The Tea On Improvisational Productivi-tea
The Tea On Improvisational Productivi-tea

The number of times I gave up on scheduling and still got things done, but didn’t know what to call it. celine Dec 23, 2020·5 min read

Disclaimer: I am no expert on this subject matter. I just saw and researched about it today, and decided to write about it because it resonated with me instantly.

Photo by Saffu on Unsplash

We plan. We think. We re-plan.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand what improvisational productivity is, is to introduce it’s opposite cousin: our scheduling. Planning. Our incessant updating of our calendars, down to the minute.

Improvisational productivity is free from all that. At it’s extreme, it is, as Daniel Gross puts it, “doing whatever seems most interesting to you at the moment”.

Hold on, …what?

Personally, there have been times where I was practising improvisational productivity before I even knew it had a name. Those times were usually when I was ‘disillusioned’ by the repetitiveness of scheduling every hour of my day. I would plan, but when the time came, I would procrastinate and end up completing nothing at all.

So I would decide not to plan. Can’t be disappointed if you don’t expect anything of yourself, right? But then I started voluntarily doing things I wanted to do. Not necessarily things I had to do (obligations, homework etc), but things that I usually would not allow myself to do until I completed whatever I had to do (hobbies, the fun stuff etc).

What’s the use, you may ask.

Well, after I had my satisfaction from doing what I wanted, I was more likely to sit down and start on my obligations. This stemmed from one key reason — I was feeling happier, so I felt like I had more emotional and mental energy to spend on the ‘have-tos’. Compare this with ‘ugh, I’m already tired, I absolutely do not want to do <insert obligation>’.

In essence, getting rid of a schedule freed my mental cage. I wasn’t bound to chains that allowed me to only think about, say, producing music. I allowed myself to do that immediately, if that was what I wanted to do. Needless to say I produced more music than I ever would if I kept the cage locked up, and eventually, forgotten. (I dramatically call this ‘sidelining your dreams’.)

What’s the rationale behind relying less on thoughtful structure, and more on improvisation? Gross writes:

“The longer you think about a task without doing it, the less novel it becomes to do. Writing things in your to-do list and coming back to them later helps you focus, but it comes at the cost: you’ve now converted an interesting idea into work.”

It’s funny how many times I never produce music when I put it on my schedule, but do so at times when I’m ‘not supposed to’.

Or when I thought of creating this Medium account years ago, and never did it until two days ago, when I just did. If you read my first post, you’d know that I have 99% no plan for this account except to write words.

You’d also know by the disclaimer at the top of this post that although I did plan to write something this afternoon, I had no idea what that was going to be until I sat at my desk and came across Ali Abdaal’s video, 20 Life Lessons I Learned in 2020, of which one of them is improvisational productivity, which became the inspiration for my research and hence, this post. Isn’t that kind of mini-mindblowing?

Here’s to all the lost dreams and ideas we delayed and eventually let go, just because it didn’t fit into our agenda for the day, week, month, or year.

Wait, if this improvisational productivity thing was so great, everyone would be doing it.

Oh yes, the other side of the coin. Improvisational ‘productivity’, or rather, the lack of scheduling, at its worst for me has meant binging various shows for 12 hours straight. Laying in bed feeling like a worn-out rucksack. Deciding it’s better to just sleep the day off than waste it any further.

I definitely do not practice improvisational productivity everyday, nor do I do it at its extreme, for that would simply be impractical. (Hold off all my bills, will you, I’m trying to finish this book!) I would, however, recommend taking 2–4 days off to wholly practice improvisational productivity if you find yourself in a rut with all your daily schedules. Just to switch things up.

On a daily basis, however, a bit of both is more manageable. I have my obligations blocked out in my calendar, then I have other things I want to do. I usually section my day by Morning, Afternoon and Night, separated by meal times.

Let’s say I only have one obligation in the morning, so I decide I’ll do activity x and y in the morning as well. I don’t clutter it with activities, so that I’ll have ~0.5 hours of ‘unscheduled time’. I let myself take more time for activity x if I need to — if I come across something interesting I want to learn more about, for example.

Note also that I don’t specify that I must complete activity x from 9am to 10am. I just tell myself that it needs to be done in the morning. So on my Google Calendar I would put activity x for, say, 1 hour, then obligation 1, then activity y for, say, 1.5 hours. The timings are just rough guidelines. If I end up taking 45 minutes for activity x, I’ll just update the timing on my Calendar, then either take a break or start on obligation 1. This is typically what works for me right now.

Another aspect to this balance is the naming of tasks — when planning, I don’t have to figure out what exactly I am going to do. Going back to the example of writing this post. I just planned to write it, but I didn’t decide then what I was going to write about. The flexibility of time allocation, described in the above paragraph, means that I can afford this non-specificity of not knowing what exactly I will do.

Ultimately, finding the balance between traditional planning and improvisational productivity is a balance that is deeply personal to each individual, and their current circumstances. I hope this post has given you an introduction, or a re-iteration, to the concept of improvisational productivity.

Have a great day!
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['Productivity', 'Self Improvement', 'Time Management', 'Personal Development', 'Work']