Building Middlementum
Some thoughts on unsticking
Middles are where hope goes to die.
This, at least, is the claim of a 2011 paper I recently came across: In the life cycle of a project, motivation tends to be highest at the beginning and end, with a dip in the middle—or in graph form…
In the long shadow of the replication crisis, it’s dangerous to take any one study as gospel. But this one feels quite common-sensical1—a formalization of what, I think, most of us have experienced firsthand: Enthusiasm is naturally highest when you’re either gripped by novelty or can make a big push toward completion. Tedium, avoidance, and indecision, by contrast, are most likely to set in when you are slogging ahead with no end in sight.2
So let’s run with the U-curve and ask a simple question: How, in the midst of a big project, can we fight this dip in motivation? How can we build more “middlementum”?
Pac-Men and Palimpsests
Often when you sit down to write, what you have in mind is an autobiographical novel about your childhood, or a play about the immigrant experience, or a history of—oh, say—say women. But this is like trying to scale a glacier. It's hard to get your footing, and your fingertips get all red and frozen and torn up. Then your mental illnesses arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer, and they try to be quiet but you know they are there with their weird coppery breath, leering at you behind your back.
…I go back to trying to breathe, slowly and calmly, and I finally notice the one-inch picture frame that I put on my desk to remind me of short assignments.
It reminds me that all I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story...just one paragraph describing this woman, in the town where I grew up, the first time we encounter her.
–Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
The simplest (and probably most widely prescribed) strategy for increasing middlementum is to trick your brain into believing that you are not in fact in the middle of anything.
The trick is achieved through the creation of sub-goals or milestones, which give you a gratifying sense of completion at every stage of the process. I’ve referred to this approach in the past as “mupping” the project: habitually asking yourself, What is the Minimum Unit of Progress (MUP) I could make on this right now?
When subgoals are small and well-defined enough, it can actually feel like more work to let them linger than just complete them. In some cases, it literally takes more effort to track the task than to simply knock it out right now. In other cases, you get into a groove of “Oh, alright, just one more…”: Like a Pac-Man gobbling up pellets of productivity, you are carried forward by the next to-do’s eminent doability.3
If Minimum Units of Progress are a way of tapping the motivation of frequent endings, what about new beginnings? Though it might sound counterintuitive, I think it can often be more effective to restart projects multiple times “from scratch.” I’ve referred to this in the past as the palimpsest method, named for a manuscript which is overwritten with new layers.4 Redoing (some) work helps load the project back into your mind—and once you’re in the flow of it, the momentum may carry you forward to new ideas and solutions. It is a way of warming up the creative muscle before the heavy lifting.
Implicit in these two strategies is the reality that progress over any sustained period of time must be iterative and incremental. For those who crave long blocks of focus, this reality can be frustrating; instead of working in fits and starts, would it not be better to block off a day to really sit with the project, spend hours on end riding the current of generative problem-solving? Unfortunately, perfect conditions like this are a luxury life rarely affords—and if you sit around waiting for them, most days you’ll accomplish nothing. It’s for this reason that consistency trumps intensity: You can achieve a lot in five minutes. You can work miracles in forty.
Speed Cycling
Being fast is fun. If you're a fast writer, you'll constantly be playing with new ideas. You won't be bogged down in a single dread effort. And because your to-do list gets worked off, you'll always be thinking of more stuff to add to it. With more drafts in the works, more of the world will pop alive. You will feel flexible and capable and practiced so that when something demanding and long arrives on your desk, you won't back down afraid.
–James Somers, “Speed Matters”
There’s a certain attentional state I find is most conducive to middlementum, a mindset I hear echoed in the accounts of many accomplished artists and knowledge workers. I call it speed cycling.
Speed cycling is a kind of racing ahead, pushing yourself to work just at the edge of control. It is an urgent, almost haphazard kind of output—one which prioritizes above all else the need to keep moving.5 It often involves a jumping around which on the surface looks not so different from constant distraction but in fact is a kind of hyperelasticity of focus.6
In writing, this approach can take a linear form, a top-down form, or a combination of the two. The linear version is not so different from how we’re first taught to write in school, except that it relies much more heavily on [placeholders] for whatever is not immediately accessible (e.g., links, missing words, or illustrative examples). The top-down version starts with an outline and then successively fleshes in the skeleton. Inevitably, the top-down approach ends up lapsing into spurts of linearity as you begin to envision the final piece.
