When Building a Universe, No One Wants to Decide What’s for Dinner
It’s a good thing Snow White only met seven
dwarves, because learning more names than that requires a genius. It’s suggested
that the average person can intake seven new pieces of nonsequential
information, that multitasking drastically decreases the quality of your output,
and a high mental load can cause a break long before sleep-deprivation. Feeling
overwhelmed is the most impacting obstacle that prevents us from pursing our
dreams.
How do I motivate myself to clean my house? Start
writing a book. Things like cleaning or cooking don’t require a lot of mental taxation,
especially when it’s not your first time. But regardless how often you write,
telling a story—especially a fictional one—you have to constantly be making
decision. And if you’re building a world from scratch, well…
Now, let’s be clear, there’s a lot of writers
who love talking about what the characters are having for dinner. Hack hack
hem, Mr. Martin. But that’s just it. Characters.
The person who spends all day writing and coming up with new magnificent dishes
and the names that goes with them does not want to think twice about what to
make for dinner.
I find that the hardest time to be a writer—outside
of bone crippling hopelessness—is when I’ve worked jobs requiring high mental
load. Ones that I need to pay attention to detail after detail, schedule different
jobs against each other, and keep track of to-do lists. The mental load is a
real problem. The trick to being inspired can be to just cut down on those
little things weighing you down:
-
Make time in which you won’t think about
anything but writing, or let guilt get at you for putting something non-writing
related off.
-
Write a to-do list of everything with a deadline.
Find when between now and the deadline you’ll get it done.
-
Write a to-do list of things hanging over your
head but without a timeframe. Schedule manageable chunks with breathing time in
between.
-
Delegate and set boundaries at work. I find that
most managers are far more understandable than my coworkers expected, especially
if you have proven yourself to be a good decision maker.
-
Be honest about your work ethic. Don’t not write
just because you should be doing something you wouldn’t do anyway. Don’t not
write and don’t do anything else either.
-
Cut down on responsibilities. Think of jobs or
promises you made out of guilt or ambition, but aren’t really directing you
towards your goals.
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