The Boss You Need to Get Your Creative Work Done

Every once in a while, it helps to have a boss come around and tell you to do something by a certain time. Get it done.

I did it to myself the other day. I’d been floundering a bit with revising my novel, the progress slowing down to a trickle, the doubt creeping in that maybe this wasn’t that great of a story, maybe I should start something else.

The distractions loom large during such moments. There are always exciting, new projects waiting around the corner, like sex workers offering a good time for just a few bucks. Maybe that’s not the best analogy for creative work, but there definitely is a lot of fun stuff to do. Maybe the next big binge to watch on a streaming service.

In fact, I’m really into What We Do in the Shadows right now (streaming on Hulu) and I have to limit myself to a single episode at a time or I’d quickly burn through several hours.

I always have a ton of domestic duties I need to do, like yard work and house maintenance. There’s clutter to be cleared from the shed, the garage, and the basement. If I’m not locked in to my various writing projects, I easily could spend four or five hours working on something like that.

The other evening, I got an offer from a friend to go out for a hamburger. That's not a euphemism for something else—he really wanted to get a hamburger. It was tempting. I was hungry, and the novel wasn’t going anywhere fast. Luckily, I caught myself and announced to him, “I can’t go anywhere until I revise 10,000 words of this novel.” That was Act Four, and I had to hunker down.

I did it. It felt great to accomplish in one hour what had taken five days for Act Three.

I did it once before in my life with the ukulele. I bought a ukulele and I’d taken a couple of lessons. With that, I could pluck out a song and strum a couple of chords, but I was clumsy. I'd hit an early plateau and wasn’t pushing myself. It was so frustrating I thought about abandoning the instrument.

That one instructor had mentioned that, when he was learning, he told himself to put in the hours or it wasn’t going to happen. He carried his ukulele around the house practicing chord shapes, shifting between chords, and strumming. The finger muscles have to build up, the coordination has to be practiced, and it all has to be committed to muscle memory. It simply takes a lot of practice.

I told myself I wasn’t going to worry about any kind of a song until I figured out these various chord progressions. I had to boss myself around, but it worked. It raised my playing to another level. Within two weeks, I played chords well enough to return to learning songs.

It made playing ukulele a lot more fun. I had to boss myself into it.

What's going on in your creative projects? Are you letting yourself off the hook on something? Has a project fallen into the doldrums?

Don't abuse yourself about it. One of my precepts is to never treat myself like a rented mule, meaning I will always respect my self care and well being over any creative project.

But if everything is fine and you're simply not doing the work, you may need to stand over your shoulder and make sure you get something done.