Soul-Making Productivity: A Process Manifesto

Stoking the fire

Bringing things into the world is a challenge — whether it's a poem, a spreadsheet, an apartment complex, a syllabus, or a new frame for understanding life. The process of giving form to an idea tends to follow two basic patterns:

1. Suck it up and just do it — find a workable way to force yourself to produce the right kind of output by the right deadline.

2. Wait for energy and inspiration to strike. Make yourself available to the muse, and get things done when they want to get done.

The former is by far the culturally dominant option, but the latter shows up a lot too, mostly on the more creative side of the spectrum. Both have endless failure modes and shortcomings, as do the attempts to mix them. Broadly, I might say that the first option drains the fire from you and your work, while the second option lets the fire take its own course, but fails to stoke it, often letting it gutter out. Attempts to mix them usually stoke the fire a bit so you can drain it a bit, then leaving it alone to replenish enough to be drained again.

I haven't come across an approach that stokes the fire to any satisfying degree, letting its natural level of heat serve as fuel for the work. I've had projects where that happened on its own, but it's always had the feel of grace — happening more by accident of circumstance than by anything I did to nurture such an outcome.

That's one part of what I'm aiming at with soul-making productivity. I want a way of stoking the fire, and not just that — a way of devoting myself to the fire, of courting it and nurturing it, and of teaching it how to work with me, how to help along this project we're engaged in together, this effort to take an idea from the ether and sculpt some patch of reality into its shape. I want to partner and collaborate with the fire, to apprentice myself to the process of creation, rather than trying to diminish and deform the fire so it works purely on the terms my own conscious mind sets.

Here are some of the parts of what I'm putting together, some of the imperfect but endlessly modifiable elements of soul-making productivity. I'll try to keep most of these short and spare, avoiding too many tangents, since each one is basically a seed, not a fully formed idea.

---

Ambition

Productivity discourse tends to have a desiccated vision of ambition. To be fair, it borrows that desiccation from our shared culture. It's hard to overcome that stale sense of ambition, let alone to replace it with a better one — but we can always try.

Ambition isn't about getting more money, more goods, bigger houses, greater acclaim from people you don't know or respect. It's not about anything that can fit on a spreadsheet or graph, or that lends itself well to bragging on social media. All of that is just grasping, not ambition.

Ambition is about the echoes you want to leave reverberating in the world around you. It's about finding the place in The Current where your heart, mind, and gut resonate with creation. Ambition is about living life as an art of devotion to the Process and Pattern, making reality more beautiful with your participation than it would be without it.

Any work that's more dedicated to grasping than to ambition isn't soul-making.

Fuel Sources

So much productivity is fueled by negative emotions. You're afraid of getting a bad grade as a teen, so you study for tomorrow's big test late into the night, mostly out of fear and with the knowledge that you'll be exhausted tomorrow. There's no joy in it, just a fear of not being good enough, of disappointing someone, of ruining your future.

As an adult, you carry the same attitude into your work, many of your projects fueled by a fear of failing, of being fired, of falling behind your peers. Or maybe your work is driven by material gain, by greed for more and more without enjoying what you already have, each step along the way. Or maybe by resentment, by an urge to show some people from your past that they were wrong about you.

There are endless possibilities, holding up the central point: most work, most of the time, is driven by negative fuel sources more than positive ones.

Sometimes, people sense that they have to change this situation because running on dirty fuel for so long starts to make them sick, to twist their humanity.

Other times, people are forced to change fuel sources because they simply run out of the old ones. In my late 20s, I lost access to a huge well of self-hatred, anxiety, and inadequacy. I was very happy to find that they were gone, but surprised to find that oops, those had fueled much of my ability to be productive throughout my life. Without them, I didn't have much oomf to get up and do stuff.

Other fuel sources became available — things like curiosity, exploration, awe, love, fascination and the like — but a) they weren't exactly available on tap for me, as they aren't for most people, and b) they work differently than than the negative fuels. It's not so much a matter of "you stop burning coal and start burning cherry wood," where the basic mechanics are the same: throw things into the fire. It's more like "stop heating your house with a stove and use radiators instead," where the two heat sources work in entirely different ways and require entirely different equipment and care.

Fuel sources like fear and inadequacy have a raw power to them, a quality of being able to push things past the finish line on sheer force alone, mindless of any consequences.

Fuel sources like curiosity and devotion lack that raw power — at least at the levels I've been able to access — but they do have a more graceful, sinuous strength to them. Less of a diesel truck, more of a beloved horse. It takes practice and skill to learn how to ride the horse well, but once you do, you can navigate in ways you couldn't with the truck.

