As I work my way through the text of my putative book on the creative process, you might like to read the rest of the text so far here. Also, the rest of my meditations on the process here.

There are many ways to manage TASK AVOIDANCE.

xxx <— this is my place holder for “needs more cowbell,” in this case some examples of structured procrastination before I get to kanban. (You can leave your system in comments if you’d like me to include it!)

My favorite way of making sure that my TASK AVOIDANCE is productive (and not just laziness) is the Japanese system known as kanban.

Kanban was originally developed at Toyota as an inventory control system and has been adapted for use in other areas, such as software design. Jim Benson and Tonianne Demaria Barry have developed a “personal kanban,” and I highly recommend their website (personalkanban.com) and their accompanying book.

Kanban involves writing down your tasks and subtasks on cards or sticky notes, then subdividing them into workflow stages such as Ready, Doing, and Done. (Benson/Barry emphasize that the system is ultimately adaptable to your workflow, terminology, and needs.)

This first key concept is called “visualizing your workflow,” and the first time you do a kanban dump it’s scary: all those sticky notes with all those things to do! But take a deep breath and remember: you’re going to procrastinate on most of this. You’re just getting organized about it.

The second key concept is “limit your work-in-progress.” Decide on how many of the sticky notes you’re going to actually work on at a time. The usual number is three, certainly no more than five.

As you complete a task, move the sticky note over to the Done column.

That’s all there is to it. (Of course there’s more to it, but that’s it for the basics.)

As Benson/Barry describe the process, the rest of the value of kanban manifests itself through these two key concepts. You’ll begin to get an idea of the tasks you’re avoiding and why. You’ll begin to examine your work practices as you watch the flow of sticky notes.^[1] You’ll begin to adapt the system to your needs.

There are a lot of ways to implement a kanban. The easiest way is simply to take a white board and stick sticky notes on it. (The important thing to remember is that your kanban has to be where you can see it as you work.)

There are of course software versions, including free add-on apps for Google Drive.

For a while, I used my laptop, creating a desktop image and using Apple’s Notes app to create sticky notes there.

Let’s take a look at this for a moment and see how I modified the three-phase model for my own workflow.

Across the top are the three standard columns: To Do, Doing, and Done.

Across the bottom are the modifications I made to the kanban to fit my workflow: Holding, Daily, and Future.

Holding is where I’d put the tasks in the Doing column that I couldn’t work on until someone else did their thing, e.g., budget figures or travel plans or something they had to get done before I could finish the task.

In the Daily section, I put things like blogging that I did on a daily basis, stuff that it didn’t make sense to keep creating in To Do and then move across the screen every single day. Notice the small vertical line: the Daily section was like a mini-kanban loop inside the Doing column. I could move my blogging sticky from one side of the line to the other to check it off—then move it back.

The Future area was stuff I knew I needed or wanted to work on—just not right now.

Your mileage may vary. It should vary.

Note that kanban is not a to-do list. I still have my to-do’s on my phone: mow the lawn, do the laundry, prep the labyrinth. My kanban is for MAKING THE THING THAT IS NOT and keeping my TASK AVOIDANCE on track.

XXX… <— some kind of conclusion

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(Each of the chapters on the Nine Precepts ends with a SO… summary.)

Task Avoidance- SO…

• Use “structured procrastination” by alternating your projects—avoid working on one project by tinkering with another.
• Kanban^[2] your projects—know what you’re putting off and why.
• Don’t be afraid to let projects simmer.
• Don’t grind your gears: give yourself some slack.

—————

^[1] see RITUAL

^[2] Start with http://personalkanban.com

As I work my way through the text of my putative book on the creative process, you might like to read the rest of the text so far here. Also, the rest of my meditations on the process here.

The other secret to successful TASK AVOIDANCE is that gestation is a necessary part of the creative process in any model worth the study—and a smart artist uses TASK AVOIDANCE to let ideas fully form. For the Lichtenbergian, it is part of the joke—procrastination is a key to creativity—Cras melior est—but make no mistake: we know when we’re wasting time and when we’re allowing an idea to mature or a problem to percolate unseen.

