Every choice you make, even a very positive one that gets you where you want to go, carries trade-offs

What will the trade-off be? Identify all those trade-offs. You can use the Five Whys activity in Chapter 1 to help. WRITE THEM DOWN. And decide—TODAY— specifically what you are willing to give up or demote or delay for the sake of your creative work.

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.

Why can’t you just freaking focus already? Does this mean you’re a lost cause, that you’re not cut out for doing creative work? Absolutely not. It just means you don’t know your next step.

The key to sitting your ass down to work isn’t willpower. And it definitely isn’t inspiration. It’s systems, and it’s habit.

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.

Setting up a schedule ahead of time is about valuing yourself and your time, and choosing to use the time you have according to your priorities, not someone else’s. When you see that you actually can’t take such-and-such a project or task on, or it’ll throw your priorities for the week into chaos, it becomes a lot easier to say no.

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

This is meant to be your ideal week, based on how you would like to be working in your present-day reality. In other words, for the purposes of this exercise, you don’t get to imagine how great it would be to not have a day job if you have one. Whatever is currently nonnegotiable on your real calendar stays nonnegotiable. There’s no point in imagin