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

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?

This is a Focus Session. This is not just having coffee. It’s not “support.” It’s a system for feedback and collaborative improvement. It’s reliable, it’s repeatable. I don’t wait for inspiration or luck. I hate waiting for luck. Luck is always late.

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.

Defining what’s working along the way is one way to stay on track and ensure you build in work on your Vital projects on a daily basis instead of getting sucked into Pressing tasks from other parts of your life.

How to tackle the Must + Now list:

The options we have available to choose from during some periods of our lives can be really hard to grapple with—during challenging times, the spectrum may feel like it goes from crappy to apocalyptic—but in my experience,

We all have work to do on understanding how we work best, and where our weaknesses lie.

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 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.