Creative Constraints - how to make your productivity skyrocket

When you're growing up, you get used to rules and laws being generally bad things. It's something you need to oblige to, to follow, and it often doesn't allow you to do the things you want to do.

Of course, rules are there for a reason, even when you're a kid. You may not love the act of brushing your teeth every morning but you also won't love the consequences of not doing it. It is difficult for a child to grasp the concept of long-term consequences since they have either never experienced them as such, or they are just not responsible enough yet.

Once you grow into an adult, you realize the power structure and organization hold. Especially during the pandemic, many people came to the realization that once their structure is disturbed, their mental health diminishes. Commuting to work and changing up your environment turns out to do wonders to one's psyche, especially once you understand how much you underperform when home alone for a long time.

Yet, many people ignore the structure they need in their lives. They find themselves in front of a blank document, not knowing how to start a project, even if they had done it a thousand times before. Every next project is a struggle and creative art block occurs a bit too often.

If you have sometimes found yourself in the same situation, don't fret, we all have. And this is where the magic of Creative Constraints comes to the rescue.

What are Creative Constraints?

Constraints, by definition, are limits, restrictions, preventions. So to find them in the context of creativity, even more so, in the context of boosting productivity and creativity is kinda weird.

But the main philosophical principle which makes them so powerful is Parkinson’s Law. Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time period allotted to it.

If you have an essay due, and you decide it’s gonna be done this weekend, it’s not gonna get done in a 2-hour block of time on Saturday. You are going to start thinking about it from the morning, then you’re gonna procrastinate it to the evening when you’ll have less creative energy, then you’re gonna resume work on Sunday and cram most of the research and writing in the last evening, only to submit it a few minutes before the deadline.

This is also why you can push 8 hours worth of work the last hour before the deadline if you’re a professional procrastinator. Yes, the quality of work may or may not change depending on the time you allow for it to develop, but it’s true that the more time you allocate to a given problem, the more time you allow yourself to procrastinate it.

Thus, it may be helpful to use creative constraints not as a way to limit your potential, but as a way to skyrocket your productivity.

1. Time Constraints

This idea ties neatly with the concept of time-blocking. When you put conscious effort into the planning of your tasks, you start to figure out patterns in your behavior that can be used to your advantage.

Once you get the hang of how long it takes to do a given repetitive task or project, you will be able to optimize.

And the optimization is the time constraint itself.

By limiting a given task to just a few hours, or sometimes even less, you don’t give yourself more time than you need and then you finish it early. The main advantage of this technique is that it helps you overcome the trap of perfectionism. When you don’t have the whole day to do a given task, you try to do it in the allotted time period and then move on, which is honestly the optimal variant.

So, the next time you have a heavier project to do, try to divide it into manageable chunks and do those subtasks in the allotted time. No more, no less.

2. Self-Assigned Deadlines

Kinda ties in with the previous point, but it is a bit more niche.

When we’re working on university, school, or work-related projects, we often have fixed deadlines that are outside of our control. And that’s a good thing because the external pressure can get you to act more diligently. But when you’re working on a passion project or just a side-hustle, it’s often easy to let it fall by the wayside, patiently waiting for its turn in your busy schedule. W

And if you happen to be even moderately busy, the energy and discipline needed for a hobby will be diminishing.

This is where self-assigned deadlines come in handy. It’s the reason I switched from using Due-dates to using Do-dates. Especially for my personal business, it’s hard to find the motivation to do anything if I haven't first set a specific tie by which I want it done.

Another reason why it’s so cool to be your own boss.

3. Choose a topic

If neither of the two tactics beforehand happen to work, you may be actually working against yourself. Oftentimes, when we feel mental resistance to doing a specific task, it boils down to one of two things:

1. You either think the task is too hard

2. Or you think it’s too easy

In either of the two scenarios, you end up getting very little done, because each morning is an exercise in trying to build up the motivation from scratch. Which not always happens.

So a surefire way to get you out of the “too easy/too hard” void, try doing the task in a specific manner. Maybe this time you’ll do it in a different location.

Or you’ll make a study group to do it together with.

Or you can try and write that essay by looking at some good essay examples and trying to make yours similar in quality.