threat.”

So while I had one voice telling me Hey it’s been a long time since you wrote anything, maybe you should fix that, somewhere else I was feeling like between multiple trips to the doctor and extra work meetings and depressing news stories, it was more worth it to do…nothing.

Ironically, this post came from something unexpected: more work. I found myself in a bigger role in my department, which led to training to learn how to do the new responsibilities.

A week or so ago, I scrolled through the training lessons and modules and taking notes, there were times where I started thinking if it were possible for this to be a video, and then from there it starts rolling through multiple creative ideas: if this was a video, how would it work? etc.

Last week, I also noticed that being mentally fried is the same time where dumb-scrolling¹ increases and any quiet time you have is spent staring at your phone. To fix this, I started reading a book I had been neglecting and while parts of it are interesting, certain passages would be slow and I’d find myself coming up with creative ideas that I’d rush to write down.

But these only happen when I’d put the phone down and do something boring.

Is this the key to unlocking creativity: Forcing myself into slow-moving situations and wait for my brain to begin firing off some sort of free jazz association of ideas? There does seem to be some correlation between those two examples and also coming up with ideas in the shower or stuck in traffic.

Surely, I’m not the only one that this has happened. As it turns out, I’m not.

watsky @gwatsky

always work on two projects at once. that way you can procrastinate on project A by messing around on project B, and when you get tired of project B you can waste time by working on project A. you will be twice as productive while doing nothing but procrastinate

I discovered by forcing myself to do something small and low-stakes and boring (but in this case, eventually important and necessary²), I somehow “unlocked” a creative side of my brain. For some reason, this doesn’t happen when I’d sit down and stare at a blank page or tell myself I needed to be creative on a quick deadline.

I sat in the boredom.

What does this mean?

It was lucky that I stumbled into this procrastination “hack”, if it can even be called that. But to replicate it, I followed these steps:

1. Mute distractions (usually my phone) and possibly decide to stop procrastinating. Sometimes I was more adamant about it than other times.

2. Do something boring, especially if you can do it in silence. I found that folding laundry or cleaning up kitty litter worked best for me in these situations. The key is finding a task or a chore that is easy enough to pick up but also doesn’t fill me with dread (which is what usually leads to procrastination). This happens too in shower or “commuting home” situations: something part of my brain can do on auto-pilot so the other part can wander.

3. Profit! (Creatively-speaking, that is)

Give it a shot, and see how it goes.

1. I coined this just now; it’s like “doom scrolling” only with things that are random and unimportant like IMDB trivia for a movie that is 30 years old, or the potential fallout for sports broadcasting negotiations. Or basically, a really good Wikipedia rabbit hole.

2. The more notes I took for the self-guided work training, the more creative I felt “procrastinating”. It makes no sense, but somehow all the information stuck and I got a 100% on the final exam in the training.