How we spend our days is, of course, how we live our lives.
ANNIE DILLARD,The Writing Life
When we think about thriving, we tend to think big picture, but the reality is that it’s the accumulation of purposeful and productive days that lead to our thriving. We become by doing, and the days are where the doing happens.
But the days of our lives are where distractions, interruptions, and the consequences of our decisions come home to roost. It’s where we need to bob, weave, step, and dance our way to getting through the voids of the projects on deck. The good news is that we have 365 days a year to start finishing our best work; the bad news is that it’s surprisingly easy for a day to get away from us and to undercount the importance of any single day.
The steps we take today create a different path for tomorrow. And since each step counts, let’s start there.
CELEBRATE SMALL WINS SO YOU CAN CELEBRATE BIGGER ONES
Your best work is going to be broken into projects that often are going to require months, quarters, and years to complete. But between when you start a project and when you finish it may be a lot of daily setbacks, cascades, thrashing, and existential mini crises that, combined, are enough to make you lose track of the picture and careen into a thrash crash.
It’s also true that with almost every block of time you allocate to your project, you move it forward. The exceptions are when you’re generally thrashing or when you’re almost to the finish line, but even still, those bouts of flailing are part of the process. Staying on the field while flailing is better than checking out completely.
As much as we’ve focused on finishing, the more nuanced truth is that progress is what matters more. While you may finish discrete projects, you’ll never be finished with your best work. Each completed project is just the start of one or more other projects, and, as you succeed and evolve, the goalposts on your best work will change. To make progress, you have to finish projects, and while that comes with a great deal of satisfaction, it’s usually not the end goal.
Progress being the more important goal also allows us to accommodate our experience that the happiness that comes with completing a project is fleeting at best. It’s quite common to invest the limits of our blood, sweat, and tears into a best-work project only to step back when it’s done and think, “That’s it?!” At a certain point, the joy is in the process and progress, not the product, but for some of us, the product of our work is the basis of our livelihood.
But if progress trumps completion, it also means that all the smaller chunks of work we finish every day are worth celebrating in their own right.
Of course, when I say celebrate, I’m not talking about throwing a party every day — though if that’s how you roll, I’m not judging.
What I mean is to take a moment to acknowledge that you showed up, and in the midst of an overdistracted, overpressured, and overurgent world, you finished something that mattered.
I find it odd that daily celebrations are a novel concept that I sometimes have to fight for when taken in the context of how many moments we spend ruminating on what didn’t
go the way we wanted it to. We can just steal some of our daily self-deprecation and spend it on daily celebrations. At the very least, the daily celebrations allow us to counter the negative stories we reinforce, generate, or absorb every day.
SRINIVAS RAODON’T BREAK THE CHAIN
When it comes to our most ambitious creative projects, we often don’t celebrate them until we’ve poured blood, sweat, and tears into them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The simple act of tracking our progress isn’t only proven to increase motivation but it also improves our sense of fulfillment when we’re working on a project.
The simplest version of this was popularized by Jerry Seinfeld, when a young comedian asked him for advice on how to become a better comedian. Seinfeld told him to buy a calendar, and for every day he wrote jokes, he should mark an X
on the calendar. Eventually there would be a chain, and the goal was simply not to break the chain.
When we’re able to see our progress, we don’t have to delay gratification, and progress creates motivation and momentum. Instead of letting our well-being be determined entirely by outcomes, we’re able to do so with our effort. Your effort, actions, and behavior are always in your control.
Commit to a consistent action, measure your effort, and your fulfillment and motivation will go through the roof.
Srinivas Rao is the author ofAn Audience of One: Reclaiming Creativity for Its Own Sakeand the host of theUnmistakable Creativepodcast, where he’s interviewed more than seven hundred people.
Here are some ways you can celebrate your small wins:
Create a win journal in which you highlight three wins every day.
They need not all be related to your best work, and if you already have something such as a gratitude journal, you can add a little section about wins. This is also part of the 5/10/15 split, but you may want to account for your wins later in the evening or before bed to capture the full day. Going to sleep having anchored your wins leads to much more restful sleep than going to bed with your setbacks or frustrations in mind.
Share small wins with other people.
It may not seem noteworthy that you finished a piece of something, but it is, and there’s a good chance that your friends and success pack will take interest, be excited, and celebrate with you.
Keep a project and/or streak tracker.
