All writers finish and ship. You got this. Everything is ready. Now it is time to ship. Are you certain? When did you Finnish the writing? When is that? Tricky questions for all creatives from the artistic side’s writers, artists and performers to the pragmatic side’s architects, engineers and business builders.

Being finished can be easy or hard, it depends on the variables. For our talk here I will stick to writing, but the base concepts are universal for all creative types.

Theory says that a writer is done when they can ship. Practice often stalls shipping. Shipping has several options and depends a great deal on the writer. When we ship happens a lot for writers in the process and can be when we send the work to an editor, publish the article on line or deliver that white paper to a client. Writers ship at several stages, some are harder to get past and are toally different for most writers.

For the most part to ship is the point where we can no longer make changes to our draft. We go live. For many writers this is where we get cold feet. We feel that inner critic just hammering away at us. It is not always easy to know the answer to the question in the back of 0ur head. When is this work ever really going to be done?

Do I have to finish to ship?

A lot of people make the mistake of bouncing between the belief that their stuff is crap and over editing or thinking that every line they put down on paper is golden and waste time trying to make the work work. Neither is hardly the case. They are both stalls to ship.

Every writer needs to know when to let go. Our job is to filter through our raw material to find the pure ideas we are aiming at. Sometimes that means we have to know to let go of the clinkers.

What’s a clinker?

When we used coal fired stoves people often found one or two pieces that did not burn in every load. The nonburnable pieces were called clinkers. They were often the result of either low quality fuel or not burning the fuel right. The common answer back then was mostly just to shovel them out and start over with a fresh load.

Writing works much the same way. When we form clinkers we have to know to shovel things out and start over. We have to know when to let go.

Did you go all Picasso or George Lucas or Sir Author Conan Doyle?

If it were easy to know when a creative work is done masters like Picasso, Lukas and Doyle would have had a far easier time of it. Knowing when we are done is as much a sense from our guts as it is a plan spelled out in great detail on paper.
Picasso was showing his newest collection to his friend and Paris art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler when his voice fell silent. In that moment Picasso could see his work had not really reached his vision. Picasso knew his work was not done. He seized a palette knife and shredded each one in turn.

All the time Picasso destroyed months of work his friend kept trying to stay his hand. “Arrête Pablo. Arrête.” Nothing could stop him. In that moment Picasso took himself back to square one. Sometimes you have to know the work is not ready.

Our early success can prevent finishing and shipping also

George Lucas found his work incomplete for decades. Fans raved about this along with him, but it was a case of misunderstanding of what the work scale was. Fans loved the story and demanded the remaining unfilmed six films he had used to craft his back story, story line and characters.

There is little doubt that Lucas could have finished all the films sooner if he had not piddled around fine tuning the original three through several incarnations. The question real question was should he tell the story for the audience or for himself?

Lucas’ vision only wanted to tell the story of the first three films, chapter four to chapter six. Lucas focused on perfecting the vision for the first films instead of finishing the rest of the films and shipping them to his audience. He spent years remaking the films after they had been in the theaters for various versions as the technology allowed him to expand our view of his original vision.

Lucas’s Answer

As Lucas said in an interview on his 2004 updated version of the first film from 1977,

“The special edition, that’s the one I wanted out there. The other movie, it’s on VHS, if anybody wants it. … I’m not going to spend the, we’re talking millions of dollars here, the money and the time to refurbish that, because to me, it doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s like this is the movie I wanted it to be, and I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be.

I’m the one who has to take responsibility for it. I’m the one who has to have everybody throw rocks at me all the time, so at least if they’re going to throw rocks at me, they’re going to throw rocks at me for something I love rather than something I think is not very good, or at least something I think is not finished.”

Fans and Lucas aside, the industry is far better off tech wise because of all that time Lucas spent to advance the tech he needed tell his story. The main thing is that in the end it is the writer who says the works done. Though eventually Lucas did bow to the public desires. He made the first of the remaining six films and he set the stage for the reast of the films to be made from his notes and guidelines.

Doyle Changed his Mind

Sir Author Conan Doyle was not consumed by perfecting a vision of his work. He was tired of writing about Sherlock Holmes, so he killed Holmes to get free of the story. The ire of the public over the untimely end of the story, including bricks through his publisher’s window, forced Doyle to bring Holmes back. It was much later that he could quietly quit the tale.

