The journey to being more internally motivated starts with accepting and working with the fact that you’re externally motivated. If you can build a consistent practice, it will begin to be self-reinforcing.

In general: Schedule your hardest-thinking, most creative work first, and leave admin, relaxing, and chores for when you’re likely to be low-energy.

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

That’s where creating objective measures of progress is really important. What are the actions that contribute, long term, to getting your Vital work done? Quota tasks like “write 500 words” and “sketch one hour,” measurable tasks like, “lay out one page of the comic” and “meet my writing group,” and also more meta actions like “do my weekly review

How to tackle the Must + Now list:

Why can’t you just freaking focus already? Does this mean you’re a lost cause, that you’re not cut out for doing creative work? Absolutely not. It just means you don’t know your next step.

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.

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;

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,