Impulse

There's a funny thing about starting something. Sometimes it seems like you just decide what to do, sit down and do it. Other times, it seems like just about everything else in the world has to happen first. You go to start, but you check your email first, and then you remember you should really respond to a friend who wrote to you a while ago, and then you remember you have some chores to take care of, and because you don't really want to do them you go check Facebook or whatever...

I think it's worth analysing this notion of the time or effort between deciding to do something and actually doing it, which I've been thinking of as impulse. Having a high impulse means you can almost immediately go from thinking about something to doing it, and having a low impulse means it tends to take a long time or a lot of effort.

Low impulse is often caused by intrinsic things. For example, if you tend to think of ideas and then shut them down, eg "that'll be too hard", "it won't be good enough", "I should do other things instead" and so on, then it's easy to build an association between thinking about things and not doing them. If you're easily distracted, you can have the opposite problem, where you think of something but before you do it you start thinking about something else. Or if you're disorganised or busy you might get too used to responding to external impulses and forget to make use of your own.

External causes of low impulse often look like interruptions, where in between thinking of something and doing it, someone bothers you with their own needs. Alternatively, if you have a long list of stuff you should be doing, then that tends to intrude in the space between thinking and doing. Similarly, if your tasks are highly dependent on each other then before you start on one thing you have to think about its consequences on everything else, leading to an enormous amount of inertia.

I firmly believe we naturally exist in a high-impulse state, but we add complexities that drag our impulse down and make us less creative and more hesitant. The solutions then, are mostly about recognising the things that decrease your impulse and removing or restructuring them. In the case of the intrinsics, that means reducing distractions and building more positive connections between thinking and doing. In the case of the extrinsics, it's mostly about decreasing these forms of interdependence and state that restrict our actions.

None of which is to say that high impulse is always the stated goal. After all, if you're in the middle of a righteous writing marathon and you have a stray idea, it's probably best to just note it down and leave it for later. That said, I think there's always a risk of putting our ideas off too much and ending up in a low-impulse mindset, starved of the vital creative connection between thought and action.