One of the biggest revelations that I had, in the phase of my career that I would call “in burnout, but also in denial” came from a conversation with a dear friend of mine, Thea Harrison.
We are both dog lovers, and involved dog owners, and we talked about our working habits and dog training… And I started seriously thinking about what I was training my animal to do.
Between my prior dog (Kiev, RIP 1998) and Pele (born 2008, hopefully will live to infinity years), there was a good ten years when I was in school during which I yearned after dogs but lived in cheap housing that didn’t allow pets. I was aware during that time that my family dogs hadn’t been well-trained, and so in lieu of having an actual dog, I read everything I could find about dog training.
One of the biggest things I internalized in those ten years is that dog owners should understand what behavior they’re reinforcing, because your dog doesn’t understand English except in very limited quantities. If your dog picks fights with other dogs, and you call him off by shouting, “treat! come get a treat!” desperately, you are giving your dog a reward for fighting, and the lesson your dog learns from your behavior says “go fight other dogs and I will give you something yummy.” Conversely, if you tell your dog to come so you can punish him, you’re negatively reinforcing the “come” command and teaching your dog not to comply. (Note: I tend to use “he/him” pronouns for dogs because my dog is male.)
After that conversation, I started to pay attention to how I was reinforcing my own behavior. I do technically understand English, but brains are weird.
This is how my productivity tended to look:
Day 1: I write 1000 words. “Whee!” I say. “That was actually fun! I could spend twice as much time and get twice as much done.”
Day 2: I write 2000 words. “Hmm,” I say. “That was neat! I could push this up and get more done.”
Day 3: I write 3000 words. “Hmm,” I say. “That last session was a bit of a slog, but I could push harder and get even more done.”
Day 4: I write 4000 words. “Okay,” I say. “I’m exhausted, but I still had extra time. Let’s go, Day 5. 5000 words it is!”
Day 5: I write 1500 words. “Ugh. I’m a failure.”
Days 6-13: I manage a total of 2200 words over all these days because it’s hard to write as a failure. By my count, I should have been able to do at least 4000 words each of those days, so now I feel like I’m 25,800 words in debt to myself, and keep trying to plan how to make up those 25,800 words by somehow…just…magically writing? I don’t know.
Day 14: “Okay, let’s take a deep breath and reset expectations. Can I do 1000 words today?” I write 1000 words.
Day 15: “Okay, I did 1000 yesterday. I bet I can do 2000 today.”
Day 16: “Okay, I did 2000 yesterday, I bet I can do 3000 today.”
Day 17: “Let’s do 4000!”
Day 18: “Okay, 5000! Can we do 5000? …apparently not, it’s 800.”
Days 19-28: Total: 1400 words.
So a few statistics: 28 days. 4 weeks. 25,900 words. (Note that I’m using word count here as a measure of productivity. These don’t exactly correlate with my actual word counts. I’m probably going to talk in a later post about why I no longer do that, but it’s a fairly understandable measure.)
Repeat this cycle often enough and it starts to break down sooner, and also, I have that one magical day where I wrote 8,000 words to compare to so that I always think of every other day as wildly inadequate.
So let’s evaluate what I did wrong here from a dog training point of view.
First, I am negatively reinforcing getting work done. What is the “reward” I’m giving myself for meeting my word count goal under the above scenario? It’s a bigger word count goal tomorrow. Is more work actually a reward?
In some ways, it is. I enjoy getting things done. I like seeing numbers get bigger, and I take pride in it happening quickly. And I actually do enjoy my work, for the most part.
But in most ways, more work is a punishment. My brain really enjoys variety, and doing the same thing over and over is not fun. I do not in fact want to spend all my available time working. When I keep adding successive work sessions because I was fine yesterday, the thing my brain is learning is, “if I do any work at all, I am going to get pushed until I am not fine.”
Second, I am engineering work to not be fun. I really do enjoy my job…up to a point. But instead of trying to figure out how much of my job I can do and have it remain fun, I’ve instead invented a method of working that explicitly tries to do so much of a thing that something that I find inherently fun stops being fun.
So not only am I not rewarding myself for not doing the thing I want to do, I am actually making the thing I want to do less enjoyable for myself.
Third, working to the point of brain exhaustion means I always end work on a low point. And your brain has a tendency to associate the thing you did with where you ended it. If you finish your day feeling frustrated and garbled because you worked until the point when your brain was like, “no. no more words. we do not know words ever again,” then picking up work the next day means that I’m associating work with that negative feeling of failure.
There’s a reason one of the fundamental rules of dog training is, “always stop training your dog while it’s fun for the dog.”
Fourth, I’m defining success as meeting maximum output, meaning that I almost never feel like I’ve won. No matter how much I beat up my brain about wanting to have nothing but perfect days, I rarely do. It turns out that repeatedly telling myself I’m a failure does not make me want to do better.
One of the other fundamental rules of dog training is, “set your dog up to succeed, and if your dog isn’t succeeding enough, change the win conditions.” I think the rule is you want your dog to be succeeding something like 85% of the time—enough to give the dog a desire to figure it out. If I’m setting my win condition as something that I manage to get 1% of the time, wow, I’m just sapping my will to succeed.
For me, the magical game changer (lol, see the note on this below) was this: Instead of asking myself how much I hypothetically could work in a day, I asked myself how much I hypothetically should work in a day to maximize my own happiness and joy.
The answer to this, looking at the above description, is pretty clear. I’m having fun at 1000 words. I’m having fun at 2000 words. After 3000 words, I’m feeling okay but starting to flag.
Applying the fundamental rule of dog-training (always quit training the dog while the dog still wants to keep training) you stop at 2000 words. Period.
And the thing I discovered when I did this—and when I gave myself weekends off—is that my productivity looked like this.
Day 1: 2000 words. Had fun.
Day 2: 2000 words. Had fun.
Day 3: Only felt like doing 1000 words. So did that. Then had fun.
Day 4: 2000 words. Had fun.
Day 5: 2000 words. Had fun.
Days 6 & 7: No words, had even more fun!
Repeat through Day 28.
End result: 8 days completely off. 20 days spent working, 7 of which ended up being half days because I didn’t feel like working more. Total word count: 33,000 words, and I loved doing it.
In my next post, I’m going to talk more about specific methods I’ve used to figure out how much I should work in a day, versus how much I could.
Final note on the lol above: I did actually figure this all out, but I have a bad tendency to backslide, and shockingly the method that had completely broken down and didn’t work continues to work extremely badly!
I am in part writing this series to remind myself that I should stop backsliding.
You got through all of this, so here is a picture of my dog.
This resonates with me SO MUCH. I was always judging my productivity by NaNoWriMo (and from the ones I did before I started publishing when I ONLY had to write) and being frustrated when I couldn't churn out 2000 words a day every day including weekends all year long. I completely had to rethink this because pandemic meant I was literally having panic/anxiety attacks. So now I mostly ignore my actual word count, give days off if I need them, and try not to feel bad about it. And lo and behold, I wrote 4 books during 2020, which was exactly my pace beforehand.
You literally just blew my mind. I've always been a quick writer -- particularly when I get to a certain point in a story and I just write every day -- I know I'm capable of 5k a day, even more sometimes, so I always feel like there's something wrong with me when I don't write that much. I've wrote three first drafts last year, but now I'm feeling so burnt out that I don't even want to finish editing the third of them.