Wholeness

So many jobs, so many bosses, so many projects ask us to leave aside most of who we are. We're supposed to leave everything at the door except the part of us that mechanically checks tasks off a list and follows procedure. This alone is a good sign of work that is incapable of being soul-making. Any work that boxes out most of who you are isn't going to let you unfold. It's functionally incompatible.

If your work has no place for your heart, for your body, for your intellect or soul or relationships — it's bad work.

To be clear, I don't mean that your work has to go out of its way to be the single and only thing in your life, supporting and developing every single aspect of you, or else it's crap. I'm just saying that if the work needs you to suppress or ignore parts of yourself, if it doesn't have room for all of you to exist — that's a problem.

There are a few ways to try and bridge this gap. One is to find or create work that does invite every part of you to participate. Another is to find ways to bring more of yourself to the work you already do, and make sure all of that is accommodated.

Both of these are easier said than done, but they're both also deeply worthwhile efforts. The situation may never be perfect, but the effort to move more and more towards wholeness in your vocation is always worth it.

Desire Infrastructure

I'm playing on the term "desire paths" here, the paths that show up where people actually want to walk, not just where the planners of sidewalks and roads want them to walk.

The same way that top-down planning of public spaces so often fails to account for how people intuitively want to navigate that space, our own top-down planning of our time and energy fails to account for how we actually intuitively want to navigate those.

We press schedules and to-do lists onto our days, paving a sidewalk in the shape of "6am: wake up → 6:15: morning jog → 6:45: shower and breakfast → 7:15: drive to work..." instead of attending to our time, space, energy, desires, drives, etc, and watching what patterns emerge.

I'm not advocating a slack "go with the flow" surrender here — my internal image of desire infrastructure is more like a tree. Trees don't plan out a grid of where each branch and leaf must place themselves to maximize their inner image of efficiency and self-worth. They branch out slowly, bit by bit, testing what emerges from the confluence of growth, light, shadow, the angle of a branch, its weight, the density of the soil, on and on and on. Trees become tall, strong, sturdy living infrastructure precisely because they don't work like sidewalks — they work like desire paths from the start, and then build and strengthen those paths while also experimenting with new ones. The more strong infrastructure you have, the more you can safely build.

The same is true of your own desire infrastructure. If you can allow yourself to notice the "trunk" of your own time, energy, and desire, you can put in effort to strengthen it, and eventually start growing more branches off it — hanging new habits and behaviors and desires off that trunk. As those get sturdier, test by test, you can experiment with growing new branches off of those, and so on.

When you lose branches — when the shape of your life and work changes significantly — it no longer has the character of a house of cards falling apart, but of a sturdy living system needing to adjust itself.

Why are You Doing It?

Every task you do, you're doing for a reason. They all emerge from particular drives and desires. Sometimes its as simple as "I want money, and this gets me money." If you dig a little deeper, it might reveal itself to be "I want my family to be secure, which takes money, and this gets me money." Dig a little deeper still, and maybe you find something like "I want to feel safe, which means feeling like my family is secure, which takes money, and this gets me money."

The more links you find in the chain, the more points there are to reflect on. How closely related is your actual core desire to the way you're acting on that desire? I'd reckon every single one of us has at least a handful of habits in our lives that, if we examined them more closely, we'd find we're causing ourselves more problems by acting on them so indirectly. For example, a lot of people crave more money, no matter how much their income keeps increasing, simply because they don't feel safe on a deep level, and the money is a surrogate for real safety. After a certain point, it's probably more helpful to work on unblocking your sense of somatic and psychological safety, rather than continuing to claw for more cash. The money won't meet your goals nearly as well as a few deep breaths and some self-awareness.

Sometimes though, the long chain is simply a long chain — you have to extend yourself in order to act on the relevant core desire, and that's that. In those cases, one of the bigger problems is that the charge dissipates over the length of the chain. For example, the hours of paperwork you're doing may be a directly necessary part of fulfilling the deeper core desire to express your love and care for your children, but it's hard to feel that fact when you're in hour 3 of filling out IRS forms.

It can help if you're able to trace back and be aware of that core drive, and then find specific ways of re-connecting with that drive. There are a lot of ways to go about this, a couple I like are below: environmental cognition, animism, and archetypal resonance.

Environmental Cognition

A spider's web is a part of its mind. Its cognition is extended not just through its own body, but through the vibrations and structure of its web. Messing up its web can make a spider act cognitively impaired until it's fixed. Humans aren't so different: our minds are shaped by our environments. For some people, this means they need a clean, organized room for their mind to feel clear and organized. For others, it means they need a bit of chaos in their office so they can creatively mix and match ideas and domains to produce fruitful ideas. For me personally, I think better in large rooms with high ceilings than in smaller cramped ones — my thoughts need space to roam and spin before coming together into something compact and fruitful.