For Doyle the return of Sherlock Holmes ensured immortality for the Holms story, but very few of us today know of his Lost World that has been used for many Jurassic type worlds since including works like Jurassic Park.

So who knows when best to end the story the author or the audience?

Many would like to see ourselves as Picasso with the steel nerves to raze our work to the ground. I am certain some do have Picasso’s direction, but most of us either fritter our time with clinkers or just yield to demands of the audience to decide when we are done. In the end it is the writer who must decide to let go or press on. We have to listen to Picasso and Lucas. Writers are done when we say. We say when to finish and ship.

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Support sour focus is a strange kind of thinking but it’s a true need. Let’s dip into this concept. You need to have a support system for your focus outside of the writing. Your work is not just the result of your writing time. It is everything you do in your day. You bring all of it to the table when you sit down to write. If you want your A game when you sit down, you have to have an A game support system the rest of the day so that it can replenish your focus resources and build new reserves.

Be Active

One of the keys to keep your focus strong is getting the blood out of our feet and into our heads. We also need to build our capacity for work, aka our physical fitness. We need fitness for focus. For the writer this is available at two times during our day. One is found while writing and the second is found in the rest of the day.

The power break

Taking breaks at regular intervals while you are working maximizes our reserves, allowing us to maintain peak productivity. When we are writing these breaks can be as short as five minutes and as long as half an hour at the end of our twenty five or fifty minute work periods. Yes, the Pomodoro system is based on this concept. For the writer these breaks allow us to clear our minds and let the subconscious do its thing with the work while it allows the body to sustain longer work times.

Using your break times for surfing on line or similar online distractions do not yield much gain. These power breaks work best when we get some body movement in.

You do not have to put in a Tobata or some other short type of workout, though you could do that for a break during a longer series should you want to blend in a more vigorous approach. You do not have to be this aggressive though.

Most people will be happy to know we get excellent results just standing up and walking around at your normal walking pace so that you can circulate the blood. So get up walk, walk some stairs, go to the toilet, get out of the building for a minute or two and breathe deep, look out a window if you cannot go out, stretch a bit and again breathe deep. Movement refreshes the body and the mind while prepping you for the next round.

My take on supporting your focus

I have used these kinds of breaks for years. Even an hour of writing in the evening runs better when broken up by a five or ten minute moving break. When you remember that being too sedentary is a big problem these days, these simple breaks can be part of your cure along with better focus and higher quality production. Total win win.

They are not limited to your writing time either. The same technique can be spread throughout your day with either 25 minute or 50 minute work periods to maximize your energy and focus for the day.

The rest of your day

Aside from breaking up your day there are other things you can do regularly to support and improve your focus.

Fitness

Being fit has been proven to improve both focus and energy. You don’t have to be a marathon runner either to achieve the laser like focus that runners do. Though if you do happen to be an endurance athlete or aspire to be one there are plenty of writers like Haruki Murakami or Joyce Carol Oats, among others, to draw inspiration from. You can read a better line of thought from Oats in To Invigorate Literary Mind, Start Moving Literary Feet or Nick Ripatrazone’s Why Writers Run

You can skip the hard core, just going for a walk, swimming or adding other low impact workouts still reduce stress, improve health, and strengthens your focus for writing. Plus some exercise and fresh air does wonders for excellent sleep, which is so essential for all kinds of mental skills from hatching your plots, avoiding deus ex machina and of course focus.

Plan as you go

Keeping a note book or pad on hand to take notes when ideas come through out your day is a great way to improve your focus while writing. When we know what we are going to write about focus becomes more natural.

To support your focus practice focus

Focus is like any other skill. We get better when we do it more. Learning to stay focused does not happen overnight. You need to learn it and then practice.

Another common problem can be trouble keeping a schedule. You are fine. Experiment to find what works for you.

If you fail to write for weeks or years, how do you avoid discouragement long enough to start? Like Nike. Just Do It. Make yourself sit and write, even just ten minutes. You could use micro habits to build the practice and as a fall back for those days you are tempted to skip. Find the smallest part of your task you can do. Make it so small that you can not come up with a reason not to do it. Then place that micro habit at a point in your day where you cannot avoid it. The classic example of this is building the habit of daily flossing by starting with just one tooth every day for the first five days. Five days gives you the habit. Building off of it happens rapidly.