It’s one thing to create a streak or some momentum on a project; it’s another, more powerful thing to see that you’ve done so reliably for the last three months. This tracker can become an amazing tool to shift stories about yourself, for it’s evidence that you can do what you set your mind to.
If you don’t create a practice of celebrating the small wins, it’s harder to celebrate the big wins, for two reasons: (1) the small wins get you through the void so that you can create the bigger wins, and (2) if you can celebrate what may seem like insignificant wins, the more significant wins will be all the easier to acknowledge and
celebrate. Something I’ve learned through my own work and with clients is that the practice of celebrating small wins shifts the language and mindset around the big wins — rather than “that happened,” it becomes “I/we made it happen.” There’s less of an appeal to mystery, luck, or chance and more of an acknowledgment that it was our actions that led to the result.
And, of course, there’s no mystery to that shift:
it’s easy to see what led to the big win when you’ve been celebrating and keeping up with all the small wins along the way.
CREATE HABITS AND ROUTINES THAT MAKE IT EASIER TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN MOMENTUM
While we’re on creating a habit of celebrating small wins, let’s talk more generally about habits and routines. Both are examples of defaults — that is, behaviors that are automatic or don’t require choosing every time. They’re incredibly helpful because they lower the cognitive and energetic requirements of the day by removing scores of daily microdecisions that drain the finite amount of energy we have each day. Every choice we don’t have to make lets us focus that energy on things that actually matter, and it all adds up.
The not-so-secret secret to defaults is that, given that we’re creatures of habit, we naturally create defaults, but the defaults we naturally create are rarely the ones that lead to our thriving. As a general rule, naturally generated defaults tend to center on comfort, pleasure, and survival, largely because our biological wiring rewards those conditions. Our biological wiring is also such that the more
frequently we do something, the more likely we are to do it the next time — as neuropsychologist Donald Hebb said, “what fires together, wires together.”
So any discussion of defaults has to start with the reality that we already have some defaults, and we can create more and different defaults. The question is how to create and maintain the defaults that work for us and minimize the ones that work against us. The momentum planning method, the 5/10/15 split, and time blocking are all examples of defaults we’ve been building to make space for our best work, but let’s take a look at habits and routines in more detail.
HABITS
Habits
are single behaviors that are so ingrained that you have to inhibit doing those habits when their trigger is present. There’s a way you tie your shoes, brush your teeth, or eat certain kinds of food that you would have to actively try to do differently, and you still might fail. You also have a default way that you interact with your devices; many channel flippers don’t consciously choose to flip channels any more than they choose to tie their shoes certain ways.
Anchors
are habits that are focused around environments and tools. Environments are the containers we do habits in, and tools are the things that trigger certain habits. The hard part of exercising for many people isn’t what happens in the gym
but in getting to the gym.
Once you’re there, it’s more than just thinking you might as well do something since you’re there; the environment itself makes getting your sweat on the default option that you have to decide against. It’s subtler, but the same thing happens when you walk into a conference room, your office, or your parents’ house.
Since we know that shifts happen with places and tools, we can
choose to build our habits around those places — this is one of the reasons we took so much time in the last chapter on making sure your environment works for you. But, as with all habits, we have to actively create and cultivate anchors for them to have their power. If you want to do your best work on your kitchen table, you’ll need to make sure that you don’t
continually do admin work at your kitchen table with the same tool, as it doesn’t set the anchor. If you want to use your tablet for deep reading, it doesn’t help if the same tablet is where you watch movies and play video games.
ROUTINES
Routines
are habits or behaviors that are consistently done in the same sequence or at the same time. They’re the equivalent of molecules, with habits being the individual atoms that make up the molecule. The major upshot of routines is that the only choice you need to make is to start
the routine; the rest of the sequence has the inertia to complete itself.
Routines create flow, which is why there’s such an appeal and case for morning routines, regardless of our chronotype. Larks put in their work earlier in the day and owls later in the day, but each can have an entire prework routine that looks pretty similar. Biological functions undergird so much of our routines — when
we eat and go to the bathroom is what varies, not that we need to.
But morning routines are just one type of routine we can create. The following are some others that will lighten your cognitive load:
Bedtime routines.
What series of actions will best set you up for a good night of sleep? Something as simple as drinking a glass of water, brushing your teeth, laying out the next day’s outfit, and writing in your gratitude or win journal may create a
downcycling period that helps you ease into sleep better than trying to sleep abruptly after screen time.
