Productivity Tips from Sir Paul McCartney

We All Get Stuck. The Legendary Beatle Tells Us How to Push Through.

[caption id="attachment_3178" align="alignleft" width="166"] Paul McCartney takes a tea break between songwriting sessions. Photo credit: SixtiesGirl1964 / iWoman / CC BY[/caption] Admit it. You've experienced this scenario: you're working on something, and then suddenly you're not satisfied with your work. You get stuck trying to fix it. Before you know it, you've frittered away half your day just trying to rework a tiny part of your project -- and you haven't even solved your problem. Everyone goes through this from time to time. We can't avoid it -- we can't get everything right the first time, every time -- but we can find better ways to deal when we're not crazy about what we've done and still have a long way to go. And who better to give advice on how to remain productive than one of the most prolific songwriters of all time? Over the course of a 50-year career, Sir Paul McCartney has written hundreds of songs. His resume includes movie scores, video game soundtracks, and some of the most beloved recordings ever made. There's no way you can produce a catalog like that without running into pockets of low productivity or creative block from time to time. In a recent interview, Sir Paul says:

[T]hat’s the biggest difficulty with songwriting, as it is with anything: you run out of ideas, or you get to a point and you just think, “How am I going to continue from here?” You may have started ok, but it’s fizzling out. What I've learned to do is just push on even if you've hit a bad bit.

How exactly does Sir Paul "push on?" By not stopping to obsess over things, even lyrics that don't live up to his standards:

Don’t get hung up on that bit ‘cause it can just takes hours and you just go, “Should I do this? Or should I say that? What’s a better word? Give me the Thesaurus!” And you go, “Oh my God!” and you’re fussing over it for hours so I like to just leave the mistake in there and think, “I’ll come back to you”. You know, steamroll through it and, you know, you sometimes find you’ve left a bad bit in there but you hope to always catch them and go back.

That's the exact same advice that my creative writing professor gave me during my first year of college: write now, fix later. To this day, I still use that mantra whenever I write. Instead of getting bogged down and trying to make it perfect, I keep writing, and make a mental note to return to troublesome sentences or passages at a later date. This not only helps me get more done, it helps me do higher-quality work. Spinning your wheels will not help you perfect that paragraph, fix that graphic  or make that piece of code work. Setting it aside and returning to it later, with clear eyes, is often the key to getting over that hump.