How do I silence my inner critic and simply get things done?

March 9, 2009 9:04 PM

I have trouble just buckling down and getting started on projects at work. What tips, tricks, or resources are out there for stopping my analysis paralysis, silencing my inner critic, and just getting things done?

I am what some would call a knowledge worker, as many of us are. I have a difficult time in approaching new projects and getting things done. I tend to spend alot of time analyzing a problem, going down a path for awhile, scratching it, and then ending up not further along in my task.

Essentially I have a difficult time choosing a direction and just going with it. Most of it probably stems from a fear of failure, but I'd really like to be alot better at what I do, because what happens is I dance around an issue until a deadline hits and then I do a half-assed job just to meet the deadline. In a nutshell, I'm never satisfied with what I end up with and feel like I am never accomplishing the task or fulfilling my potential. As you can imagine, this is frustrating. Furthermore, it makes me nervous to be faced with big problems that seem insurmountable, making the issue feed itself.

For example, I'll read alot of papers on a subject, but come away without a path to go down. Alternatively, I'll brainstorm about many different ways to do something, and never be satisfied with any of ideas I come up with, always finding fault with them.

What tips and tricks do you recommend for getting into the right mindset and simply getting things done?

posted by miasma to work & money (21 comments total)

Argh. I felt exactly like this last fall (EXACTLY, word for word) and realized the only answer for me was therapy. I am still working on it. For me this was a symptom of anxiety. YMMV, but you might want to start there.
posted by sweetkid at 9:08 PM on March 9

Check out the Fluent Self. Havi is amazing and helps with just this sort of thing. Reading her words is like gong to therapy for exactly this issue.
posted by eileen at 9:18 PM on March 9

Yep... Anxiety is a bitch. Xanax helps me buckle down and 'just do it'.

Lots of times when I'm frustrated with a task, I'll whip off an email asking for advice to an attorney-friend of mine and I'll include a sarcastic version of the letter/complaint/what-have-you. Nine times out of ten, that ends up being the version I run with, sans any truly snarky or unprofessional comments. Just having fun/venting my frustration in that manner lends a certain clarity to my writing.
posted by LOLAttorney2009 at 9:19 PM on March 9

Start small. Sometimes a project is just too darn BIG. Nibble around the edges until you come up with a plan to nail the big part. And...remember...."great is the enemy of good."
posted by The Light Fantastic at 9:20 PM on March 9 [1 favorite has favorites]

You sound exactly like me. I can research the bejesus out of anything. Here's what I try, with good success, to do:

Get yourself a kitchen timer. The old-fashioned analog kind that has the big dial your grandmother twisted to set to whatever time she wanted. Physically clear your desk of everything except your project materials. Set time to 30 minutes and just do. Begin producing whatever the deliverable is. Don't research, MeFi-surf, or anything else. You'll be amazed at the flow you get into. Reset timer after 30 minutes if need be, but most of the time it's not necessary, you'll just keep going.

See, I even managed to research a simple word like flow. But that's because it's AskMe time, not sit-at-my-desk-and-do-work-time. :)
posted by webhund at 9:39 PM on March 9 [1 favorite has favorites]

Thanks for the comments so far. @sweetkid, @LOLAttorney2009, while therapy is indeed a possible long-term solution, the anxiety is not overly debilitating, just work and productivity-debilitating.

I'm looking for more solutions like what @webhund and @eileen have mentioned, practices that allow people to destuck, find flow, "get in the zone", etc.
posted by miasma at 9:48 PM on March 9

