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| Edited By: Birender Ahluwalia |Source: DNA webdesk |Updated: Mar 13, 2016, 11:26 PM IST
There is so much being written about avoiding procrastination and mindlessness, almost as if they are afflictions, better minimised or avoided. Of course, then there are those cult leaders who wear their procrastination and mindlessness like a medal on the chest.
Seemingly, both seem to feed off each other. Your mindlessness leads to procrastination or it could be the other way around. You might consider yourself a constant procrastinator and, therefore, you tend to seek refuge in mindlessness to wander away.
Whatever may be your starting zone, both procrastination and mindlessness usually gets a rap. They are perceived to be deleterious rather than being additive.
Studies of creative artists over the centuries have shown that procrastination leads to great works of art. Creative fields are replete with examples of last minute rush and delivery. Scientists have more than adequately proven that in the creative pursuit, both mindlessness and procrastination hold great creativity sparking potential.
Adam Grant in his book, Originals, observes that The Last Supper was a “work in progress” idea for fifteen long years. Leonardo Da Vinci would often think about the construct of the painting while working on other projects, but it took him fifteen years to get the perfect framework and then begin the painting.
(Image Credit - Adam Grant's Twitter Account)
I'm not comparing myself to Da Vinci here, but demonstrating that procrastination is commonplace. Never have I attended a board meeting, where I did not keep making last minute improvisations. I must have planned, supervised, and executed around a thousand sales workshops and meetings. Almost all of them have had me sitting in the editing suite to get the perfect audio-visual. If the AV was perfect, I would be asking for different sets of data in the last minute. When I worked for a logistics company, we made a ton of money shipping samples, production, promotion and conference material to make it “just-in-time”. So there is money to be made from other people’s procrastination, but that is a mindless digression… for now.
Here is the interesting bit. Even if the exact conference was to take place again, the entire cycle would be repeated again. We would remember some errors from the previous iteration. Chop and change schedules, or simply the conference venue would not be given to us in time to set everything up and conduct a rehearsal.
A dear friend recently published a post mentioned that often his agency would have the presentation ready three signal junctions before the client's office. I thought that was being super-organised. I still update and make changes to presentations while sitting in the client’s office reception. I whisper last minute updates to the presenters even for presentations that have been delivered a dozen times.
I had a boss, who would call it 'The Great Indian Wedding'. Everything seems to come together in the last minute. Except that the Great Indian Wedding is a universal phenomenon studied by psychologists and psychiatrists the world over.
I want to introduce you to three separate principles related to how “procrastination” and “mindlessness” can be made out to be a refreshing nutrient for the creative processes.
Robert Yerkes and John Dodson, in 1908, proposed that people are motivated to perform only when they have reached a certain level of arousal.
(Image Credit - Wikimedia Commons)
One of the biggest drivers of arousal is time. The ticking clock. The digital countdown gives us an adrenaline rush. When you feel you have a lot of time, you tend to put away the job at hand. You are not aroused enough. Some people need the pressure of the countdown to get their adrenaline flowing.
It is similar to that of a batsman. When the required score is low, sometimes you get complacent. If the required scoring rate or strike rate is high, it gets their juices going. They know time is running out.
I know many of my colleagues who thrive under the stress of time pressure. They drive everyone around mad, but somehow they manage to squeak through not only within the deadline but with outstanding quality of work. They just love building up to a crescendo to beat a deadline.
So how does this work? Building up the crescendo does not mean that the brain has stopped processing the options. Bluma Zeigarnik who was a student at the Berlin School of Experimental Psychology came up with an interesting theory.
Way back in 1927, Zeigarnik was having lunch with her colleagues. She noticed that her waiter remembered the order of all the tables and executed them perfectly. However once they completed the order, the waiters seem to completely forget what the patrons had ordered.
It was then she researched and found that adults remembered the details of uncompleted tasks 90% better than those of completed tasks. It is almost as if once you open a file, your brain keeps the file open for you. It keeps processing the data points in the proverbial backburner.
(An upscale restaurant in London in 1941. Image Credit - Wikimedia Commons)
The key, of course, was intrinsic motivation. If the motivation to complete the task came as orders from above, the output would be both shabby and tardy. If the motivation was to be driven by an internal challenge, then the pressure of time seemed to have a positive impact.
Therefore, think twice before you threaten the creative masters. You do not want to intrude on their personal space. You need to appeal to their higher levels of motivation and understand the balance of challenge and skill.
This is where I want to introduce you to Mihály Csíkszentmihályi's Theory of Flow.
(Image Credit - Wikimedia Commons)
Csíkszentmihályi proposed that the perceived challenge level was related to the perceived skill level.
The masters achieve a state of flow when they perceive their challenge to be high and their skill level to meet their challenge to be commensurate.
They may appear not to have started work on the project, it is either because it is anxiety or arousal. When they are in a state of arousal or anxiety, obviously it means that they have not arrived at a solution. Their brain is working full time over it. Internally they are worrying and fretting over it. The key is how do they move from Anxiety to Arousal to Flow.
Of course, if they feel the project is too easy, they might feel a sense of relaxation or even boredom and apathy.
