Most of the time, we want to keep our reflective self engaged, that part of us that keeps a watchful eye over our actions and occasionally pipes up with "hey, is this really the thing you should be doing? Is this really the right way to do it?" The rest of us is usually content to just do things and not worry too much about the bigger picture, but that makes it easy to end up stuck in dead ends or bad decisions caused by just blindly going from one step to the next.
At its best, that judgemental process also keeps you connected with the experience of what you're doing. You tend to ask "is this a good experience?", which is a way of reflecting on your own feelings about the thing you're doing, and telling you whether you should actually keep doing it. This is also important to avoid getting stuck in doing something you actually don't want to do, but seemed like a good idea at the time.
Unfortunately, sometimes you want to do something that is unpleasant or mundane. That doesn't mean you've made some kind of terrible mistake, just that, in the service of something you do want, this particular step is not terribly enjoyable. However, that feeling is essentially generated by reflection. Washing a dish or renaming a bunch of files by hand is not unpleasant as dictated by the laws of the universe, but unpleasant as dictated by your judgement of it.
The trick, then, is to get those unpleasant tasks to a point where they require no decisions and no judgement at all. If you completely specify what you need to do, to the point where the non-reflective, automatic part of yourself is doing all the work, then your reflective mind can just take a break, or think about something else. It doesn't need to be engaged in what you're doing, and that takes away the unpleasantness.
So I suggest maintaining a relationship between enjoyableness and specficity. If you're doing something you really like, leave it unspecified so you can enjoy the feeling of exploring it and thinking about how you're doing it. If the opposite, just specify everything in as much detail as you need to switch off.
The law of demand in economics says, roughly, that the more something costs, the less people will buy it. And, conversely, the less something costs, the more people will buy it. This is one of those observations that, depending on your perspective, is either totally trivially obvious or profound with wide-ranging implications. I'd like to argue for the latter.
Cost isn't just money, it can be time, or inconvenience, or injury, or stern words from your parents. Anything that increases the total amount you have to give up, trade, lose, or suffer in order to get what you want. And this applies not just to financial transactions, but any situation where you have to choose between different options. In other words, most situations. So, to formulate it another way: all else being equal, you will tend to do things that are easier and require you to give up less to do them.
That "all else being equal" is an interesting one, because of course things aren't usually equal. Most likely there are some things you want more than others, even if they require more work. For something that you are deeply and profoundly passionate about, the law of demand probably doesn't matter that much. However, two things come to mind: firstly, there are many things that you might want to do but don't feel very strongly about, and secondly, even super important life goals can seem pretty dull at times, especially when compared with more immediately gratifying options.
So maybe in general things won't be equal, but I suspect that over the course of a given activity there would be a surprising number of points where the decision of whether to do it or go watch TV or whatever is a pretty close one. All you need is one of those decisions to lead away from the thing you'd rather do and then you're off track. And not just TV either, but even other useful or semi-useful activities that are justifiable but still not the best thing for you to be doing.
Which is all to say that I think the law of demand actually does affect our decisions on a regular basis. And what that means is you need to pay a lot of attention to what things cost. Are the things that you really want to be doing easy? Can they be made easier or otherwise less costly? Can you make the things you want to do less of harder or more costly? Some of these adjustments can be very minor, but still make a big difference.
It's not sufficient to say "well, it doesn't matter if it's hard, I want it enough that I'll do it anyway". There will be times when you lose sight of that desire, and in those moments having easy alternatives within reach is just tempting the law of demand.
In platformer games, it's quite common to use various physics tricks to make the game feel better. For example, you can still jump even if you've (very slightly) fallen off the platform already, and you can land on a platform even if you (very slightly) miss it. Most of the tricks are fairly minor ways of making physics a bit forgiving, but there's one huge departure from reality that almost nobody notices: you can influence your movement in mid-air. This isn't just a minor cheat, it's basically throwing out a large chunk of the laws of the universe. But we don't even notice!
Why is this? How can we not feel totally aliented by finding out that our supposed avatar in this world just... pushes himself through the air? My theory is that, deep down, we actually feel like we do live in a universe where we can change our direction in mid-air. It's not surprising to us when we press the left button and Mario moves left despite no plausible physical basis; it's surprising in real life that after we jump we can no longer control our movement. The game is just being generous by making the universe work the way we, deep down, feel like it should.
And I don't think this applies only to physics. The idea of a situation being totally out of our control is very difficult to accept, to the point where most of the time we just don't accept it. A lot of the circumstances of your life are dictated at birth, but nobody wants to believe that. You can't make good things happen in your life by really really wanting them, yet that's the thesis of a bestselling book. And you can't get things done faster or make more time in a day just because you will it to be so.
That's not to say there aren't ways to affect how long something takes, or many other things that happen in your life. But you influence them by pushing on something, much the same way as you jump by pushing against the ground. You can push on which opportunities you pursue, push on how many things you try to get done, or push on how effectively you work. The one thing you can't do is push on nothing and expect movement. Real life doesn't work like that.
Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.
— Miles Kington
I think one of the breakthrough moments in learning mathematics is when you realise that all of the definitions are just made up. Back when I was in high school and all the way into university, I was taught things like "a negative number times a negative number is a positive number", "anything except zero to the power of zero is one", "you can't divide by zero", "there's no square root of negative numbers", "actually we lied about that one". Well, actually, all of it was lies. None of those things are that way, they were just defined that way by some mathematician or other.
Many common terms for seeds and fruit do not correspond to the botanical classifications.
— Wikipedia article on Fruit
In the interest of balance, wouldn't it be prudent to include a section on the myriad criticisms of fruit. This page is so onesided.
— Wikipedia talk page on Fruit
And definitions, both inside and outside of mathematics, seem to follow this pattern quite frequently. Some people tend to claim that their set of definitions is absolutely and objectively correct. Indeed, they'd call them facts instead of definitions so as not to offer any implication of being arbitrary. On the other hand, you get people saying definitions are fundamentally arbitrary. What you call a fruit may as well be a vegetable, or a dinosaur, or whatever. What we call good could be called evil by someone else and it would make just as much sense. That viewpoint, however, leaves a lot to be desired.
You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You’ll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing – that’s what counts.
— Richard Feynman (quoting his father)
Definitions are invented, yes, but not arbitrarily. We define things in certain ways because of the consequences of those definitions. For example, you can make your own branch of mathematics where multiplying negative numbers by negative numbers yields negative numbers. Nobody's stopping you! But other things would need to change too. Would your branch of mathematics end up consistent with these changes? Maybe! Would it end up useful? Probably not.
So too with other definitions. We can define a tomato as a fruit, vegetable, or dinosaur, but those definitions have consequences. If you're thinking about a tomato as something to eat, you're in for an unpleasant surprise if you expect it to have a similar taste or role in cooking as other fruit. On the other hand, if you want to grow a tomato, or analyse its reproductive cycle or relationship to other plants, you'll find thinking about it as a fruit saves a lot of time. However, regardless of your goals, it's unlikely that defining a tomato as a dinosaur will help you.
I think the only sensible way to think about definitions is functionally. That is, if I define a thing in this way, what does it buy me? What can I do with this newly defined thing that I could not do before, and what options does defining it in this way remove? Does it help me think more clearly about this thing or other things in the same category?
If, upon reflection, your definition doesn't do anything, you're probably better off without it.
One thing that's surprised me is how much I have come to respect structure. Until a few years ago, I was generally of the opinion that a kind of carefree, laissez-faire working style was best for creativity. I think it's a fairly common sentiment, and seems to appear mostly by analogy: if there are certain qualities you want in your work, you try to take on those qualities. However, I don't think the analogy actually holds: the work and the worker are inherently different, and creation isn't always creative.
So over time I've been introducing more structure into how I work and enjoying the benefits that brings in terms of both volume and consistency of output. I've also found that consistency can make it easier to be creative, by providing a ready supply of raw material to be creative with. Other benefits include being able to plan more easily, and spend less time thinking about what to do.
But an interesting thing I've noticed is that stability is super compatible with more stability, and not compatible with even a moderate amount of instability. Perhaps that seems obvious, but it has some interesting consequences. For example, I used to quite enjoy working out of cafes, but these days it usually doesn't really make sense; I've got my current setup working well, and changing it makes it work less well. Having my location and work intertwined makes me less likely to travel. Being less likely to travel means it makes more sense to invest in furniture and housing. Before long I've got a dog, a big TV and nice curtains, all because I found work habits that made my life easier.
And what's wrong with that? Well, nothing necessarily, assuming those stability-compatible things are what you want (and presumably they are, if you chose them). But as all those stability factors combine to form a majestic stability fortress, your tolerance for instability goes completely through the floor. An opportunity that would involve, say, an intercontinental move, or living out of a bungalow in a forest, or even just changing career, becomes extraordinarily costly. In addition to its direct cost, you have to pay the cost of giving up all the stability you've come to rely on. Eventually, perhaps, that will just stop seeming worth it in the general case.
At that point, you've hit complete stagnation, or, to put it another way, have become totally adapted to your environment. The things you do currently, you can do exceptionally well, but it will be nearly impossible to do something unexpected. And that itself becomes a problem if you want to be creative. Sooner or later, your creativity will lead you towards some kind of fairly lateral step. Maybe you've been creating software for years and it leads you to producing electronic music, or art, or opening a nightclub. At that point, you've got a choice: be less creative, or take the huge stability hit.
I'm still a long way from that point, of course, but it's something to keep in mind. Stability is a tradeoff, an investment in things generally staying the same as they are now. That's often a sensible investment to make, but like any bet, you won't always be right. More importantly, you won't always want to be right. Change is an integral part of creativity and, when the time comes to throw away your stability, it's probably best not to have too much.