Writing is no different. Put down the equivalent of flossing just one tooth, like say write just five words and quit. No more no less for the first five days. Then let yourself build your habit from there. It also helps if the work is something you care about since our emotions do give us energy to do things we care about. You can use anything that works.

Make your schedule a habit

Having a schedule for our days builds a mental pattern for us to lock into so we can tap into our natural flow. It allows us to write when our focus is at its peak and custom build your schedule to meet your needs. Write when you want to. That can be before breakfast, a couple hours in the afternoon or an hour before bed. Even just seven hours on weekends. When does not matter. The only thing that matters is consistency and regularity over time.

When you first start, develop the habit to write first. The reason is till your writing is more of a habit, and even after to some degree, writing can take more time than you will expect from interruptions, illness and unforeseen technical problems. You will avoid much frustration if you work your projects without a schedule till you have enough experience to know how long a given amount of work will take.

So skip setting a dead line for finishing a novel by January 1 or writing a blog post every Monday. Avoid the overwhelm, the need to pull an all nighter or even just giving up on the project. Skip writing deadlines, along with deadlines for all the other writing tasks from research to edits on through to rereading, in favor of using chunks of time at regular intervals. You will give yourself a better chance for success.

Getting back to work

Schedules are often made just to fail. Life happens. Things need to get done.

It is not uncommon for issues from kids to selling the house come between you and your schedule. You are going to lose writing time at times.

What can you do?

Go with the flow and then get back into the schedule as soon as you get past dealing with life’s curve ball. Consider adapting your schedule that you loved to the new situation. Completely revise it if you need to. You can also use what I call habit keepers to ride things through, or bare bone minimums that you cannot skip. For instance you can peel back your writing to just five minutes instead of an hour but keep your normal start time.

The thing to remember is that your feelings and thoughts can fool you into thinking your work is not all that important. You wind up procrastinating. The longer you do that the harder it gets to jump back into the game. Don’t wait too long. Jump into the ice filled water.

Feelings and thoughts

One of the bigger false realities comes from what you feel or think. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, feel fear or dread or worry, or have that critic in your head going off on how your writing is not any good and that you can’t complete it. We can easily feel tired or think we are too distracted to write right now.

The reality is you are not your thoughts or your feelings. Thoughts are, as the monks say monkies chattering in your mind. They are nothing more than the habitual thoughts you have picked up from others. Your feelings are the emotional responses to your thoughts and conditioned responses. Become aware of them both, but let them pass through your head without attention. Don’t let them stop you from getting to your work. Make the choice to write, then act on it.

One practice is to free write for a chunk of time, say twenty minutes. As you fall into a groove the critic and feelings will fade away. It may take time but it will happen.

You can’t do it all

The fact is we all have things we like to do besides writing. We have desires to hit the beach, go skiing, hang with friends, almost anything that is fun and easy. Social media is a huge addictive distraction for many.

The only choice we have is to make cuts and simplify our lives in other areas so we can work on our writing. Ask yourself the hard questions “Are you going to write or not?” “Is your novel going to be ship ed?” Be choosy. Find what you really can live without then move some writing into that slot. Be sure to keep some healthy activities like eating right, staying active and spending time with family and friends.

The key for better focus really comes down to commitment and work. Make the commitment and do the work. Supporting your focus will give you gains. It is also very useful when you are in the belly of the beast.

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Willpower Theory

The theory of unlimited willpower has brought a new look to what we understand of willpower. For over three decades psychology has labored under the theory that our will power is limited. That is how it has seemed to work under the long standing theory. Your ego starts each day with a full tank of fuel. All day long we run about making one choice after another. Each choice uses up a little more of the fuel, commonly referred to as ego depletion. Our goal is to maximize our reserves for more important choices, so we use strategies like planed breaks and simplifying our decision making process to ensure we get the maximum value from the day’s reserves. Over time we can also build more tank space so we can get further too.

Under this theory, a day of heavy decisions makes writing that book or running that blog a seriously challenging choice when faced with the ease of pizza and a movie.

