I really want to be completely on board with this brief post by Alan Jacobs and its longer followup, on creation and thinking and productivity tools. In the first instance, I am 100% in agreement with Jacobs when he says

But whenever I am asked to contribute to this genre — the writerly-tips-and-tricks genre or whatever you want to call it — I have always declined. I guess I am just skeptical that what I do will work for other people. But, being nothing if not critical, I can tell you what I think is generally missing from the genre, and why I think its absence is important.

By way of getting to my point, let me encourage you to look again at Johnson’s posts. He tells you how to “keep your hunches alive,” how to use e-book annotations, how to keep researching as you write, and so on. All very good in its way.

But: What if your ideas are crap?

I think this is a very essential point, particularly in an online world that is drowning in productivity tools, tips, and tricks. I certainly think many of these can be useful, and I don’t doubt that they have made non-trivial improvements to the work of people who needed the help. However, as Alan points out here, they can very rarely fix what is typically the actual problem. Take it away even from ideas and just to the larger, fuzzier notions of talent and ability. A great productivity tool might make you write a screenplay faster, and for a lot of people, that’s just what they want– to finish something and to finish it quicker. But that just might mean that you finish a bad screenplay faster.

This is related to why I’m skeptical of a lot of sweeping writing advice that you find online, like “eliminate adverbs” or “never describe a character’s emotional state.” For one, I think that the best writers can often break these rules, because they are gifted enough to do so in a way that works. But more to the point, while it may very well improve your writing to delete all the adverbs, the adverbs are very rarely the problem. I though of that today when I read that Jerry Seinfeld had minimized the importance of his now-famous “a little bit every day” trick. As he knows as well as anyone, this won’t help an aspiring comic if the person just isn’t funny.  I’m sure many people know that but it’s worth repeating.

I’ve found several productivity tips and tools that have been useful for me. But I have used productivity tips and tools as a delaying tactic– as a way to make myself feel productive rather than to be productive– far more often. It’s just easier to focus on short-term productivity problems that seem easily resolvable than to conquer bigger problems of inspiration and execution, or even more, to admit to myself that a project has failed. It’s hard to get that damn lit review done, but it’s easy to install and play with Evernote. It’s hard to say to myself that a piece of research I’ve pursued for hours and hours just isn’t going anywhere, but it’s easy to blame that problem on “workflow.” Productivity tools can be fine, but they are also great at facilitating excuses and scapegoating.

The only difference of opinion I have with Alan, really, is rhetorical. I worry about putting the onus on ideas for creative projects, because I’ve so often interacted with people who think that in either entertainment or research, ideas are what really matters. As Alan would readily admit, executing ideas is the hard part. I do agree that all the productivity tips in the world won’t help if you have nothing to say. But I want to counsel people not to place faith in ideas before those ideas have been at least partially executed. I have lots of students who lack for ideas as Alan says. But I also have students with too many ideas but no meaningful ability to enact them. So I would just say that ideas are necessary but not sufficient, and not to be seduced by their power, as we all have been at times.