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The benefits of procrastination
The image above has been shrunk. To see it full size, follow the link. You can also follow the link to read the article. It is from the New Yorker so it has some kind of anti-copy lock on it. I typed out the following from the article:
If you're a procrastinator, overcoming that monkey can require herculean amounts of willpower. But a pre-crastinator may need equal willpower to not work.
She (Jihae Shin) asked people to come up with new business ideas. Some were randomly assigned to start right away. Others were given five minutes to first play Minesweeper or Solitaire. Everyone submitted their ideas and indeptendent raters rated how original they were. The procrastinator's ideas were 28 percent more creative.
... When you procrastinate, you're more likely to let your mind wander. That gives you a better chance of stumbling onto the unusual and spotting unexpected patterns. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik found that people had a better memory for incomplete tasks thatn for complete ones. When we finish a project, we file it away.
...Of ocurse, procrastination can go too far. Jihae randomly assigned a third group of people to wait until the last minute to begin their project. They weren't as creative either. They had to rush to implement the easiest idea instead of working out a novel one.
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Creative people have more nightmares.
It sounds like being creative means you tend to have more nightmares, not that trying to have a nightmare will make you more creative.
In my current quest for productivity - actually using my creative ideas to make real things (and those 'real things' could be mere words, sentences and paragraphs in my book) I recall the times I was most productive and busy. On those days, the workload infiltrated my dreams and I would work out schedules and imagine ways to organize myself as well as perform some of the activities over night. I didn't like it but my mind was focused when I woke up and I knew where to go when my feet touched the floor next to my bed. In that way, very different from the research, I had nightmares of a sort and they occurred on my most creative and productive days. They might have helped, too.
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On Quora (is anyone sick of how blog is becoming a review of Quora discussions?), the question "What should a male writer keep in mind when writing a female character?" was looked at.
Martyn Halm had the interesting suggestion of not treating them as men with 'bolt-on boobs'.
Creative people have more nightmares.
It sounds like being creative means you tend to have more nightmares, not that trying to have a nightmare will make you more creative.
people who have a lot of nightmares experience a dreamlike quality to their waking thoughts. And this kind of thinking seems to give them a creative edge. For instance, studies show that such people tend to have greater creative aptitude and artistic expression. Jess and Chris [two of Carr’s research subjects] scored highly on a test to measure this, called the boundary thinness scale, and both are artists: Jess is a painter and photographer, Chris a musician.People who have (or maybe just remember) more nightmares also tend to have more positive dreams as well.
In my current quest for productivity - actually using my creative ideas to make real things (and those 'real things' could be mere words, sentences and paragraphs in my book) I recall the times I was most productive and busy. On those days, the workload infiltrated my dreams and I would work out schedules and imagine ways to organize myself as well as perform some of the activities over night. I didn't like it but my mind was focused when I woke up and I knew where to go when my feet touched the floor next to my bed. In that way, very different from the research, I had nightmares of a sort and they occurred on my most creative and productive days. They might have helped, too.
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On Quora (is anyone sick of how blog is becoming a review of Quora discussions?), the question "What should a male writer keep in mind when writing a female character?" was looked at.
Martyn Halm had the interesting suggestion of not treating them as men with 'bolt-on boobs'.
Most telling is when the writer puts the reader in his female character's head and she constantly very aware of how her breasts are being restrained by her sportsbra but still moving up and down while jogging.
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