New Theory Unlimited Willpower

A study at Beijing Normal University, China has challenged that line of thought. The researchers found that we might have an infinite amount of willpower. The first step is to find out why we feel depleted after a lot of choices. That answer could give us a better understanding of how to access that infinite source.

Definition of Ego Depletion is Over Simplistic

What the study results tells us is that ego depletion theory needs a tweak. The researchers found that the weakened ego effect was not as strong as has been believed when they tried to replicate the original results with participants in four studies using a standard depletion procedure. In the test the participants completed a random depletion procedure then repeat the task a second time. No evidence of significant depletion effects were found in any of the studies. The null results indicate that depletion may have a much weaker effect than previous studies led us to believe.

Previous Studies

Previous studies have been centered on the participants’ self-control. The first part was to deplete the ego then measure the loss in the second round.

New Research Shows Unlimited Willpower

The newer research argues that the first task is the reason we shift from a need to control ourselves to a need to gratify a want. This is a change of our motivational mindset.

The new process model supports ego depletion but argues there is more going on that just the hypothesis of “Doing A takes all the energy you need to do B.” That explanation is too simplified. The possibility is that the ego has a larger stamina than previous research suggests. If that theory holds, then we come to the questions of how does will power work and what can we really control?

Retrain What We See

The thinking is that if willpower really works like a muscle, then the type of work nor our feelings, enjoy or hate it, does not matter. You should not be more tired from a grueling four hour gym workout than dancing all night long.

Cut Choice

Many people using the muscle based depletion argument have cut down their choices so that they can conserve their will power. Theoretically, the fewer choices they make daily creates less of a drain on our willpower reserves. Many people from Steve Jobs in his black turtlenecks to Mark Zuckerberg are famous for their limited wardrobes. Here’s a good argument in that line of thought. “An Argument For Wearing The Same Clothes Every Day”.

Minimizing your choices is a great argument and does seem to work, but some research says that even if you feel depleted after you finish a given task, your self-control will stay high if you re-frame the work as being fun.

Unlimited Willpower Turns Work to Fun

In 2011 Juliano Laran and Chris Janiszewski (Work or Fun? How Task Construal and Completion Influence Regulatory Behavior ) tested the minimalism theory. They gave participants the tedious task of choosing between similar products like two similar computers with just a few differences, like RAM or CPU speed. The real difference was how they framed the choice as fun or not. Those in the fun group had one additional sentence in the instructions: “The first study is a fun study involving hypothetical choices in several product categories.” This extra sentence made a difference that allowed the participants to persist longer than the second group in evaluating the products. Restoring Ego Depletion

Break Point

One’s attitude is the break point for whether you feel “depleted” or not. A belief that your willpower is unlimited seems to become a self-fulfilling prophesy based on the scientific evidence.

Willpower is an Emotion

I think it is worth the work to develop an unlimited willpower mindset. It starts with how you see your willpower. People who see their willpower as an emotion also find it easier to believe that they have unlimited willpower. They might be on the right track too since there is science based evidence to support their beliefs.

Belief and Science

Researchers have looked at how our beliefs affect our willpower. Those studies show that people who believe they have unlimited will power do seem to outperform their limited willpower believing counterparts.

Sugar Free

For the unlimited willpower believer a sugar rush is not even an option. In one study on Willpower Sugar and Self-control researchers tested the effects of sugar on self-control. Over three experiments people were given a sugary or a non-sugary drink when being tested. The limited willpower believers saw an improvement when given a sugary drink versus a non-sugary drink. The unlimited believers maintained a high level of self-control regardless of the drink they had.

Bounce Back Effect

A study out of the University of Zurich Katharina Bernecker shows that unlimited believers bounce back after a hard day with higher productivity goals, but their counterparts are still exhausted from the previous day’s work and are generally unproductive. The study also shows that the believers also follow up on those goals which results in making them far more effective than the limited theory-believers.

Sustained Learning

The believers continue to learn and improve in sustained work beyond where the limited theorists feel “depleted”. A Stanford study took participants through eight biased questionnaires to place them in one of the two belief sets. After modeling their beliefs the researchers gave each group a series of eight books to study over a period of time. For the first half of the test they results were similar, but the limited group lagged in the second half while the unlimited group continued to learn at the previous rate. The study showed that beliefs about willpower can be modified by input over the short term. What theory we believe can increase performance over a long and difficult task.

