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

Building a flexible, balanced, joyful, sustaining creative practice is a craft, not instinct.

The time it takes to develop a creative practice is nothing in comparison to the time wasted on being scattered, procrastinating, and self-flagellating when you don’t have a system.

Pro tip: the Now + Would Like To bucket should be empty.

Reset deadlines where possible.

Break down the big projects into doable tasks, as small as you can manage.

Allow yourself to forget these tasks

The basic idea is that the longer you’ve been out of your routine, the longer it’s going to take for you to transition out of and into it again.

This is where things get really tough because it is probably where your dream project is sitting, and I know: It makes you feel like a loser not to put it on the schedule right now, today. I’m telling you: You can do the big dream project, you can make it happen.

But in the end, that didn’t matter: The actual process of getting back in the rhythm, a new rhythm, is long and painful, and filled with self-loathing.