It is a mistake to think that “creativity” is somehow limited to the actual actions involved in finishing a work. Planning—working out the kinks—developing a framework—sketching, doodling, warming up—daydreaming about possibilities ^[1]—these are as responsible for the quality of the finished product as the actual acts of painting or sculpting or composing or writing are.

As Danish mathematician/poet/designer Piet Hein put it in one of his aphoristic poems he called grooks:

TWIN MYSTERY

To many people artists seem
undisciplined and lawless.
Such laziness, with such great gifts
seems little short of crime.
One mystery is how they make
the things they make so flawless;
another, what they’re doing with
their energy and time.^[2]

It’s also true that simply walking away from a project^[3] will sometimes allow your subconscious to work in the background on a solution to whatever has been puzzling you. History is replete with examples of great thinkers whose biggest ideas came upon them when they weren’t directly thinking about the problem. So absolutely, put down that sonnet and go get in the hot tub. You can thank me for it later.

Another important benefit of TASK AVOIDANCE is slack. Slack is that extra bit of rope that allows you to make adjustments in whatever it is you’re doing with that rope—in Lichtenbergianism, slack is extra time, and it is critical to any adaptive system like creativity.

One of my favorite fables about the importance of slack concerns a secretary in a large firm who was a wonder: she could schedule meetings, make calls, make copies, organize—you name it, she could get it all done for you at the drop of a hat. Then the company hired an efficiency consultant who found that the secretary often had nothing to do, large stretches of time which were not productive. They advised the company to schedule her workload more tightly so that she could get more done.

To everyone’s astonishment, her usefulness to the company plummeted. She couldn’t get to all the things she was asked to do and was often behind. No one could understand it.

They had taken her slack. All that time she was observed doing nothing was actually her being available to take on any task that was asked of her. When her whole day was scheduled, she was no longer able to pivot from one task to another and get them all done.^[4]

In Lichtenbergianism, whenever you feel over-structured, rushed, or swamped, it’s time for a little TASK AVOIDANCE. Clear out some time for reading, or thinking about another project. Or, if worse comes to worse, clean your house. Ugh.

Just remember that filling every moment with work is not actually being efficient.

Tomorrow: Task Avoidance, part 3

—————

^[1] This is of course distinct from daydreaming about appearing on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to promote your book.

^[2] Piet Hein, Grooks 3.

^[3] see also: ABANDONMENT

^[4] still trying to ferret out attribution for this story; it may be from Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency , except I don’t think I’ve ever read that book; book’s on order

As I work my way through the text of my putative book on the creative process, you might like to read the rest of the text so far here. Also, the rest of my meditations on the process here.

---

 

Chapter Three: Task Avoidance

 

The sure conviction that we could if we wanted to is the reason so many good minds are idle. —GCL, K.27

A parable: He always wears spurs but never rides. —GCL, J.127

Cras melior est. —motto of The Lichtenbergian Society

—————

The core value of Lichtenbergianism is procrastination, not doing All The Things.

 

  ^[1]

 

Procrastination is generally supposed to be a bad thing. “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today” is the sturdy, Puritanical maxim. Clean that house, compose that song, write that chapter, update that website—and do it now! After all, won’t you feel better when it’s done?

Well, yes, of course you’ll feel better when it’s done, but first you have to do it. Ugh.

To a Lichtenbergian, though, procrastination is a core principle. Avoiding that symphony, that second draft, that new series of photographs… That’s a lot more comfortable. Cras melior est. Tomorrow is better.

Avoid that task.

But why is TASK AVOIDANCE considered to be a critical Precept of Lichtenbergianism?

