The Minimal-Effort Mambo
Just Kidding There Will Not Be Any Dancing
When you refer to something as “a mambo” I’m not actually sure if you’re referring to the song or the dance or maybe the whole song and dance but anyway today’s Shelf Life is about how to put in the minimum amount of effort to get writing accomplished when you don’t have energy or motivation for it, which is where I am right now. To that end I am going to try to write a short and low-effort Shelf Life, which is everyone’s favorite kind anyway. Like just enough Shelf Life to wake you up and spend five minutes reading while you chug a coffee and then get on with your life and forget all about it for the next several days.
At least, that’s what I do.
Anyway, if you have have two dogs that want to be petted nonstop every minute of every day and only have two hands with which to get stuff done, then sometimes you need to be prepared to put in the least amount of effort needed to get the job done so you can go back to petting your demanding dogs or whatever it is you do with your hands when you’re not typing. I don’t think that example is overspecific. I bet this is a problem a lot of people have.
I have this problem where sometimes if I skip a day—or an instance—of something, then it’s really hard for me to get back into it. An example of this is that while I was married to my ex spouse we used to live near a gym and I’d get up at five in the morning most days of the week to go to the gym before work. Then one day I woke up and said, “Ugh it’s raining and cold and I don’t feel like going to the gym today, I’m gonna skip just one day” and then I didn’t go back for like six years.
If you have low or no motivation but you don’t want to skip a day of your good habit because it might be six years before you get back around to it or if it’s been six years or however long since you’ve done your good habit but you want to get back into it, taking a low-effort, almost-no-effort approach is a great way to keep up your habit or restart it without putting a lot of pressure on yourself.
When people start up something new, or when we’re tired or demotivated or distracted, we’re almost certainly not doing our best work. Best work comes with repetition and practice. No matter how much time and mental energy you devote to thinking about the thing you’re going to do, you don’t actually improve at it. You can’t sit on your sofa for six months thinking about running a half marathon and then get up on the one-hundred-eighty-first day and run the half marathon. You have to actually practice doing it—pretty much every day.
Further, when we’re tired, demotivated, distracted, et cetera, we don’t do our best work because our mind or our heart isn’t in the effort. If you expect the work you put out when you are tired et cetera et cetera to be at the same quality standard as the work you put out when you’re firing on all cylinders, you can disappoint and frustrate yourself. Especially if you are doing a creative practice where the work you generate is supposed to be representative of the perfect concept you have in your mind. You might think if you’re doing a poor job that doesn’t live up to your own standards, it might be better not to bother. Why do any work if it’s going to be subpar? Why not wait for a better day and do . . . par?
Wait, isn’t it good to be subpar? Like in golf? Don’t you want to be under par? I’ve confused myself. I’ve said “par” too many times and I’m no longer sure it’s a real word.
But there are other considerations, separate from the quality of the work you create, to wit:
When you don’t practice something, your skills at that thing atrophy (use or lose); and
When you don’t maintain a habit, you no longer have that habit.
The habitual practice of anything being how one gets and stays good at aforesaid anything, it’s best not to skip it. It’s like leg day. You’re not supposed to skip it for some reason. I don’t know, I haven’t been to the gym in years.
I write a bare minimum of two Shelf Lifes per week no matter how much I want to skip Shelf Life–writing day, and the result of doing this over time is I’ve created mental shortcuts that let me write it faster and more easily than I can write anything else. I haven’t managed to do any other type of writing with the same total fidelity to schedule but I have noticed—I’ve collected metrics over time that show me—that the more (and more consistently) I write, the faster I get at writing. I like to think I am getting better as well but I don’t have any hard data on that.
When I have almost nothing to give writing on a given day but I have to give something, I scrape the bottom of the barrel and come up with some of these shortcuts.
Set a Minimum Standard
I have a minimum standard for Shelf Life, which is basically a word count that all Shelf Life essays have to at least be—but you almost never see a Shelf Life that short because once I get going I can do a lot more than I thought. However, knowing I can quit after a low-effort writing session and call that session finished instead of abandoned makes a huge difference in how motivated I am to start. Like never in a million years will I be able to make myself go to a gym at five in the morning ever again but sometimes I get up early enough to walk around the neighborhood before work.
Your minimum standard could be an amount of time or an amount of writing. An amount of writing could be as specific as “five hundred words” or as broad as “one scene.” I have a friend who writes a poem every day but she told me sometimes the poems are about haiku length. The important thing is sitting down and doing it, not holding yourself to the arbitrary standard of your average or even your best day.
I have difficulty using time as the metric because I will absolutely write three words in twenty minutes and then shrug and say, “well I did it for twenty minutes, sooooo.” Something that has helped me be productive during time-based writing sessions (particularly the ones I make myself do when I don’t want to) is using The Most Dangerous Writing App, which starts deleting your text if you slack off on the pace. I like that it basically bullies me into putting down text even if that text is not particularly good, since that’s the name of the game.
Skip All the Hard Parts
Like leg day. Haha! Just kidding! Don’t skip leg day but do skip the parts of writing that are hard for you or take up too much of your brain power.
For instance, figuring out how to transition from one scene to the next one is often a question mark for me and slows me down because I have to think hard about the best way to transition scenes so when I’m low on motivation I simply do not do that and I just put a comment in brackets like “write a transition here.” That’s more of a future Catherine problem than a right-now Catherine problem. Also I don’t spend any time at all thinking up names for new things when I am in low-effort mode (not that I spend much time on that even when I am in maximum-effort mode). I follow my Thirty-Second Rule at the best of times and don’t pause for more than a few seconds to come up with a name or word I’m missing, but in low-effort mode I do not bother even spending those few seconds and precious neurons on figuring out any words or names I don’t know and I just write what the thing is and keep moving if I don’t know the word for it. Like I was working on something the other day and I realized I needed another character for some reason and I didn’t bother at all I just wrote “NEWCHAR” and underlined it twice to represent everything about that character and kept moving.
Future Catherine, working from a point of greater energy and motivation, will deal with it.
Find Your Stream of Consciousness
I realize not everyone has a constant internal monologue running in their head at all times like I do. I realize this in that I’ve spoken to people who do not have that and I know they exist, although I don’t know how y’all exist, it must be so quiet in there. But then I have people say the same thing to me about “how dark it must be” inside my head and, yes, it is dark in there with no pictures. Like the projector bulb went out at a movie theater but the sound is still running.
When I don’t have the energy to write prose of the type that could, ostensibly, at some future time, be read and understood by other people, I just make my internal monologue tell the story to me as though I were telling a particularly funny anecdote to my partner about something that happened at work involving a grapefruit and a rubber band ball. Then I just write down whatever my interior voice is saying. (I talked about this process in The Anti Outline.)
Whatever your stream of consciousness sounds like, learn to listen and take dictation. This can work even if you think in images instead of words. I have a friend and fellow writer who thinks that way and he told me for him it’s like he’s watching a movie in his mind and just writing down what he’s seeing.
You’re probably going to have to revise later anyway, so why put so much effort into the first draft? Done is always better than perfect.
I am off to pet my dogs, who are never done receiving pets. They thank you for tolerating a short Shelf Life today and wish you a happy weekend.
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