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3 • Give Yourself a Deadline

It is human nature to procrastinate. Yet prolific idea men find that they are at their most creative in spurts, and they get their best ideas when they go "all out" to get them. Sometimes, of course, there is a real and practical deadline to supply the urge to push yourself mentally: the customer wants to see the new design tomorrow; the planning committee is meeting next Wednesday to decide whether your department or Ed Brown's is going to get the extra money for expansion; you have only ten days' supply of material "X" on hand and the only supplier has a strike still going on. In any of these cases, you would find yourself really mentally involved in finding a solution. But you can also simulate such pressure by giving yourself a deadline —just make one up. To get yourself equally involved emotionally in meeting that deadline, just tell someone else—your boss, or his boss, or the planning committee—that you are going to have ten or twenty new ideas at such and such a time.

The idea of personally stimulating yourself to be creative through the practice of setting personal deadlines should not be interpreted as a recommendation for continual "crash programs." To be sure, there are times when crash programs are necessary (even mindful of the Pentagon wag who defined a crash program as "getting nine girls pregnant in order to make a baby in one month"!). In research or product development, crash programs may have value if the paths to be followed are clearly defined and there are no major unsolved problems in the way. Then an all-out "drive" to finish a project may be justified. But by and large, you cannot keep any machines, especially mental machines, running at top speed all the time. They need "rest periods" and time for maintenance and refueling. But so far as your personal thinking is concerned, the occasional made-up deadline may be just what you need to spur your mind to a new and better problem solution.

Related terms include starting your own small business and business information systems.