I talk about willpower a lot on this blog — mostly indirectly, because I think that willpower on its own will never give you the discipline you want to be as productive as you want.
Willpower brings to mind the idea of white-knuckling your way through chores you don’t want to do.
I think writing should be fun and pleasant and something you want to do (see my post about positivity, here)
So, when I cracked open a PDF called The Science of Willpower by Patrik Edblad, I was braced to dismiss most of it, especially as the PDF is only 47 pages long, and is a bonus booklet to get you to sign up for his email list and buy his other two books.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the PDF not only doesn’t hype willpower as the only way to get things done, but Edblad has some neat, original ideas about discipline, habits and productivity, too.
One of his primary approaches to willpower is that it is a function of energy. If you manage your energy, you can manage your willpower (and, in turn, your discipline and productivity).
This aligns with my own belief in the power of habits, which circumvent your executive decision-making processes, and leaves that decision-making energy for times when you need it (and writing new manuscript is 100% decision-making from start to finish).
Edblad writes for a more generalized audience, but everything he writes about applies to writing fiction. Sometimes, you have to come at one of his ideas sideways to figure out how to apply it to indie fiction writing…but that reinterpretation is what I do here on the Productive Indie Fiction Writer.
However, if you’d like to access The Science of Willpower, you can. It does mean signing up for Edblad’s newsletter, but this shouldn’t be a hardship, as the subscription comes with 14 other bonuses, too.
At the very least, Edblad presents productivity in a different way from how I do it, which might jolt you into different perspectives about your work processes. That’s always a good thing.
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