The drifter
I always thought that “drifting” from one task to another was unproductive. I thought you needed to be motivated, driven towards one goal, and stay “on-task” no matter what. We’re taught this throughout childhood, yet this often goes against our grain. We get distracted, we get bored, we lose energy, or we change mood.
When children play freely, they drift. They are getting something new out of everything they do, even if only for a few seconds. They dig a hole and they learn how grains of sand work in mass, they pick up different shaped objects and learn how to grip them, they test their own abilities and the integrity of other objects through their actions. They change stimulus as their bodies need the change.
Of course, everyone’s different, but a lot of creative adults tend to jump from project to project without losing drive. It is in ordinary jobs where we have expectations set and our motivations derived from a higher position, where we can get stuck in a linear motion and set on a one-goal path.
I can sit for an hour at my desk and think about one task, forcing myself to work on it. But sometimes my “procrastination” is the most productive part of my day in these circumstances. I have learnt that this is my yearning to drift and that perhaps I would achieve more on the initial task if I let myself drift through various other tasks, than just sticking to that one.
I’m releasing myself this month, as a drifter, no longer a linear-task worker.