Work warm-up routines.
What sequence of actions would best set you up for work? If you commute, consider the first five actions you do and whether there’s a better arrangement. For instance, checking email and voicemail could be last
in the sequence rather than first in the sequence. If you work from home, having a routine that clearly demarcates the different periods of your day can be incredibly helpful in avoiding a continual mashup of work, chores, distractions, and filler time.
Work checkout routines.
The 15 of the 5/10/15 split could be but a part of your work checkout routine. Yours may include organizing your desk, removing dishes, getting books back to their proper home, making sure all your work is saved to the cloud, and so on.
After-work routines.
If you commute to work, this may include consistent actions such as putting your handbag, keys, wallet, and phone in certain places, cleaning trash out of the car, and so on. But it could also include meditating, listening to music, exercising first thing, and doing other activities that put a buffer between the energy of the office and home. If you’re working from home, it can be many of the same things, and you probably need more
routines to create the buffer between modes of working. The fifteen-foot walk from the kitchen table to the couch often means that you just drag the cognitive work from the kitchen table to the couch with you.
Cold-start routines.
It can be hard to get back into your best work if it’s been a few days since you’ve been in it. A cold-start routine is a list of things you do to get back in the groove. It may sound like overkill, but I printed out my cold-start routine for drafting while I was writing this book, and I would reread and follow the steps when I had missed more than three or four days writing due to my schedule and health challenges.
Chore routines.
Chores have to get done, but it can be really helpful to create a chore routine such that you almost automatically get them done. At the very least, it can help you
avoid getting distracted and leaving the chores half done.
Given that we’re creatures of habit, you probably already have some habits or behaviors that you do for each of the kinds of work or transitions listed above. You can build on those habits — what’s often called habit stacking
— to create a flow of purposeful activity that tends to things that matter, all without having to decide every time. While your body is going through the motions, your brain can focus on something else or downcycle and recover from whatever it was processing before.
For instance, using the list of routines
, you could roll from your work checkout routine to your after-work routine to your chore routine — in fact, your after-work routine may contain your chore routine — and this may create a simple flow that then opens up the rest of the evening for you to be more fully present with other stuff that matters or that allows you to be in full-on recharge mode.
LEAVE YOURSELF A CRUMB TRAIL
Consider two truths: (1) it’s usually easy to tell what the next step of a project is at the end of a working session, and (2) it can be incredibly hard to figure out what the next step is at the start of a working session. Part of the reason we can get entranced with our best work is that, once we get on a roll, it’s really easy to keep it up. Likewise, part of the reason we avoid our best work is that the colder the project is, the harder it is to get started.
Leaving a crumb trail is the practice of giving yourself easy ways to get back into your work. It comes from the “Hansel and Gretel” fairy tale,
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and, in case it’s been a while since you’ve heard it, Hansel and Gretel leave a crumb trail to avoid getting lost in the woods. The
metaphor is apt, though we do need to overlook the part about the crumb trail being eaten by animals.
Leaving ourselves bread crumbs requires us to do two things we’re often not particularly good at: (1) leaving ourselves enough time at the end of a focus block to leave bread crumbs and (2) forecasting that the momentum we have at the end of a focus block won’t be there at the start of the next. What we more often do is use all our available time trying to finish something and then slide into something else. But that white-knuckled focus and slide make it incredibly challenging to get started the next time, so we spend a lot of time getting back into the project, only to repeat the cycle anew.
Furthermore, we often assume that we’ll be able to get back into the project before it goes cold on us, but life has an annoying habit of not following the way we think it will go. It’s not just that our project and planned focus blocks can get displaced, but something can happen in between the end of one planned focus block and the next one such that we get spun around and lost in the woods.
The irony is that once you assume you’ll be lost at the start of the next focus block and prepare for it by leaving bread crumbs, it becomes significantly harder to be lost at the start of your next focus block. Once leaving bread crumbs becomes a habit, daily momentum becomes a reality.
Here are some ways to leave yourself bread crumbs:
At the end of a work session — which may be the end of one focus block or the end of the last of back-to-back focus blocks — leave a quick note to yourself about where to pick up.
If you were truly in flow and lost track of time, your fallback time to leave yourself bread crumbs is at the end of the day during the 5/10/15 split. While it’s not as optimal as at the end of the working session, it’s better than starting cold the next morning or at your
first focus block of the day.