Unlimited Willpower Sees the Belief Change

Much of the reason for the difference is that when you believe you have unlimited resources your reactions and plan of attack changes. Procrastination is less and preparations are more efficient. With unlimited willpower the subject is apt to see problem solving as more as a motivational challenge/experience, not an exhausting one. Better preparation likely aids how smooth a project moves which also makes it easier to maintain positive momentum.

What Does Unlimited Willpower Mean for Writers?

Writers can take a few lessons from this. It’s clear that an unlimited willpower mindset can improve our productivity and that we can make that happen by reimagining our willpower as an emotion.

When we see our willpower as an emotion, we are far less likely to treat it as though it will deplete over time with use. No one would expect to see an emotion such as love reduced with more people coming into our lives such as when child is born. The added child does not decrease the love we have for other family members. No one is going to spend time being unhappy to save happiness for an event later that night. The trouble is that at the end of the day we can still feel drained even with an unlimited supply of will power.

So what makes us feel drained?

Michael Inzlicht at the University of Toronto thinks that the loss of control happens when there is a conflict between goals. Your emotions settle the matter of which one wins. It’s not that you cannot resist the temptation, which is a short term goal, of desert. The breakdown is because your goal of a beach body this summer is less emotionally compelling than the desert platter.

Projects We Like

It is possible to have unlimited willpower by spending more time on projects we like or put more focus on the aspects of the work we like to keep our motivation high. We could even walk away from those goals that hold no emotional motivation for us and feel good about it. There is no reason to run five miles a day when you are not really up for it.

In the Marines I found this to be totally true. I used to hate running, but it was not till I got running regularly with my unit that I ever felt an emotional connection to running. Once I had that connection, doing training runs on my own became far easier to do.

Perfect World

If everything were perfect, we could just fill our lives with things we find motivating. That’s a hard thing in a world where even our ideal work comes with unpleasant work aspects. As writers we all tend to like to write, but we might have problems with editing or research. Research in How do people adhere to goals when willpower is low? The profits (and pitfalls) of strong habits indicates that our habits are our way out in those times that willpower and emotional fortitude are low. Habits lock us in when we lack that emotional tie.

Habits

Creating a new habit to deal with such onerous tasks to take advantage of a regular emotional upswing in our day is a useful way to use autopilot in an advantageous way.

Putting Unlimited Willpower to Work

Researchers know that prioritizing our goals over impulses is key to winning the battle with temptation. What we do in our free time builds our motivation for later. Here are a few suggestions.

One of the things that helps us increase our willpower is how fit our bodies are. Physical exercise has shown clearly to improve mental function and willpower. A long term consistent program is the key for optimal benefits. This is likely because the habit of doing the workout even when you are tired or when the weather is not nice allows you to become more comfortable with discomfort and inconvenience. A sporadic workout has been shown to have both positive and negative effects on willpower, depends on factors like workout intensity. In both cases though moving the body and working out is a great tool for developing willpower.

Meditation and other mindfulness activities improve our willpower. In How Mindfulness Enhances Self-Control and How Mindfulness And Productivity Go Hand In Hand we find that there is a positive link between regular mindfulness and meditation practices and improved willpower. When we learn to observe our thoughts and emotions without judging them it becomes easier to see temptation when it strikes. Seeing temptation in the moment allows us to use our willpower and self-control to control it.

Subtle Reminders

You can use a subtle physical reminder to symbolically remind you of your infinite power. This can range from a poster over your desk to a medallion you use to meditate on. Eric Miller’s team found using subtle cues for unlimited willpower can create an access point to the unlimited mindset.

Conversations

You can also watch who you talk to as you develop your own unlimited mindset. Much of the research shows that creating too varied and conflicting cues in our thinking can have a negative effect on our ability to keep our motivation high. Avoiding conversations about feeling drained while we are working to shift our mental perspective can make it faster and easier to redefine our willpower expectations.

Consider

What is your inspiration to work on large goals? What attitude do you approach your day with? How do these affect your productivity? What do you think helps to rethink willpower?

Try out a great read Honesty- What does that have to do with writing?

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