Let's start with the phrase "having all your ducks in a row". Yes, you want everything organized before you commit to one plan of action, keeping everything intuitively organized and aligned until you resolve your current project. This is a good plan if you have every variable under control and a clear definition of the outcome. If that's what your work calls for, then that should be your goal, setting clear, linear objectives stretching from onset to outcome.
But back to the ducks. Ducks themselves use a different logic. They have a 10 to 20% success rate with their duckings. Sure, they can keep themselves in a row, but not all of them will make it. So, to counteract the surety of failure, they simply have a lot of ducklings. Some will meet tragic ends. Some will go on to be magnificent mallards. They don't know which will. So the key, for the ducks, and for some creative thinkers, is to have a surfeit of ducklings. Start broad, with a lot of projects that vector in on an uncertain outcome i.e. use many different means to achieve an outcome. Not everything will work, but ducklings are a relatively low commitment enterprise. Make your initial steps as a precocious as a duckling. If they work, great! you can commit more to that direction. If they don't, cut your losses and count that duckling out. (which is always sad, because they're very cute)
Stepping back from the ducks for the bit, reluctantly. If you have a lot of ideas, but are afraid to commit to one path for fear of failure, spend the intellectual energy figuring out what the simplest, most binary step you can take to determine if that path is right or wrong. Do this in multiple directions so that if only one works, you still have a way forward. Once that path is clear, then you can get all linear and delineated about what needs to be done, confident that all the other avenues would have failed, according to the ducklings.
posted by Cold Lurkey at 9:49 PM on March 9 [3 favorites has favorites]

My suggestion is that your challenge is at least partially that you are working in a vacuum. Who determines the success of your work? Do you have access to ask them for input? Every time you get stuck or unsure, think about what question you have about your work and then go ask it. If you are being asked to miraculously invent new things that satisfy folks without access to the people to satisfy, then point out the inherent disconnect to those who are structuring your work that way.

If you have a clear goal, but difficulty getting started, that is a different question, but it sounds like you are challenged with defining that clear goal. I've learned that when I'm stuck on work, usually the answer is to talk to someone and ask for help, not try to figure it out myself. The same may be true for you.
posted by meinvt at 9:59 PM on March 9 [1 favorite has favorites]

I think timing is everything. Experiment and figure out when you are at your most creative/industrious/concentrated in your work. For me, unfortunately, it is in the early morning (e.g, 2-4) and at the end of the day (4-7). But I find I get more done in those two time periods than the rest of the day, so I've figured out how to harness those times to do my most important knowledge work. I used to fight against the middle-of-the-night thing, then gave in to it, and my productivity went up 100%. In short, listen to your body. Work when it wants to work.
posted by Londonita at 10:15 PM on March 9

I keep my work area as clean as possible and I keep a paper list. This makes it clear what needs to be done, even if it is small and easy (file that thing Hippo sent me). When I get bogged down and have a hard time starting a big project, I do what the Light Fantastic mentions. I pick an aspect of a project that I know I can do right now, even if it is small. That usually leads to another and, before you know it, the next steps become almost dones and everything lines up.
posted by Foam Pants at 12:04 AM on March 10

MonkeyGTD.
posted by devnull at 2:53 AM on March 10 [1 favorite has favorites]

I recommend the iProcrastinate podcast, which is produced by a professor whose research is broadly applicable but focused on academic procrastination, i.e. graduate students who can't seem to get their theses done. iTunes has it all the way back to the first episode from January of 2006, and it's worth listening to the first several podcasts in chronological order because they build on each other. I found them quite illuminating.

He even addresses the possibility that some people will listen to the podcast as a way of procrastinating.
posted by jon1270 at 4:47 AM on March 10

@meinvt: Unfortunately, the way my job works is more about the latter, miraculously inventing new things. It is really up to me to determine the success of my work. My projects will range from 6 months to 2 years in length, and it is expected that I will figure out how best to break down the project into major goals, and then come up with tasks to accomplish those goals. I do end up talking to others at the company when I'm stuck, but I find it leads to more procrastination than it does to greasing the wheels.

@Foam Pants, @devnull: While I do love me some task management, that's not really my problem. If anything along those lines its about how to break a big project down into small manageable tasks, and its really about being satisfied with how I accomplish those tasks.