Consider using author Ernest Hemingway’s trick of stopping before you’re empty and leaving something easy to start with.
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You want it to be easy enough that it doesn’t take a lot of brainpower but difficult enough that you have to engage with it.
While we’ve been discussing bread crumbs in the context of active projects, another helpful practice is to make sure that all on-hold or stuck projects have bread crumbs, which might be as simple as being clear about what the next action is. The bread crumbs for projects on hold might indicate the conditions needed to start the project or the reasons why it’s on hold, whereas the bread crumbs for stuck projects may indicate why they’re stuck. In both cases, the bread crumbs keep you from having to wonder what’s going on with that particular project every time you look at it.
Because bread crumbs often amount to microplans, like all plans, they don’t have to be followed. As you ruminate over your work, you may have an insight, epiphany, or realization that makes it clear that something different needs to happen. You can follow that thread, and even if that trail isn’t fruitful, you still have your old bread crumbs to keep you from aimlessly wandering in the creative wilderness. If the new trail is fruitful, you can evaluate if your crumb trail is still relevant or if it leads to a diversion.
MINIMIZE INTERRUPTIONS AND DISTRACTIONS
While we’re on environments, it’s a good time to think about the distractions and interruptions that may be keeping you from doing your best work. I lump them together because they’re unplanned
diversions from your work, but their causes are fundamentally different, so addressing them requires different responses.
Let’s take a look at the key differences between interruptions and distractions:
Interruptions are external diversions that keep us from doing our best work.
These are things such as children walking into the room, incoming phone calls, and coworkers knocking on the door (despite the rule of not knocking if the door’s closed).
Distractions are internal diversions that we allow ourselves to do.
Email, social media, YouTube, past seasons of Battlestar Galactica
, or that new O, The Oprah Magazine
fall into this category. None of these run into the room and tug on our shirt; we allow them to tug on us.
Though minimizing distractions and interruptions requires different solutions, the solutions themselves share the common thread in that they require finding the entry point
first and examining how you can alter that entry point. Focusing on the entry point prevents the distraction or interruption rather than reacting to it, for once you’re distracted or interrupted — especially during deep work — you’ve lost the thread and may not be able to recover it easily.
Take email, for instance. While it may be true that the notification settings on your devices may seem to be interruptions, you enable those notifications. If you can choose to disable them but decide not to, then you have allowed yourself to be distracted. If you change these notifications, the only way you can be diverted by email is if you check
email; the entry points for email are thus the devices and apps that allow you to check email. If you eliminate or minimize those entry points, you make it harder to be distracted by email. We were less distracted by email fifteen years ago simply because we
didn’t have notification engines in our pocket and there wasn’t the expectation of near-instantaneous responses.
INTERRUPTING INTERRUPTIONS
Of the two, interruptions tend to be the harder to minimize or eliminate because they (usually) involve other living beings; realizing as water drips on your head that you have a roof leak is also an interruption, but these kinds of interruptions are rarer for most of us.
For ease of explanation, I’ll call being mostly uninterruptible being dark
, understanding that most of the time you’ll want to go dark for focus blocks, but you may also go dark for recovery blocks.
Going dark requires boundary conversations and negotiations, so it’s useful to break these conversations down by the kinds of people you’re addressing:
Bosses.
Because of the power dynamic, boss interruptions can be the hardest to minimize or eliminate because not being interruptible can lead to not having a job to be interrupted at. Fortunately your boss’s interest and yours likely align; they want you to do more and better work, and you want to do more and better work. Thus framing your need to go dark so you can do more and better work is common ground to build from.
Coworkers.
Starting with your boss makes minimizing interruptions from coworkers a lot easier since your dark time is sanctioned by your boss. In most cases, negotiating commonly available times with coworkers is a welcome relief for many teams, since it dislodges the “always available” mindset that few of us actually talk about but most of us follow.
Adult(ish) family.
While kids and pets tend to be worse about interruptions than adult(ish) family, it’s your adult(ish) family that can help you address the interruptions from kids and who
also can be a huge interruption engine. By adult(ish), I include teenagers who are mostly capable of taking care of themselves, younger kids, and pets if properly motivated to do so. Going dark from adult(ish) family is largely about bartering free/dark time and ensuring you have similar conventions in place as you do with your work team about what’s relevant to break your dark periods and how to contact you.