Whenever I speed cycle through a draft this way (linearly or top-down) I’m struck by a how much it differs from typical media depictions of the writing process:
With speed cycling, the words accumulate much more quickly than would otherwise be possible—even if they are of lower average quality. (It’s remarkable to see how much more volume you can produce when you free yourself of the expectation that every sentence be perfect before you move on to the next one.)
With speed cycling, I feel much more as if I’m assembling the text than generating it. (This is especially true of the top-down, outline-forward approach.) Often it comes as a surprise when, on the third or fourth pass, I realize that what I’d thought was just a “sketch” actually reads almost like finished prose—despite my never actually having written it from start to end.
With speed cycling, there’s no illusion that the first draft could be perfect; the placeholders are an explicit admission that you’ll need to take another pass. For me, this can create a nagging sense that I’ve forgotten something important—but that same low-level unease is also a powerful driver bringing me back to the work.7
Speed cycling takes some practice because you need to see it work a few times before you start to trust it. With enough raw output and iteration, your future self will catch any flaws in the project—filling in the gaps and sanding the rough edges. There is an emergent wisdom that comes from repeated intuition, a solution which is greater than you can summon in one instance through even the most strenuous conscious effort. All you have to do is relax enough to let it take over.8
That said, there are a couple pitfalls of speed cycling which bear mentioning. First, speed cycling does come with switching costs—and this is more true the more disparate the contexts you are switching between.9 The bet you are making is just that the raw velocity of your output is enough to dominate the fact that you are frequently jumping around.
Second, you should be honest with yourself that speed cycling isn’t just a way of avoiding the most difficult part of the project. If you find that you’re skipping over a certain placeholder on every single pass, start interrogating why. Often, it’s merely just not the right time to fill in the placeholder, and you’ll tackle it when you’re ready; but sometimes there really is a fundamental issue you haven’t worked out, and your jumping around is just a way of deferring the battle you lack the skills to fight.10
Emergency Unsticking
I think when you are truly stuck, when you have stood still in the same spot for too long, you throw a grenade in exactly the spot you were standing in, and jump, and pray. It is the momentum of last resort.
–Renata Adler, Speedboat
There are three more middlementum strategies I mention with caution. These strategies are higher-variance, and not always practical—but they can provide a kick in the pants when all else fails. They are: commitment devices; randomness; and other people.
Commitment devices are effectively just preregistered rewards and punishments—for example: “If I don’t complete my project by X date, I will sign myself up for a local open mic and perform spoken word poetry [or equally garish consequence].”11 Commitment devices—especially when they are made clearly and visibly—certainly catalyze action, but they are a bit of a crutch. A more practical barrier here is the challenge of coming up with motivators that are sufficiently extreme as to not lose their efficacy over time, of which there are a limited supply. (You can’t have a sword hanging over your head for every last email and household chore.)12 Personally, I would try some less extreme measures like time-blocking or MUPs before binding yourself to the mast.
Randomness is a surprisingly useful strategy for moving out of analysis paralysis. In fact, many many computer programs rely on randomness—as Brian Christian explains in Algorithms to Live By:
Randomness seems like the opposite of reason—a form of giving up on a problem, a last resort. Far from it. The surprising and increasingly important role of randomness in computer science shows us that making use of chance can be a deliberate and effective part of approaching the hardest sets of problems. In fact, there are times when nothing else will do.
Randomness gives you something to react to. It is a much faster (if less comprehensive) means of exploring a wide range of possibilities than systematically going through all the options. It helps you break out of local optima when you are at risk of latching onto the first half-decent idea that comes your way.
What does this look like in practice? In a narrow sense, you can randomize by flipping a coin for certain decisions, or using impressionistic, tarot-like sources of guidance. The goal of these practices is not to outsource your decision-making but to reveal intuitions. In a broader sense, you should simply try to expose yourself to a wide range of media and perspectives. This kind of eclectic sampling is not truly random, but it creates the conditions for inspiration and serendipitous discoveries.