An indicator would be their past track record. If they usually deliver high quality, then you know they can work their way from anxiety and arousal into flow. However, it might be that the challenge is not strong enough. The key here is to change the stakes in the game.
Therefore, it is not a simple act of delay or procrastination. There are real states of emotion involved here. Judging their emotional states and processes needs a great amount of awareness of their skill and capabilities.
(Image Credit - Wikimedia Commons)
Small steps
Without you knowing it, when they are being briefed about the problem at hand, their mind starts evaluation options and alternate courses of action. However, they know that the options are only a first draft or a first wave. They are unhappy with the output.
You might want to be concerned if they turned around a creative project almost immediately after being confronted with the problem.
This is when, under the cover of procrastination, they let mindlessness take over
Mindlessness and planned delays
You might hate it, but the fact is their dissatisfaction with the output has made them abort the project for now. They might undertake some other low stake project, or even listen to music. For some, a nap works wonders. For others, it could be playing a video game or just stepping out for a coffee or a cigarette.
Mindlessness and Mental Travelling
Treat it as a strategic retreat by an experienced field marshal. He is just surveying his options. The brains are marshalling the resources at hand. Now while you take that break. Remember, the file is still in open mode. The Zeigarnik effect is still at play.
The mind is digging into its deep recesses to find a solution. At a subconscious level, the mind is trying to connect two seemingly disconnected thoughts or paradigms.
Sometimes the mind is looking for external clues. Remember the famous apple and the thoughts of gravity in the mind of Isaac Newton? Remember Archimedes and the displacement of water in proportion to the mass and density? They are perfect examples of creative discovery through external clues.
Mental travel cannot take place unless you let your mind travel into unexplored territories. At the end of the mind travel, you have many more concepts and information in your brain.
(Image Credit - pixabay.com)
Robert Biswas – Diener and Todd Kashdan in their book The upside of your dark side, call this process “Uncover – Discover – Consolidate”.
When you were faced with a problem, instead of just jumping to the first option, the mind travel enabled you to have the opportunity of uncovering some information and incubating a few ideas. Sometimes the concepts are half-baked. Instead of jumping to the half-baked idea or even rejecting an idea, the mindlessness helped you generate a few creative ideas.
The procrastination and mindlessness worked in tandem to consolidate and evaluate options.
Tactical Procrastination
Unlike what many people think, creativity peaks when we are tired. When we are fresh we are focused on solving a problem and we keep the information flow in along the boundaries of a channel. There is a possibility that we are thinking linearly. However, for creativity to peak we need divergent information. We need to gather information, which challenges the current information our brains are churning out.
Mareike Wieth and Rose Zacks have analysed "night owls", or people who work best at night versus morning people, who prefer the first half of the day. Night owls do their best brainstorming at 8.30 am. This could be when they have just woken up and their minds are still groggy. Their minds are still not sharp enough to reject any contrary data points or to censor any unwanted ideas. On the other hand, when night owls need to solve an analytical problem, their best time is around 4.30 pm, when their cognition starts to peak.
So if you are dealing with a night owl creative hothead, you might want him to hunker down around evening. It is best to stoke their creative fires early in the morning.
For morning people, it is the reverse. They are at their analytical best between 8.30 and 9.30 in the morning. As the day progresses and their brains begin to tire out, they are more open to new information. If you have a boss who is a morning person, it is best to pitch new unconventional or even risky ideas to him in the evening. He might be more open to divergent thoughts. If you present the ideas to him in the morning, when his analytical skills are at its peak, you will get a lot of holes poked in your presentation or ideas.
Many people claim they get creative ideas while seated in the toilet or the shower. It is not the location working in your favour, it is creative prime time for the night owls for mindless mind travel. It is when you give yourself permission to let your mind wander.
Never consider your project to be complete. Adam Grant, whose book I spoke about earlier, talks about the famous “I have a dream” speech by Martin Luther King Junior. He started writing the speech the night before the famous day.
As King was waiting for his turn to speak, he kept making changes and adding new points. As King was walking up to the mike to deliver his speech, the phrase, I have a dream was never in the script. As began his speech, he never knew that he is going to deliver the “I have a dream speech”.
Someone shouted out to King to tell them about the dream. He then incorporated the dream, not out of impulse, but because he had processed it many times in the earlier 350 speeches that he had given to build support for the civil rights movement. He did not hold on to a fixed structure, as any mindfulness expert would have suggested. He was still mind travelling, looking for cues and encouragement. He would have driven the structured speechwriters mad.
We possess a small fragment of Martin Luther King Jr. when we pursue new destinations or confront insurmountable problems in our lives. It is our creativity that will solve the insolvable problems.
It is a human to deploy a bit of strategic procrastination. It comes naturally to some people. It is also dependent on us as leaders to spot a strategic pause and to encourage an optimal gathering of divergent and conflicting ideas.
Human progress depends on our ability to reach into our subconscious and tap into our latent resources. It is when we connect two incongruous and conflicting thoughts in our minds that we develop a beautiful tapestry. When we write the most beautiful poetry from the most tragic of circumstances, it is because we can let the mind travel and soar far above our current realities through creativity.
The author is the Founder of The Positivity Company, where he helps business leaders become more positive and productive. Birender can be reached on birender.ahluwalia@gmail.com.
