Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life

success markers do not always have to yield a new physical object, so long as there is an identifiable outcome.

It means you literally read through your current projects in your system, ideally once a week, thinking about what might be missing and what you’d like to prioritize next.

Avoid decision fatigue in the moment by literally setting the table for you to work. Take the tools of your trade, and get them set up for a work session the night before you plan to work. Remove all other options from view. Make doing the work the default option, and require an explicit decision not to work.

And how do you know what your taste actually is? You have to listen to yourself, pay attention to what excites you (or pisses you off), what you talk about. And then invest in it: Invest your time and your attention.

Identify and write down what it would cost you to not do your highest priority. What will that feel like? Who else will it affect? What will it gum up or prevent from happening? What will it do to future-you’s life?

But when we rely solely on willpower to make a project happen, we’re setting ourselves up for failure. Willpower is a vanishingly scarce resource, and we have to use it for all kinds of things, all day. As we use it, it is depleted. Why waste your willpower when you can create routines that avoid forcing you to face decisions that will be hard to m

The journey to being more internally motivated starts with accepting and working with the fact that you’re externally motivated. If you can build a consistent practice, it will begin to be self-reinforcing.

For your self-created system, however, you can and should be very calculated about building in features that will reassure your subconscious over time that you’ve got this. What does that mean? It means building a robust review process into your routine, one in which you verify that you’re moving in the right direction and take time to reflect on w

How to tackle the Must + Now list: