A Spork in the Road

In a moment, I’m going to ramble about high-value tasks vs. low-value tasks and the role of inefficiency in the creative process, but first:

It’s a bright and beautiful Saturday morning, and I’ve slept off most of my steroid hangover. I feel a little prickly and achy from the poisons still coursing through my veins, but mentally I’m more alert today than yesterday and feeling positive.

On chemo Fridays I tend to have the intellectual force of a radish.

I didn’t get much work accomplished yesterday.

So today I have databases to conquer, Flash rotations to adjust, and non-profits to plan. With such a blue sky and bright sun, the prospect of those tasks is downright cheery. (Out my window, I can see one of those fluffy white clouds that looks like Pixar animated it just to make the day seem that much more perfect.)

I’ve been reading Eat That Frog! by Brian Tracy, one of those books that reminds you to do the things you know you ought to do in order to work better/live better/do better. I just finished the chapter called “Apply the 80/20 Rule to Everything” in which he concludes:

The fact is that the amount of time required to complete an important job is often the same as the time required to do an unimportant job. The difference is that you get a tremendous feeling of pride and satisfaction from the completion of something valuable and significant. However, when you complete a low-value task using the same amount of time and energy, you get little or no satisfaction at all.

I totally agree with this, and I’m looking forward to using this advice to improve my performance at work this week. But it does get me thinking about the areas where efficiency isn’t my highest priority.

The 80/20 approach is great to get me to sit down and work on my novel. But once I’m there, the efficiency guys walk away with a chuckle and a wave, because their work is done. Creativity is a messy, inefficient process. It’s blind alleys and long loops that bring you back to where you started; it’s wandering and getting lost. It’s spending 90% of your time on 5% of the work and then throwing away what you did because it’s not… quite… right.

If you’re in love with efficiency, be thou not a writer.

And anyway, I wouldn’t take the “efficiency” approach to an extreme in any area. You need a little chaos to keep things alive; you need a little inefficiency, a little of the unexpected, or you’ll stiffen into an efficient, boring fossil.