Children.
While rules around interrupting you while working and/or not knocking on closed doors can help with interruptions from children, following rules is something kids aren’t often good at — and that’s not even counting babies and toddlers. Going dark with kids amounts to two strategies: (1) having an adult(ish) family member take sole responsibility for caretaking while you’re dark and (2) physically going somewhere else while that surrogate caretaking is in play. Fortunately time may be your ally here in the sense that your kids may be at school, attending after-school activities, or, in the case of younger ones, asleep during times in which you could be dark from other interruption sources.
You may need to address other people such as clients, neighbors, and friends, but those are much more contextual and murkier than the relationships above. If your friend is going through a nasty divorce, you may be on the other end of a lot of interruptions, as they need to process it with you; in most cases and with most other friends, you may not be as interruptible as you are for the in-crisis friend. Your neighbor’s love for their way-too-loud motorcycle may be hell on your emu-aligned evening work session, but it may be unreasonable to expect them to not work on their bike while you’re painting. Clients may hire you or your company precisely because they want someone else to be interruptible on demand, in which case they have a legitimate claim to your being (reasonably) interruptible.
Once you open the door for dark periods, you can assess what entry points to close. For work contexts, the common entry points
are your (smart)phone, email (computer), collaboration hubs such as Slack (computer), and your door or area if you work in an open office. Some combination of switching environments, shutting down apps, and going on wireless mode is going to be the right dark setup for you. If you work from home, you merely replace your door or desk with analogs at home, but you add the sources mentioned above, so it still boils down to the same combinations above with making sure the kids/pets are cared for and/or kept out. Most smartphones have a Do Not Disturb mode and settings that allow you to specify recurring times and people who can get through when your phone is set to Do Not Disturb; setting this up makes sure that you can be interruptible to certain people at certain times but aren’t disturbed by robocalls and others who “just want to talk.”
DEALING WITH DISTRACTIONS
A chief reason we need to discuss distractions and interruptions separately is to avoid the common pattern of finding ourselves frittering away a dark period or a planned focus block with things we choose to be distracted by. It’s far too easy to create the time, space, and environment we need only to fall into a click hole, email, or conversation that we didn’t need to initiate or respond to.
We rarely consciously choose to be distracted, and we don’t intend on being distracted for as long as we actually end up being distracted. Few people go to Facebook intending to spend forty-five minutes scrolling and arguing with strangers. One YouTube video seems to turn into seven. The quick call to your friend turns into a thirty-seven-minute replay of what her son’s teacher did to him yesterday.
Digital distractions can be especially devastating to our momentum because of how easy it is to fall into what I call the
“Infinite Loop of Digital Distractions” (hereafter the Loop). An email contains a link to a website; the website contains a few links, pop-ups, and share options; a share option sends you to a social media site and the thing you just had to sign up for is sitting in your inbox; somewhere along the way you were given an option to buy something or remembered that there was something you meant to purchase online, so you need to get your wallet; by the time you get back with your wallet or finish reviewing the thirteen different options for the thing you’re trying to buy, there’s a new important email that came in or you remember that you need to prep for your upcoming meeting; after the meeting or email, you now have six open tabs and need to check likes, comments, or responses on the link you shared. The entirety of our unplanned moments throughout a given day can be spent on the Loop, and if the way I’ve explained it sounds maddening, absurdly comical, and tedious, I’ve done an adequate job of capturing reality.
The problem isn’t that we’re distracted for a moment but that we get on the Loop where the combination of microgoal completion and dopamine keep us on it. In the moment, it seems as if we’re getting somewhere, and it feels satisfying, but we’re the rocking chair that’s all motion and no progress. In reality, it’s retrogress, for as we’ve been rocking, time has been tick-tocking.
Much like interrupting interruptions, the simplest way to deal with distractions is to block the distraction entry points. For example, it’s impossible to get distracted by YouTube if you don’t have access to a connected device. Distractions thus follow the same pattern as interruptions: the harder it is to distract yourself, the less likely you are to be distracted.
The strategies below get successively more aggressive at blocking distractions, so if distractions are displacing your best work, work your way down the list:
Make your daily momentum plan before jumping onto distraction sources.