Randomness is a risky unsticking strategy because results can be a bit, well, random. You need a good selection process to cull down the options, time to separate the wheat from the chaff. You’ll probably find randomness less useful the farther you are into a project. (The closer the work is to its final form, the less it makes sense to shake things up.) But earlier on, randomness helps ensure you are exploring widely, and can help inject fresh energy into a stalling project.
Other people are actually one of the best ways to get unstuck—they just aren’t always available. In some cases, the mere act of explaining a problem to someone else can help uncover next steps and solutions. This is true even before they give you a word of input.13 Alternatively, when collaborators take a more active role (i.e., you hand off all or part of the project to them), they derive the motivational benefits of a fresh start: You may be stuck in the middle, but for them it is a beginning.
Of course, other people have different competencies from you, which is another reason it can be useful to enlist their support. They may enjoy the very aspect of the project that was causing you anxiety. They may simply have different sources of knowledge. The screenwriter is often not the right person to direct the film; the visionary founder may not be the best person to run the mature company.14
Like commitment devices, other people can become a bit of a crutch, and like randomness their help can be high-variance. You may just not know the right person to ask—and even if you do, there are limits to how many favors you can seek. (LLMs, by contrast, can often offer many of the same benefits and never get tired of you.) For these reasons, cultivating middlementum on your own remains an important skill.
Return of the S-Curve
1) To have high morale is to believe that you are able to do the things you want to do; to have low morale is to believe the opposite.
2) Either state is stable, and your brain will act to reinforce it, so that reality matches its expectation.
3) Everything—*everything*—either increases or decreases morale.
Not long after I started blogging, I published a piece called Breaking Up the S-curve. The basic thesis is that creative work tends to follow a “slow-fast-slow” rate of progress, or S-curve.15 This is a thesis which, at least on its face, seems to contradict the “high-low-high” U of motivation:
I actually think there is not a contradiction between the S-curve and the U-curve. The key lies in drilling down on exactly what variable each graph represents. In the S-curve, the Y-axis tracks the external state of the work, whereas the U-curve corresponds to the internal state of the creator. From this perspective, the graphs are really two sides of the same coin.
Of course the boundaries between these phases are blurry, and not always so linear. Still, I think they capture something real about the life cycle of project-based work, and I find the model useful for setting expectations. (E.g., You should expect that your motivation will be lowest exactly when you seem to need it most.) To drive the picture home, let’s go through in a bit more detail—again using writing as an exemplar of the creative process:
When an idea first comes to you, as if by magic, you are gripped by enthusiasm and rush to get down everything in your head. You find yourself making all kinds of unexpected connections, your mind racing faster than you can jot down notes or Google; random conversations seem to prompt new insight about the project. But all this “pre-work,” while essential for building your understanding, usually doesn’t produce very much beyond a lot of fragments and disorganized notes.
As your rush of inspiration subsides, the reality of actually making the thing sets in. This is in fact where the most substantive progress occurs—the phase in which the work most rapidly approaches its final form. (You can think of “substantive progress” here as the proportion of words in the final draft that are currently on the page.) But usually, the force driving that progress is more workhorse than muse.
Finally, as the piece nears its final form, your changes get more trivial. Eighty, ninety, ninety-five percent of the final version is already on the page. But now the end is in sight and the cognitive labor required is just finer aesthetic judgments (a cut here, an expansion there), and your motivation once again rises.
This model isn’t just descriptive—it also offers strategic insight into how you should allocate psychological resources. It suggests that the greatest returns to increasing productivity are likely to come in the middle of a project. Or in graphic terms: When you increase middlementum (i.e., raise the floor of the U)…
…you supercharge your visible output (i.e., increase the slope of the S)
All of this is just a fancy way of saying that increased motivation leads to faster progress—which, to be fair, isn’t exactly groundbreaking.
