Embrace unevenness

I am extremely uneven in my approach to productivity. I have a great many habits, passions, and professional competencies I have sustained and improved upon for close to two decades, but I have only managed that by vacillating between periods of manic activity and relatively disengaged slumps. I know no other way to function.

When I get excited about something, I engage it with utter focus, to the exclusion of all else, pushing relentlessly forward until my nascent, ethereal, fragile idea exists in some physical, finished form. But inversely, I can then step freely away from these projects and leave them, gathering apparent dust, for many weeks and months. Perhaps “step away” is too delicate: I can barely stomach the sight or thought of these passion projects. To lay hands upon them is to handle something alien and antiquated.

I have tried habit trackers and Pomodoro timers and all-manner of devices for regulating and homogenising productivity into something predictable and even. Every fibre of my being rails against them, and I find myself more drained and more fatigued by the continuous, low-level exertion than I am by sinking twelve hours into a single idea.

Proponents of even-keeled productivity doubtless have different brain-chemistry to me, but more than that, they underweight the importance of idle time. Slumps provide the space necessary for the mind to accumulate a vast backlog of ideas, to process and prioritise their potential, and create a product-ready queue of jobs to be done; indeed, jobs that can be done, far faster and more efficiently than seems probable, because of the time spent percolating during the slump.

As Gary Provost says in 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, “Just as high water pressure makes more water flow faster, the greater weight of material you have gathered will make the words flow faster.” Slumps are periods of accumulation, albeit without much tangible physical output to show for them; but the seasons of frenetic energy and productivity that follow are only possible because of these apparently idle times.