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

underlying the practical question of what idea or project to focus on creatively is the much bigger question of how to weave creative work into all the other things you do and want to do. In other words, how to build a sustainable system for your life.

But it gets worse (and this point is especially important for creative people): It can take many minutes, or even hours, to get fully tucked into a cognitively demanding task like writing (or answering email, for that matter). Each time you switch tasks, you may lose five minutes or even an hour of full effectiveness. This is called “context-switch

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

Ask for help from others when you need it

In general: Use every trick you know to make yourself start tackling Must + Now for even 15 minutes. Then: Take walks, take breaks, and allow yourself not to think about anything for a while. Time your breaks, and get back to short sprints of work.

This is the most important part of what Chuck Close advises: “You sign on to a process.” Yes, you need a regular creative practice. But there’s more: How do you build that practice? By having a system for working, a specific way in which you go about doing things day in and day out, so you never have to start from scratch. You establish a routine.

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

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.

But get warmed up first.