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

You’ve intentionally created an open loop, and you’ll be incredibly eager to get back to it just so you can finish up that thing you left hanging!

But you can’t talk yourself into self-belief. To own that confidence and feel it authentically, you have to repeatedly act in a way that builds up your trust in your own creative impulses over time. In other words, you have to make your work.

I knew what I wanted to focus on in general, but to identify, concretely, in the time available this week, what was most important? Either it 1) hadn’t occurred to me to do that, or 2) I hadn’t yet recognized the value of doing that and/or 3) I hadn’t developed the skills needed to actually do it. Making these choices ahead of time is incredibly va

Avoid decision fatigue in the moment by literally setting the table for you to work. Take the tools of your trade, and get them set up for a work session the night before you plan to work. Remove all other options from view. Make doing the work the default option, and require an explicit decision not to work.

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.

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

Every choice you make, even a very positive one that gets you where you want to go, carries trade-offs

Following your work as deep as it needs to go takes an iron constitution.

you’ve got to exercise conscious choice over what you’re going to devote all that energy to. You need to pull back and think about how this choice fits into your big picture.