Just Start: On not skipping the warmup

This isn't a post about working out

Something you learn pretty quickly when you start working out is that it’s a bad idea to skip the warmup: however short on time you are, however ready to go you already feel, you’ll pull a muscle or underperform, or simply feel terrible for the rest of the session.

Something that takes much, much longer to learn when you’re trying to do creative stuff (I still forget it occasionally, and I almost always pay the price) is that something similar applies when you sit down at a desk.

This seems a bit counter-intuitive: lots of productivity people will tell you that you should start your day by tackling your most important job, then save the less brain-intensive stuff for the afternoon. But if I try to jump straight into doing good writing cold, I almost always do the brain equivalent of tearing a hamstring (straining a synapse, maybe?), whereas if I ease myself in I can (usually) get myself where I need to be.

So, I do a sort of warmup. And in the same way that a gym warmup needs to have different ‘bits’ (cardio to get the blood and synovial fluid pumping, dynamic stretches to get the muscles warm, box jumps or medicine ball throws to get the fibres firing), I think it’s helpful to divide it into parts. My gym warmup’s taken me a decade or so to perfect — my brain warmup is still a work in progress. Here’s what I’m doing right now (with one exception, which I’ll talk about at the end):

1. Easing in. This is the bit that I resisted for longest, because it feels like exactly what every time-management type tells you not to do: replying to comments, doing emails, time-sink stuff that distracts you from real, important work. But then I had a chat with with Mark Millar, the incredibly prolific comic author who came up with Kingsman and Kick-Ass, where he said this:

   I find it takes me an hour or so to get into it, like a journey down a mine, and then I'm in the zone for a solid six hours where I get all my writing done. Then it's a one hour ascent back into the real world. If you stop for lunch it just means you take another hour to get into it again. Writing always works best when you have a bit of momentum and energy best in morning.

   Twitter, emails, etc, is like stretching exercises, a warm up using SOME of the muscles, but the heavy lifting comes later when you're a bit more detached from the real world.

   I tried this and — sure enough — it works! The real key is that you have a cutoff: replying to YouTube comments quite often sparks ideas and gets you into the ‘writing things’ zone, but you have to limit it to ten or fifteen minutes so you don’t get bogged down.

2. Making a list. There are still days when I don’t write a to-do list: almost always, I end up flailing and unmoored in those days, feeling like there’s a bunch of stuff I ought to be doing that I’ve somehow forgotten. I do a handwritten to-do list on one page of my notebook: little checkboxes next to the items so that:
   
   a) I get the satisfaction of ticking them off and
   b) I can easily see what I’ve already done
   
   I also make them as ‘first thing’ focused as I can: so it’s not ‘Email a bunch of people for interviews’, it’s ‘Find the best contacts for X person to interview.’ The basic idea is that every ‘Thing’ should be as clear and short as I can make it, so that it segues naturally into more things.
   
   One more thing I’ve started doing at this stage is checking that I’m not ignoring any of my projects for too long: this is when I ask myself stuff like: “What do I have coming up on YouTube? Did I write a newsletter this week? Do I have enough paid work coming in?” This sounds like a lot of extra stress, but it’s actually enormously helpful: by consciously asking myself this stuff at the start of the day, I clear it out of my mind for the rest of the day (and, if something isn’t being moved forward, I can act on it). It’s basically what you’d do in an all-hands meeting at work, except that you can do it yourself, in five minutes a day. Lovely.

3. Doing the first thing. This just means going through the list and picking the first thing to do: sometimes this is the most important (emailing the person whose opinion you absolutely need), or the most stress-removing (paying off an invoice, having an awkward conversation), or even the most easy. The important thing is that it’s the priority: it’s like doing the most important movement right at the start of your workout.

   The one exception to all of this is if I wake up, or I’ve been walking around, with an idea or a paragraph that I absolutely have to write down in my head. This usually happens when I’ve been reading a lot and then letting my brain percolate for a little while: I shuffle words around in my head and then I have to get them down before I forget them. If this happens, doing all the other stuff first would be silly — but I still do all the other stuff straight afterwards.

   That’s what I do right now: it might change in future! But take it from someone who’s done a lot of workouts, and a lot of stuff that involves trying to be creative: skipping the warmup is rarely a good idea.

   
   Have a great weekend!

   Joel x

Stuff I’ve done

Video - I tried reading for three hours a day
For a month earlier this year, I tried to read for at least three hours, every day. Here’s why I did it, what I think was helpful, what I wish I’d done instead — and, yes, which books I read.

Stuff I like

📖 Book - The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin

I’m onto book two of the 3BP trilogy, and though it’s not quite as cohesive as the first one, it’s one of those books that’s so compelling that you just want to sit down and read until it’s done. I’ve got a couple of hundred pages to go, so this opinion might change.

📖 Book - The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han

I’m re-reading this for a project I’m working on, and though it’s very short and quite dense in places, it’s pretty near a must-read — Han’s central argument that we’ve moved from a ‘disciplinary’ society to an ‘achievement’ society, where we’re pressured to optimise, perform, and produce constantly, hits very close to home for me, and it’s something I’m trying to scale back on a bit.

🎥 Video - Dua Lipa In Conversation With George Saunders

I’m sort of a big fan of celebrities who use their platforms and resources to do something they find personally interesting, and I absolutely love this channel, where Dua Lipa interviews some of her favourite authors in depths that put some of my interviews to shame. This one, where she chats with the author of the (amazing) Lincoln In The Bardo about Glastonbury, death and the creative process, is fantastic.

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