Take your time

Not sure where this idea came from.  In something I was reading, if I find it I will give credit where it is due.  But the gist of it was that one artist/artisan said that when he was working on something challenging and complex, he would pretend he was in jail.  This sounds stark, but the point was that he would pretend that he had nothing else to do, and to take his time and not feel the pressure of a "due date."  I think this echoes a concept of savoring the process instead of the outcome.  The Bhagavad Gita says the same, not to be attached to the fruits of your labors.  But the idea of disengaging the time element of a project, and "pretending you're in jail" with nothing else to do,  could be quite powerful.

Update: Found the citation.  It is from a book called "Creativity" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (famous for his work on "flow.")

Jacob Rabinow uses an interesting mental techinique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition. 

 Yeah, there a trick I pull for this.  When I have a job to do like that, where you have to do something that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I'm in jail.  Don't laugh.  And if I'm in jail, time is of no consequence.  In other works, if it takes a week to cut this, it'll take a week.  What else have I got to do? I'm going to be here for twenty years.  See? This is a kind of mental trick...