The Four Circles of Creative Hell

For people with a wandering mind, the ticking timer seems to carry authority disproportional to its role. Getting stuck staring at the timer might force a false perspective that measuring time is more important than measuring results. It is not. Do your work first, check your stats later.

The lesson: Track time, but measure work.

Nothing brings the hammer down like a ticking timer on top of a blank page. While having sat for ages without doing anything might seem depressing, you can turn this around by acknowledging that sometimes you just need to drop what you’re doing and move on.

The lesson: when the timer hits 20 minutes and you’re doing nothing, change tasks.

If you fail to heed the warnings and push past the 20-minute mark, you’ll soon enter productivity twilight zone. Also known as the “what am I doing with my life” phase, it acts much like a black hole by crushing everything you enjoy about your work into a very unremarkable-looking speck. This phase can last for hours (and it will feel like days).

The lesson: if you’ll be doing nothing, make sure that nothing is something that makes you happy.

Just remember that most things in life can ultimately be fixed with Netflix and ice cream.