The slightly subtler point is that there’s not a ton of value to increasing motivation when it’s already high (i.e., at the beginning or the end). Additionally, it’s worth noting that the last phase of a project (tweaking/polishing) can often take as short or long as you let it; the graphs serve as a reminder that the sooner you get to the top of the S-curve, the sooner you can decide whether it’s worth the time it would take to strive for perfection—or, alternatively, whether good enough is good enough. To even reach the “good enough” decision point, you need middlementum.
Cooking Is the Goal
The important thing, then, is not these specific practices I have described…Cooking is the goal. Concentrate on trying to get a feel for cooking—for words and ideas interacting into a higher, more organized state. Govern your behavior according to the principle that whatever makes it happen is right for you and whatever gets in its way is wrong.
–Peter Elbow, Writing Without Teachers
In his classic text, Writing Without Teachers, Peter Elbow offers a versatile analogy for the creative process: cooking.16
Cooking, Elbow says, can sometimes happen internally (i.e., when ideas flow out of you fully formed). But when internal cooking fails there are also external methods you can use to catalyze progress.17 The middlementum strategies I’ve described fit in this latter category: They operate by structuring the process of making something, reducing obstacles to creation, etc. rather than a direct impact on the work product.
When you take a step back, this obsession with organizing work over doing it can start to seem inefficient. Why focus on subtasks and time blocking and commitment devices when we know it is at least in theory possible to summon great bursts of motivation? Why rely on external cooking when it could all be an inside job?
I’m 100% in favor of internal cooking if you’re able to sustain it. Internal cooking actually is more efficient than external cooking—it’s just often unrealistic. As Elbow explains:
Internal cooking is in fact quicker and takes less energy. External cooking is like low gear on a bicycle. When you first discover low gear, it seems as if you are getting something for nothing: you now easily conquer a hill you couldn’t get up before. But in actual fact, if you had been able to stay in high gear, you would have gotten up the hill with less energy. It was wasteful to take all those strokes in that lower gear. But you would have had to be much stronger to save this energy. (Only the rich can afford to economize.) Similarly, internal cooking means getting the whole pot boiling at once and having it go through changes as a whole. Whereas external cooking means taking it into separate little pots and cooking each one with less fuel—but the total fuel bill is greater.
The upshot here is that middlementum can be generated naturally or mechanically, and at every point along the spectrum in between; the important thing is just to keep it going. After all, a little inefficiency is a small price to pay to avoid the greatest progress killer of all: stopping.18
True middlementum is not merely the absence of stagnation. In this, cooking is a particularly helpful metaphor: It offers a positive vision of the creative process. To cook well, you must locate within yourself a flame which spreads constantly beneath the work, making it rise, crisping it to shape. You must form an intuition for how real progress feels. That feeling bakes the loaves and bricks without which we are dust.
Recap
Motivation throughout a project tends to follow a U-shaped curve: high at the beginning, low in the middle, high at the end.
In order to maintain “middlementum,” it is helpful to artificially divide projects into a series of smaller beginnings and endings.
The simplest version of this is subtasks or milestones.
Redoing work from scratch (in part or whole) can also infuse a project with fresh energy.
I believe the attentional state that is most conducive to middlementum is speed cycling—racing/jumping around just at the edge of control.
There are a few emergency strategies which can help generate middlementum:
Commitment devices take the form “If I don’t do X by Y date, I will [consequence].”
Randomness helps break you out of local optima, surface hidden connections, and give you something to react to.
Other people can provide accountability, solutions, fresh energy, or different skills to move a project forward.
One key implication of this model is that increasing middlementum offers greater gains to productivity than psychological resources invested at the beginning or end of a project.
Like cooking, middlementum can be “internal” or “external”; while internal cooking is theoretically more efficient, in practice the goal is simply to keep moving and develop a felt sense for cooking by any means.
Contrast this with more striking and specific findings like “Eating sugar increases willpower” or “Holding a pen in your mouth affects how funny you find cartoons,” which researchers have had difficulty reproducing.