Part of the joke is that we think that the world be better served if artists of all stripes thought twice before releasing their works on an unsuspecting public. It’s a matter of quality control, really. It’s one thing to crank out the ABORTIVE ATTEMPTS; it’s quite another to assemble them and release them as your band’s CD. Or book of poetry. Or Southern gothic novel.^[4]

We call it the “Better as a T-Shirt Rule,” e.g., a Cafe Press t-shirt vs. the permanence of a snarky tattoo. Don’t commit to permanence when there’s still SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION to be done. You can always take a t-shirt off; you can always go back to an unpublished poem and take another look at it. Not so much with an hastily-considered tattoo, nor with a published collection of unrevised diary entries posing as poetry.

---

It is good when young people are in certain years attacked by the poetic infection, only one must, for Heaven’s sake, not neglect to inoculate them against it. GCL, L.69

---

Let’s face it: 90% of everything is pure dreck. Dreck is fine—see “The Bad Penny” in the previous chapter—because without people having the courage to put their dreck out there, we’d never get the 10% that’s actually worth something.  God bless all the lesser but nevertheless competent composers that dotted the musical landscape of the Age of Enlightenment, as Professor Peter Schickele called them—without them, Mozart wouldn’t have had a market for his perfection.^[5]

But if we, as creators, can hold back our dreck until it’s worth at least as much as the bottom 90%, then let’s do that. Cras melior est!

I want to make it clear that I am not telling you not to write bad poetry. On the contrary: you should write bad poetry, the more the better. You should write execrable death metal music. You should make uninspired pottery. That’s the whole purpose of Lichtenbergianism.

But, I hear you ask, how do we get from “create a lot of bad dreck, but put off finishing or publishing it for the love of humankind” to “create successful dreck by putting off finishing or publishing it”?

Here is the secret to successful TASK AVOIDANCE: because you are an artist, you have more than one Task to Avoid, each one nagging for your attention. The trick is to play them off against each other, avoiding one by working on another.

This very book (at least at the time of writing this sentence) is being written to avoid the pain of writing music.^[6] Not only that, but in the process of writing every section of this book, every other section proved a suitable distraction. Stuck on the AUDIENCE chapter? Jot down that note in your head on GESTALT that has been doing its best to distract you.

The very first full year of the Lichtenbergian Society I failed to achieve a single goal, mainly because I got distracted and built a labyrinth in my back yard instead:

In fact, often the Lichtenbergians will find that although we didn’t achieve what we said we wanted to achieve in any given year, we have done something else of value while avoiding our actual goals.

This is what John Perry calls “structured procrastination” in his charming and perfect The Art of Procrastination. I would say that Dr. Perry had beaten me to the draw on the concept, but as I said in Chapter One, none of this is new— he himself quotes a 1930 Robert Benchley column as defining the concept even earlier: “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

As Dr. Perry puts it, “The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing… The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks… as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.”^[7]

In 2003, for example, I was given permission by poet Nancy Willard to set her Newbery Award winning A Visit to William Blake’s Inn to music. Since there was some interest in performing this piece as part of an international sister city thing, you would think that I would have gotten right down to it.

Instead, I spent 2004 writing a children’s opera for a competition in Germany—which needless to say I did not win.

The good news is that I went on to finish William Blake’s Inn with an increased confidence in my abilities to orchestrate, and the final result is still my proudest achievement.^[8]

Tomorrow: Task Avoidance, part 2

—————

^[1] This is one of those “memes” you’ve heard tell about. I will be using lots of similar pop culture allusion. I may be old (spoiler alert:^[2] I’m old) but I try to stay aware of all internet traditions.^[3]

^[2] That’s another meme.

^[3] So is that.

^[4] We call these premature releases Corroborative Evidence and we shake our heads sympathetically—there but for the grace of Apollo—as we consign them to the flames. [see RITUAL]

^[5] Peter Schickele. The definitive biography of P. D. Q. Bach, p.23.

^[6] The opera Seven Dreams of Falling.

^[7] John Perry, The Art of Procrastination, p. 3

^[8] And if you’re looking for a world premiere piece for your organization, call me.