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

But stopping before “you’ve written yourself out” will absolutely get your subconscious engaged in working through the problem at hand.

Anxiety is energy with no place to go. Keyword: energy. You want to act. You have that energy in you. You just have to tap it. To tap it, you have to create a path for it to flow through.

James Clear, who writes about changing habits. His theory is that you can create tiny new habits with a small amount of activation energy, and those tiny habits can build up over time;

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.

When you get back from a break, whether voluntary or involuntary, there’s a drag effect on your ability to focus on a few levels: On the one hand, it’s literal: If you’ve been away, you’ll have more stacked-up tasks. Then there’s the fact that you’re simply out of the habit of concentration.

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.

It means you literally read through your current projects in your system, ideally once a week, thinking about what might be missing and what you’d like to prioritize next.

Procrastination, when it passes a certain point, stops feeling like simply putting things off (as crappy as that feels) and starts to feel like creative block. I’ve talked a lot about the idea that procrastination stems from anxiety and feeds anxiety, and this is an extreme example. This game, of trying to create self-generated work, is not a physi

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.