Playing with Deadlines: Nurturing a New Relationship with Productivity
Watercolor painting by me
About four weeks ago, I decided to publish weekly blog posts again. I explained my reasoning in my October Reflections post, but the short of it is that I wanted to make more progress toward the book I'd like to write by working through the ideas on my blog. I took it easy on myself the last year and a half (for good reasons), but now I want to be productive again.
It's not easy for me to write fast. I like to tackle big ideas, and sometimes they overwhelm me. My creative energy has also never been consistent; there are days or weeks when I sit down to write, but nothing comes. I also wanted to develop a new relationship to deadlines than the one I had before.
How do you have a relationship to deadlines? We can have relationships to anything, including objects, concepts, and ourselves (or parts of ourselves). This is not always obvious to me, either, which is why I'm working on it. We tend to relate to concepts or objects based on past experiences or what we’ve been taught about them, which inform our expectations the next time we encounter them. Case in point: sometimes, children grow up to hate certain vegetables because they are forced to eat them. Their relationship to that vegetable is tinged with pressure and coercion, though the vegetable itself is a neutral entity.
My relationship to deadlines is similarly informed by pressure and coercion. But as an adult working toward my chosen goals, the context is vastly different from the one I grew up in. These are deadlines that I've set for myself, not ones imposed by others. But in the past, when I've had a higher workload or set weekly (or even monthly) blogging deadlines, I've been overly anxious to the point of being counterproductive. I wanted to see if that dynamic has changed.
What I've been learning
The first two weeks went by smoothly since I had an article mostly ready to go. I did a final edit and posted it. The next one was a life update, which was easy to write. In the third week, I wanted to finish and post part 4 of my Calm Path series, which was three-quarters of the way drafted. But this was one of my "big" topics, where I was trying to cram a teaching that spans entire books into a single article. I also had to live with the ideas in my daily life before I could authentically write about them (I thought I had already, but it wasn't enough). This challenge was why this entire series took me months to write.
When the writing took longer than expected, I didn't know if I would make my Friday deadline. That's when the anxieties started as if the deadline I set for myself were a school deadline, and I faced failure if I didn't turn in my essay. This anxiety did not help matters since I couldn't ponder and be curious under these conditions. Each writing session carried the weight of potential doom.
My deadline came and went. Okay, so what if I didn't post on Friday? I could post on Monday. But if I posted on Monday, I'd only have four days to come up with the next article. Or I'd have to change my publishing schedule each time I fell behind. I don't know why these changes were so horrendous to me at the time, but they were.
Then, I needed downtime to recover from the stress I gave myself during the week, so I decided to return to writing on Monday. On Monday, I finished the article and rewrote some earlier sections, but I still didn't love it. So I let it rest for a while (like dough, the writing sorts itself out if you step away) and started working on something new. Something less complex. More of a bite-sized piece (okay, not really, but I tried).
Over a year ago, I let go of publishing blog posts on a schedule because I felt the only way I could manage the anxiety around deadlines was to stop using them. But now, rather than reduce my workload, I wanted to see if I can reduce my reaction to the workload because that's the cause of my stress--the threat of potential failure. Could I do the work without stressing out?
Healing perfectionism with IFS
Around this time (the third week of my experiment), I also signed up for a six-week art course and a six-week Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy course that both started at the beginning of November. Why did I do that? I don't know. One was supposed to be fun, and the other was for working on some of my persistent issues. But the added workload didn't do me any favors.
Besides being activated by deadlines, my anxiety also had a lot to do with perfectionism. Nobody is grading me here, and my work for each class is only for me. But somehow, part of me believed if I didn't make my art on schedule and turn it in, something terrible would happen. Even when I recognized that perspective and decided not to obey it, I could not relax.
IFS helped. This was one of the therapies recommended in The Body Keeps the Score, which I loved for helping me understand trauma on a deeper level. Whenever I read descriptions of IFS or watched interviews, its foundation of self-acceptance and compassion resonated deeply. IFS is about working with our behavior patterns as subpersonalities, or "parts," with their own motivations, feelings, and consciousness. It's like inner child work but with more complexity.
In my first practice session with a partner, I "met" (through guided visualization) a "part," or subpersonality, who was me at about age 15. She felt she had to be perfect in her school work and make A's; otherwise, she would disappear or cease to exist. I remember feeling that way in school. Realistically, I wouldn't cease to exist if I got a C in a class. But emotionally, that's what it felt like -- like I'd have no future. This part of me was exhausted and sad for having to keep up for so long.
I did not try to convince her this scenario wasn't true anymore--that's not the IFS way. The earlier sessions are about developing trust between you and the part. My partner and I reassured her that she didn't have to do anything and that we were not there to fix her. The important thing was for me to move aside what was in the way of my feeling compassion and acceptance for her, which we were able to do. At the end of the session, the 15-year-old part held my hands and relaxed, and she felt like a bright light that bathed everything around me. She told me her name was Brightness.
The week after that session, my stress levels were much lower, and I no longer felt like I had to do everything I signed up for perfectly. Whenever my pressure appeared again, I stopped, noted it, and thanked Brightness for her efforts.
My experiment in sustainable writing
It also helped to relieve my anxiety by reframing how I thought about my deadlines. I unconsciously assumed that missing a deadline meant failing a commitment or failing at my efforts. But I was no longer my own taskmaster who only saw perfect compliance as acceptable. Posting for three weeks out of four was pretty good!
Moreover, I wanted to see how well my energy held up to weekly deadlines and what kind of productivity I could have without burning out. Weekly posts may not be sustainable for me, and I'd need a week off for every 3-4 weeks of posting. I also wanted to practice writing more lightly and spontaneously, to write about smaller ideas with more playfulness so they didn't take so long.
Most importantly, it's heartening to see that I can now navigate a situation that used to trigger a lot of anxiety with more awareness and compassion. I can find my way through a previous obstacle by refining my choices rather than only seeing it through my old lens of success or failure.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your thoughts. Let me know down below!