The 5/10/15 split is particularly helpful here because you can reference the plan you made yesterday at the end of the day and thus start with a default. Even if you need to check email or your collaboration hub, you’re only looking to update
your plan rather than starting from scratch, and your default plan may have enough weight to pull you out of the Loop.
Create better defaults during transition periods to replace the distracting defaults you may have.
For instance, rather than checking email first, walk the halls at work or around the block at home. I personally leave my office after every meeting because if I don’t, I’m more likely to get on the Loop and lose what might otherwise be a recovery block.
Turn off all notifications and make ample use of Do Not Disturb.
If whatever it is has a way to be silenced, do so. Turning off all
notifications is a better starting point than eliminating one or two, with the caveats that you make sure (1) you have the conversations highlighted in the section on interruptions and (2) you have enough admin blocks to keep up with the required administrivia that comes with every job.
Lock yourself out.
Since turning off notifications may not be enough to prevent the first click of the Loop, you may need to block your ability for the first click to turn into a second. There are lots of ways to block apps and websites. I currently use and recommend Cold Turkey Blocker (for the Mac) and Screen Time (for the iPhone), but these options are always evolving as technology companies recognize that they’ve gotten too good at creating devices that make distraction a habit.
Delete apps or remove capabilities.
If blocking apps isn’t enough to keep you out, then remove the apps completely. I routinely sit with clients while they remove distracting apps from their phones, sometimes including email and their browser. All modern computer operating systems allow you to create accounts that can only open specific apps and/or can’t open specific websites, so you could log into a “Best Work” or “Creator” account that only allows you to do your best work. Turning off your Wi-Fi or removing your Wi-Fi card may also prevent you from getting
on the Loop.
Use dumbtech.
It’s inconvenient, but using devices that don’t have internet or distracting capabilities makes distraction (from those sources) impossible. For instance, many people need music to get in the zone, which they assume means that they need their smartphones, but old-school iPods play music just as well and can be found cheaply on the internet and at pawn shops. Longhand may be more inefficient than typing, but if you actually draft more and better words because you’re less distracted, spending a couple of hours a week transcribing your longhand may be more effective.
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Finding the right combination of distraction-blocking strategies may take a little time and money, but consider how much of your week you’re on the Loop, recovering from being distracted, or frustrated that the open time you had during the day was lost.
Eliminating distractions alone can generate the recommended three focus blocks per week needed to fuel a best-work project.
Since we choose to be distracted, we can choose not to be. Zooming up, if we choose to be distracted, we’re also choosing to not do
our best work. Your move.
CASCADES, TARPITS, AND LOGJAMS: THREE WAYS PROJECTS GET STUCK
In an ideal world, we’d build a perfect road map, our schedules would actually be what we’d planned they’d be, and there wouldn’t be any disruptions to throw us off. In this world, projects get off track, and the more a project gets off track, the more likely it is to
end up stuck. Just as a project in motion tends to stay in motion, a project at rest tends to stay at rest.
But projects slip and end up stuck for different reasons; knowing this helps you prevent them from getting stuck and dislodge them when they’re stuck. Let’s cover some of the common pitfalls that can interrupt our momentum, which I call cascades, logjams
, and tarpits.
CASCADES
A cascade is the pattern by which one project gets behind and causes other projects to get behind. While it’s sometimes true that the cascade starts because the projects are linked, projects don’t have to be logically linked to start a cascade. It could simply be that the focus blocks you had planned disappear or get reallocated, so every other project that pulls against downstream focus blocks slide backward in time. Those chunks of projects start backing up on each other like a conveyer belt that has a blockage on the end. (Think of the I Love Lucy
chocolate factory episode.)
To deal with a cascade, you have to work on both ends of the conveyor belt. If projects and commitments keep coming in at the same rate, even if you work on the end, you’ll still have a backup. If you just work on the end, you’ll still have a backup.
Here’s how to handle a cascade:
Put all optional projects on hold.
An “optional” project is one that won’t get you in hot water if it’s not done.
Say no to new projects when you can.
If you keep getting more projects faster than you can do the ones you’ve already got on deck, you may need to show the project delegators what you have
on deck and make a case for why you need a “new project timeout” for a few weeks to get caught up.
Sort the remaining projects by importance.
This often means prioritizing projects you’re going to get in more trouble for or be embarrassed by if undone. If projects tie for importance, work on the one that can be finished first and use the snowball method until you get caught up.
Work on projects sequentially rather than trying to push seven at once.