This is one element of environmental cognition: sense into what you need from your environment (not just in general, but specifically for what you're working on), and shape your environment to match that as well as you can. Don't just assume that because you're supposed to work well in a clean, sterile environment, that means you'll actually do your best work there. Test it out for yourself, move things around, go work in a new space, see what happens. Figure out what you want from a space, and what each space wants from you.

Another element of environmental cognition is... y'know, I don't want to use the word shrine, but it's probably simplest to just say shrine. You might want to consider some shrines.

Whatever the core drives behind your work are, it's easy to lose track of them if they're just ideas in your head or even feelings in your chest. It can be helpful to concretize them, to dedicate a space to them that you can return to or glance at when you need to re-connect.

This doesn't mean setting up a little buddha statue with incense or anything — it just means finding a space that you can turn into an expression of the values driving your work. It could be as simple as some pictures of your family on the fridge, or a cork board near your desk where you pin up piecemeal mission statements and manifestos for yourself, to keep mindful of what this is all for. It could be a vision board with aspirational pictures on it, a corner table where you keep a couple books that inspired you to do what you're doing — it doesn't even have to be a stationary space, it might be more talismanic, something you carry with you. A wedding ring can be a great way of reconnecting with what matters most about your marriage. A well-chosen watch can be a regular reminder about why you live the way you do.

Your environment can either work in your favor or against you — ignoring that fact feels not just silly, but harmful to any project you want to bring the fullness of yourself to.

Animism

If your work is a thing that you work on, and object to tinker with, you're going to get stuck in some unhelpful mechanically-minded habits when trying to bring it into being and flesh it out. Engaging your deep human animistic instincts can be a huge boost. Remember that whatever idea you're trying to bring into the world, that idea is a living creature, with its own wants, needs, desires, and drives. I'm not even saying you have to actually believe this is true — just that the more deeply you can act as if it's true, the more fruitful your relationship with your work can become.

Try having conversations with the project you're trying to bring into the world. Try sensing its shape, its color, its mood. What does it want from you? What do you want from it? If you write a letter to the idea behind your project, what might you say? How might you expect it to respond?

Humans have been animists for as long as we've been humans, even if it (very, very) recently fell out of fashion. Your brain developed to see the world as a living process full of living presences — it's counterproductive to try and shut out the inherently creative possibilities of mythopoetic cognition, just because you feel silly talking to and sensing the personality of something your conscious mind doesn't think is alive.

Archetypal Resonance

If you dig really deep into your core drives and deep values, you may notice they start to feel very powerful, but a bit shapeless. They trade cohesive direction for raw power. Working with archetypes can be a helpful way of giving them back some shape and direction again.

That's what archetypes are, really. They're form, not content. If you can fill up the form with energy and the content of your life, it takes on life and direction of its own. An archetype is like a gradient for energy to follow, the way a mountain stream follows gravity down the available gradient, you need to find the right path for your own energy to flow along.

This can take some practice, and always involves a bit of back-and-forth between you and the deep drives themselves. Your conscious mind may think it wants something specific, and try to force a particular shape onto the energy, but that doesn't tend to go very well. That's what this whole article, this whole endeavor is about. Instead, we can return to the "desire infrastructure" approach here, sensing in from the bottom up: what shapes feel available for this energy, this drive?; do some of those shapes, those archetypes, feel like the energy lights them up more than others?; looking at the surface-level tasks, and the deep-layer energy, does it feel like there are archetypes, gradients, patterns that naturally bridge the two?

This may take real time and reflection to begin experimenting with at first, but it does pay off and get easier with time. It's mostly about finding and anticipating the desire paths between your drives and your tasks.

Starting out, it might be helpful to keep a list of available archetypal characters, situations, and places — anything that might help you constellate your energy and test out different ways for it to present itself and act through you.

Somatic Resonance

Your body knows when your work is disconnected from your soul. It knows when your action isn't in line with your drives and values. If you deepen your connection with somatic awareness, this can be pretty trivial to recognize with even subtle signs, but even without that, less-subtle signs have a way of bubbling up to the top.

When you lose all the energy to do something that you insist must be done; when your deadline was a week ago, but you still can't bring yourself to do anything more than vague brainstorming; when you keep getting mysterious pains and injuries whenever you turn towards a particular project; when you get angry or irritable at the mention of a specific task — dozens of things like this can be clear signals that something's off between you and the project. Maybe it's about the way you're doing it, maybe it's about the project itself. Either way, the body is the outward expression of the soul, it knows when your vocation isn't being respected.