The cleverest part of the study is not the assertion of the U-curve itself but the proposed mechanism that gives rise to the curve (and the experiments the authors use to test the hypothesis). Specifically, they argue that motivation is tied to the most salient reference point for progress:
In the beginning, using a “progress to-date” frame, you feel you’re covering ground quickly. (Going from zero to one is an infinite increase.)
At the end, using a “progress to-go” frame makes the work feel increasingly attainable. (Reading a single page when you have one hundred left brings you 1% closer to completion; when you have five left, it’s a whopping 20%.)
In the middle, it’s not obvious whether to measure progress prospectively or retrospectively—and whichever one you choose, it’s hard to feel like you’re making big gains.
It is this same reward circuitry which is hacked by short-form social media platforms: If there’s weren’t just one more TikTok, one more Tweet, it would be so much easier to stop scrolling.
Rewriting from scratch has other benefits as well: You may shed nonessential material when you reproduce it from memory; and rather than be constrained to tweaking the original form, you’ll generate distinct versions which can be compared.
Note when we’re talking about speed that there is a distinction here between “stopwatch time” (i.e., when you are actively working on the project) and “calendar time” (i.e., the total duration of the period between starting and ending). Speed cycling means that any given work session is highly efficient and generative—not that you necessarily ship the product immediately after its conception. You could take years to make something that, in total, only represents only an hour or two of work, just very spread out.
The distinction between speed cycling (generally good) and excessive task-switching (bad) is two-fold: First, speed cycling is self-directed, rather than driven by external stimuli. Second, all the jumping around is aimed at triangulating a single cohesive whole. Often there are chicken-and-egg problems in creative projects that necessitate rapid zooming in and out between e.g., big picture goals and immediate next steps; or a change on page five might imply corresponding edits on page ten. You need to jump around in these cases to make sure the project hangs together, but you are doing so in a strategic, selective manner.
Hemingway purportedly advocated stopping mid-sentence to create a powerful urge to return to the page.
To achieve this necessary looseness, some people rely on chemical interventions; others use more modern interventions like time-boxing or pomodoros. My own two go-to tricks are black highlighting the text I don’t want to keep going back to edit—or, when I’m really struggling to build middlementum, using a website called the most dangerous writing app, which automatically deletes your work if you don’t type a character within five seconds. However, it’s important to remember that these are a means to an end, and that ideally the goal is to get to a point where you can speed cycle without the training wheels.
The psychologist Paul Bloom utilizes an extreme version of speed cycling in which he jumps between different work products in 6-minute bursts.
Astro Teller has a good analogy for this: If you want to get a monkey to recite Shakespeare on a pedestal, you should prioritize training the monkey over procuring the pedestal. The pedestal is the easy problem, and there’s no point in solving it if you’re only going to be bottlenecked by the hard one down the road.
For a great example of commitment devices, check out this Radiolab episode about how my grandmother quit smoking by writing a $5,000 check to the KKK.
Some research also shows that extrinsic incentives can reduce intrinsic motivation—albeit probably not in the majority of cases.
To simulate this, software engineers sometimes talk about “rubber ducking” (explaining the problem to a toy or inanimate object as if it were another person), which can be surprisingly effective.
Anecdotally, it seems that “starters” tend to index higher on qualities like speed, divergent thinking, and comfort with ambiguity; “closers” are more likely to be detail-oriented and perfectionistic—more tactician than grand strategist; and “middlemen” are somewhere between these two extremes or possess the ability to toggle fluidly between them.
Another key claim of that post was that you should step away from creative work at the hinges (or “elbows”) of the S-curve. I’d be less dogmatic about that prescription if I wrote the piece again today, but do think it’s generally wise to build in breaks at some point, both to refill the motivational tank and get yourself to view the work with fresh eyes.
As with me, he focuses mostly on writing, but I think the ideas generalize to all kinds of art, design, and entrepreneurship.
Most memorably, he advocates for an iterative method of writing and sorting ideas on index cards he calls “desperation writing.”
The claim that slow-but-steady external cooking trumps internal cooking finds backing in one of my favorite studies of creativity, “Which Is More Productive, Writing in Binge Patterns of Creative Illness or in Moderation?” (Spoiler: It’s moderation.)
This is one of my favorites so far.