@jon1270: Looks interesting, thanks for the link!
posted by miasma at 5:31 AM on March 10

cold lurkey's got it. It's great that you can see lots of paths to travel down. Start traveling down them and when one hits a dead end, abandon it. Nothing wrong with ending up with a project that has two trajectories. And if you're already turning in half-assed stuff anyway, it's not like you have something to live up to. Doing it this way will, at worst, get you to half-assed sooner. At which point maybe you can select one and polish it up to full-assed. Plus, if your boss doesn't like approach # 1, that you've turned in, you can say well I was also playing around with this approach, would you like me to go back and flesh it out?
posted by nax at 6:11 AM on March 10

For me, what works is a deadline. Sometimes, I have to artificially create one. It helps. A LOT!
posted by 2oh1 at 12:04 PM on March 10

This app called Procrastination Killer , recently featured on Lifehacker, has really helped me stick to my work. It's a very simple tool, not entirely without flaws, but it's free and I found it effective. Try it if you run Windows (I'm currently searching for a Mac version!).
posted by xiaolongbao at 2:03 PM on March 10 [1 favorite has favorites]

From "Positive Psychology", if you keep putting yourself down with internal criticism, treat the critical thoughts as if they were coming from an external third-party, and you're absolutely sure that third party's goal is to make your life miserable.

That, and breaking every task into a long string of small goals, each with it's own reasonable timeline.
posted by talldean at 3:04 PM on March 10

@miasma If you start using something like MonkeyGTD, you get used to breaking tasks down into smaller chunks.
posted by devnull at 2:44 AM on March 13

It might be worthwhile to try and understand where your experiences are coming from. I'm seeing a couple of possibilities:

1) psychological factors - anything from fear of failure to anxiety to depression. If I were you this wouldn't be the first area that I would be looking at for solutions, unless there are other things going on in your life that indicate otherwise.

2) your development and growth as a professional. Maybe you've started out in your line of work getting things done by sheer creativity and flying by the seat of your pants, and you've now reached a plateau where you feel the need to find reliable ways to get things done even when you're not 'on' or you're simply out of ideas. (Yup, been there, done that.) There's a lot of literature out there about developing your creativity, and working with a personal coach who has experience with people in creative professions might also be an option.

3) sometimes boldly going where no man has gone before just sucks. It's hard work, it's often lonely work, and in my experience the feeling of vulnerability when you put your fledgling ideas out there in front of other people never goes away completely. The answer is to just plod on anyway. Your ideas and solutions may not be perfect, but more often than not they're as good as it gets.

A couple of things that have worked for me:

Try describing your idea in different ways. In my line of work, I can often describe the things I'm working on either in diagrams or as a written narrative. When you do this, different strengths and weaknesses tend to come out.

If you can't find someone to talk to (even someone who isn't in your line of work but who's reasonably smart and willing to listen) just imagine telling someone about your idea or about the problem that you're having. Be creative. If it helps, imagine that you're talking to Sherlock Holmes, or to CJ Craig from the West Wing, or to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Planning may not always be the best way to get started. Sometimes when starting a new project it's helpful to give yourself a couple of days to just jump in. Start reading stuff, start writing stuff, start doing basically anything as long as you keep busy and what you're doing is somehow related to the project. In my experience this takes the edge off the 'where the hell do I start' thing, and it also gives me a better understanding of the project which makes planning easier.
posted by rjs at 8:57 AM on March 15

Also, I don't think the trick is to silence the inner critic, but rather to learn to work with him / her in a constructive way. As an experiment you could take a pre-set amount of time, let's say 30 minutes or an hour, to let your inner critic out. Take a piece of paper and just write down every bit of criticism that comes to mind. Then, maybe after give it a rest for a couple of hours or a day, take the piece of paper and look at everything on it calmly and objectively, assessing whether what you've written down makes sense, and how you can use it to make your work stronger.
posted by rjs at 12:54 PM on March 15 [1 favorite has favorites]

@rjs: Thanks, these are great ideas. As much as I realize that the issue can likely stem from (1), the focus I think I'm looking for are tricks and tips to bypassing them, as you describe (using different exploratory techniques, personifying sounding-boards).

In regards to (2), it could very well be the case that I got by flying by the seat of my pants, but I'd like to turn that into a workable approach instead of a last-gasp.

Aside from "inspirational thoughts", what lifehacks do people use just get creative and critical thinking done and producing a product or thing that shows the accomplishment of their actions?
posted by miasma at 7:20 PM on March 16