Better to finish a project or two a week and use the snowball method to get caught up than to make a little progress on a handful of projects, especially if you had to negotiate for a “new project timeout” with people.
Use the Five Projects Rule so you can see the cascade coming.
Cascades often occur because we commit to too many projects in the first place.
You don’t get out of a cascade by continuing to shuffle projects or by simply working faster; you get out of them by finishing the essential projects and committing to fewer projects once you’re out of the cascade.
LOGJAMS
Logjams occur when you have too many parallel projects happening at once and you can’t finish them all when you need to. Much like cascades, the project chunks don’t have to be a part of the same larger project; you can simply have two large projects with simultaneous deadlines competing for the same limited focus blocks.
Here’s how to clear out a logjam:
Review the conflicting projects to determine which chunks of the projects will get a project moving.
If one project starts to move, it tends to open up space for the others to move as well.
Triage your projects and renegotiate deadlines (if possible).
This means you don’t have so many projects coming due at the same time.
Anticipate and address logjams before they happen.
As you’re working through your project list, be on the lookout for the chunks of projects that are likely to cause snags and prioritize finishing them, so your logjam doesn’t turn into a cascade.
TARPITS
A tarpit is the pattern wherein a project not only gets stuck, but the longer it stays stuck, the harder it is to pick it up again. It’s the difference between throwing a ball on concrete and throwing it into a tarpit. If you’ve ever tried to pick up a project that’s been stuck for longer than a year, you’ve likely experienced the “Ugh!” of a tarpit.
Here’s how to handle a project stuck in a tarpit:
Make sure the project isn’t dead.
If it’s dead, then let it go.
If it’s alive but just stuck, reconnect with the pain of not doing the project, with the caveat that not living up to your ideals can be a pain.
The project is stuck in the tarpit because not doing other projects feels like it would cause more pain. Rather than try to compare “it would be good to have this outcome” to “it will be painful to not have this outcome,” it’s usually easier to compare pain to pain.
If you haven’t done so, chunk the project into smaller pieces.
Because it’s in the tarpit, it’s usually helpful to chunk down smaller than you normally would.
Pick a chunk that you can do within the next three days.
The goal here is to get some
movement, since a project in motion is easier to keep in motion.
Work on a chunk of the project at least twice a week.
This will prevent the project from sliding back into the tarpit.
Avoid putting the project into a (metaphorical or literal) closet.
If you can’t see the project, it’s too easy for it to sink back into the tarpit. Make it so that it’s easier to work on the project than to shuffle it around.
If you’re continually finding that you have projects in tarpits, it’s a good sign that you’re overcommitted and/or committing to projects that aren’t aligned with your priorities. It’s probably time to go on a project diet by removing one project slot from the Five Projects Rule and continue to drop down until you start finishing 80 percent or so of the projects you commit to in the time you commit to them.
HOW TO GET THROUGH THE CREATIVE RED ZONE
Pushing a project over the finish line is often one of the hardest parts of finishing a project. It sometimes feels as if no matter how much you work on it, you have just as much to do as you did before you started the last push. I call this last stretch the red zone
of a project because it’s similar to the phenomenon we see in (American) football, where the offense gets to the last twenty yards before the end zone, only to lose the ball or, at best, have to go for a field goal rather than a touchdown.
In football, it’s fairly obvious why there are so many red-zone
turnovers. For one thing, the defense locks down and has less field to cover, so the offense has fewer options for how to push the ball forward. Then there’s the fact that offensive players do one of three things: (1) they take it for granted that they’re done and don’t give their full effort, (2) they succumb to the fatigue of having driven the ball eighty yards, or (3) they get overexcited and make mistakes because they’re thinking about it too much.
Creative projects have very similar patterns. The defense is the head trash, competing priorities, and poor team alignment. Whereas the dragons that keep you from creating generally have plenty of avenues to keep you from finishing and showing your work, they now can concentrate their powers in the same way that the defense in football can. And we’re often tired or exasperated toward the end of a project, so we fall into overthinking or succumb to the creative fatigue that’s a natural byproduct of expending so much of the mental, emotional, and physical energy needed to carry the creative ball that far. (Ironically, decision fatigue makes it more likely that we’ll overthink things precisely because we don’t have the inner resources to make decisions in the face of uncertainty.)
