Your mind is an impatient customer
Your mind is an impatient customer. Your mind is waiting near the host’s booth, craning its neck over a phone, checking its watch every two minutes, tapping its foot while it glances daggers at you.
This is the experience of creating on an indefinite timeline. The mind is impossibly impatient, ruining its own experience, and ruining yours too.
“The most profound source of anxiety in waiting is how long the wait will be,” wrote management consultant David Maister in an article called The Psychology of Waiting Lines. “For example, if a patient in a waiting room is told that the doctor will be delayed thirty minutes, he experiences an initial annoyance but then relaxes… However, if the patient is told the doctor will be free soon, he spends the whole time in a state of nervous anticipation, unable to settle down.”
Most people understand that expectations are important. It makes barely any difference if a restaurant host tells you the wait is 10 minutes versus 20 minutes. Except if the actual wait is 15 minutes, being told “10 minutes” makes you impatient for 33% of your wait, while being told “20 minutes” gives you a pleasant surprise when your table is ready.
This helps explain why so many productivity gurus tout the praises of the pomodoro timer. When you decide to read for “a little while,” your mind is constantly asking should I stop now? What about now? But if you set a timer for 25 minutes, and decide to read until the timer goes off, your mind is at ease. It sounds ironic, but by imposing limits, you end up reading for longer than you would have with no limit, and you have a better time while you do it.
This is the thesis of the Creative Consistency Challenge: setting realistic limits on a short-term challenge to ease the impatient customer that is your mind. Think of any important but unpleasant task ahead of you. If you set a timer for one minute, and worked until the timer went off, you could do it. It would be fun. Then, if you increased the timer by one minute every day, eventually, you’d accomplish more than all your daydreams could conjure up.