Project Necromanagement

Projects fade away and die sometimes — and we try to bring them back or pump life into them sometimes.

When a situation like this comes up, it's best to truly, honestly ask yourself what kind of thing it is that you're bringing back to life. Are you pumping juice back into a zombie project that wants to drain your life and eat your brain? Are you resuscitating a project that was cut off in its prime, and just needs a kiss of life to come back to vibrance? Are you propping up what is clearly a dead project, trying to Weekend-At-Bernie's it across the finish line just for the sake of having it done?

Projects often die for a good reason. They weren't right for us, or we weren't right for them, or they never had any life of their own in the first place. The thought of bringing a project back to life bears special consideration, starting with "why am I doing this? Is there actually potential here, or am I just doing what I think I'm supposed to?"

Trust the Timing

So many times, I've been working on a project and gotten it to 70%, 80%, 95% finished — and then come up against a near-total block. Entirely unable to finish off the next chunk. One part of me said to push through, hack away at the last bits until I got it across the finish line. Another part of me said to wait.

Usually I'd wait, and maybe 1 week later, maybe 2 months later, I'd be out for a walk or talking to a friend, and suddenly — it all falls into place. THAT'S WHAT WAS MISSING! The planets align and I can clearly see how to complete the project in a way that couldn't have occurred to me weeks before. More than that: if I had tried to force it across the finish line weeks before, the project would have been lesser for it. It would have been incomplete, pulled out of its cocoon early, an inelegant half-made thing.

There's a gap here between working by chronos or working by kairos — working by linear clock-time, versus working by the sensed patterns of Time. Learning to attend to the quality of the moment, to when patterns complete themselves, versus simply following the quantity of moments, scrunching and stretching existence to fit a pre-fabricated deadline.

Don't Go It Alone

I always need this reminder: you don't have to do everything yourself. You don't have to be everything for yourself. Reach out, connect, find the others. Join a team, start a group chat, whatever is appropriate to the situation. Don't confuse individuation for some kind of isolation.

---

Pre- or Co-Requisites

Soul-making requires a certain sensitivity to what underlies life, to the deeper strata of mind and heart. There are a lot of ways to train yourself in these kinds of sensitivities, but as always my top recommendations are somatic resonance and imaginal literacy. Learning to recognize the latent insight of your own body and the archetypal patterns you swim in are unparalleled training grounds for deepening into soul-making and following your vocation.

Also basically anything that helps you move from Systematic mode into Spontaneous mode is a huge step in the right direction. I have a few ideas for possible steps over in this article:

Solving McGilchrist's Big Problem (or, fix right hemisphere imbalance with these 7 weird tricks?)

Conclusion

Like I said, this is a process manifesto — it's necessarily incomplete and built on a lot of context that's come before. It's about 40% a reminder for myself to return to and 40% a beacon to Find The Others who feel called toward what I'm talking about. The other 20% is an open mystery — I'm not entirely sure what it is I'm doing here, or where all this will go.

I hope some of you found something here. And I hope our paths cross again.

(Side note: You'll soon be seeing another kinda-sorta process manifesto here, more on the subject of learning and research. Just FYI, the impulse behind that one is closely related to this one. I'm not sure how to combine them, but I also don’t think it’s possible to separate them.)

---

---

Coda: This article isn’t a blueprint, it’s a process marker

I'm thinking of this article as a "process manifesto"; my inspiration for it is drawn from Christopher Alexander's approach to building:

There are, loosely speaking, two types of building production. Type A is a type of production which relies on feedback and correction, so that every step allows the elements to be perfected while they are being made. This is not unlike the way a good cook tastes a soup while cooking it, checking it, modifying it until it tastes just right. Type B is a type of production that is organized by a fixed system of rigidly prefabricated elements, and the sequence of assembly is much more rigidly programmed.

What Alexander says of buildings also holds true for the kinds of projects that manifestos are a part of. Sometimes, manifestos have a tone of being a blueprint for the idea they're talking about, something to return to for instruction on how to proceed. Sometimes, like in what I'm writing here, it's more of a starting point — open to continuing feedback and correction. Writing it down is just one part of the process of trying things out, seeing what works and what doesn't, continuously modifying until it "tastes" right.

Also worth noting: I've written and spoken a TON elsewhere about soul-making, spirituality, human wholeness, somatic resonance, all that stuff — I'm not going to repeat a lot of it here, but all of it is deeply relevant in what I'm writing here. Everything in this article is built on top of that foundation.