This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the Tao Te Ching:
People, in handling affairs, Often come close to completion and fail If they are as careful in the end as the beginning Then they would have no failure.4
Getting through the red zone is tough. While there are a few outliers who get more positively excited toward the end of a project, most of us don’t. That’s why we hold on to things and stop finishing.
But you don’t have to lose the ball in the red zone. Here are some things you can do to get your projects wrapped up when resistance
is holding those last few yards.
DOUBLE DOWN BY RETURNING TO THE WHY OF THE PROJECT
When we shift to the hows and whens of a project, it’s easy to lose sight of why we started in the first place. If nothing else, think of the beneficiaries in your success pack who will be better off when you finish and show your work. The world is a little better because of what you’ve been doing.
And then there’s the reality that you’ll be better off in the long run. You’ll have one more thing that matters done, and you can be proud of what you’ve created. Finishing your best work is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
FOCUS ON GETTING IT TO GOOD ENOUGH
As Voltaire said, “Perfection is the enemy of good,” for no other reason than that perfection is unattainable, which means that if that’s your goal, you’ll never be done. The key to being useful and prolific is understanding that getting something to good enough is the best we can do — we need other people to make our work excellent.
KNOW THAT THE MORE IT MATTERS, THE MORE IT’S ONLY A START ANYWAY
The more the project matters to you or the people who benefit from it, the more it’s only a start.
A book is only a conversation starter.
A community project is only the start of building a thriving
community.
A beta application starts a relationship of delight and utility with its users.
A new diet is only the start of the lifestyle changes to create a healthier you.
A leadership initiative is just the start of greater things to come for your team.
We often falsely assume that the more it matters, the better the start should be. The reality is much humbler and accessible:
the more something matters, the better it is that we start finishingsooner.
UNDERSTAND THAT TOWARD THE END, YOU’RE USUALLY WORKING ON YOUR OWN MINDSET
We often think that we’re making the project better, yet we often have no yardstick for measuring how it’s better.
An essential characteristic of the red zone is that we’re continuing to work but we’re not really getting anywhere;
working on it more, then, isn’t going to get you any further. It just means you’re going to log more hours.
What you’re really working on is your own mindset. You’re telling yourself that if you put more work into it, the naysayers and critics won’t be able to complain about the value of your work because you gave it everything. You’re telling yourself that the next addition is going to pull things together and complete the set. Or that this word, line of code, additional white space or flair, or piece of supporting research will make it that much better.
But imagine flipping this mindset to that of serving others by
finishing your work. Every day you delay is a day your success pack can’t help you make a bigger difference with your work.
DO YOUR WORK, THEN STEP AWAY
As Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, “You have a right to your actions, but never to your actions’ fruits.”
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When you do your best work, you give up the certainty of outcomes for the certainty of purpose.
Of course, you might fail, but the silver lining is that you’ll no longer be perennially stuck in the red zone. You’ll get to try something with the knowledge that the last thing didn’t work, so you can invest more of your energy into alternative options. Or perhaps returning to the heart of the matter will reveal that it wasn’t something you should have been doing in the first place.
Better to know that today than three weeks, months, or years from now.
Again referencing Lao Tzu: “Do your work, then step back.” But step back
doesn’t mean to stop working or jump right into the next thing. Step back and celebrate the journey you’ve been through, the dragons you’ve overcome, and the person you’ve become by doing your best work.
You’ve worked hard to cross that finish line and should be proud. The next chapter is about what to do once you cross it.
Celebrating the small wins of progress enables us to celebrate big finishes.
Habits and routines minimize decision fatigue and create longer
periods of flow.
Leaving crumb trails for projects makes getting back into projects more enjoyable and efficient.
Interruptions are external diversions that keep us from doing our best work; distractions are internal diversions that we allow ourselves to do.
A project cascade happens when a project falling behind makes others fall behind; a project logjam happens when you have too many concurrent projects; and a tarpit happens when a stuck project gets more stuck the longer it stays stuck.
The creative red zone is the last stretch of the project where the closer you get to the finish line, the harder it is to cross the finish line.
Create a win journal in which you highlight three wins every day.
They need not all be related to your best work, and if you already have something such as a gratitude journal, you can add a little section about wins. This is also part of the 5/10/15 split, but you may want to account for your wins later in the evening or before bed to capture the full day. Going to sleep having anchored your wins leads to much more restful sleep than going to bed with your setbacks or frustrations in mind.
