Steven Kotler explains how procrastination can trigger flow by raising the stakes, but suggests imposing creative constraints early instead of waiting until the last night. Habitual deadline cramming backfires when life gets in the way.
Basically, I do my best work at the end of a deadline. And I saw that you said you get up to a thousand words at the end of a book as well. It's probably, you know, momentum and everything, but for me, it's basically the fear of getting in trouble if I don't hit my deadline. Well, don't get paralyzed. I get. I get super focused and more creative than I ever was, and I think of the best ideas that I wish I had a week ago. That kind of thing. And fast and accurate. It's just great. And I wish I could get that earlier on because I got you.
I got you, I got you. So check it out. And this is perfect. Coming off the conversation with Michael, because he sort of teed this up perfectly. I always tell people in the peak performance world, your emotions don't mean what you think they mean. And one example I like to give is that most people think procrastination is a bad thing. And it sort of is. But what you're really doing is tuning your challenge skills balance. Your body naturally wants to perform at its best. We are built to move in the direction of optimal. This is why so many of the things in the book are familiar. Peak performers, like, we're built biologically to perform at our optimum. We will move us, ourselves unconsciously in that direction. Procrastination is that exact thing. You're tuning the challenge skills balance. You're saying, this task is so boring to me. I can't drop into flow. I can't marshal the focus to drop into flow. So I'm going to put it off until the pressure mounts. Here's what I always. I'll give you my. I don't know how you can apply it in your life. You have to. You're gonna have to morph this into your life. But I, you know, I used to work on deadline a lot as a journalist, and I would work all over the place and I would have a lot of articles. So. Right. I mean, I'm like, okay, maybe I'm interested in data caves, maybe I'm not. Who the hell knows? I don't know anything about data. Right. That kind of thing. So you don't want to put it off to the last night. That's only because it's a recipe for disaster over time. Meaning sooner or later, my dog's going to get sick or my wife's going to get sick or. Right. Something's going to come. Life is going to come bite you in the ass sooner or later. On that one. So what I used to do is I would up the challenge level on the front end so the assignment would come in and they'd be like, okay, give me 1000 words on data caves. Well, okay. I'm not paying attention to a thousand words on data caves until the night before, because I write. But if I have to give you 1000 words on data caves that I write in the style of Ernest Hemingway or Charles Dickens or some other writer I admire whose style I can't quite copy and like Dickens on data caves, like, how would you do that? Suddenly the challenge level is way up and I'm interested. And so it's. Right. I've tilted the. I've artificially inflated the challenge level so I don't put it off to the night before. So that's how I think about that problem, and that's how I tend to coach people around that problem. Because your problem is it's not 4%. Your problem is that until it's the night before, it's like 0.5%, 1%. You're not interested, you're not paying attention, you can't perform at your best, so you got up the challenge level on the front end when it shows up. If you're interested in not putting it off to the night before kind of thing, does that make sense? Is that useful? Yeah.
Yeah, that's good.
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