Step One in Directing Your Talents is to choose a creative project. Step Two is to plan it. Step Three is to implement your project plan.
Here’s how:
1. Start.
With any new project, there’s a natural excitement to get cracking, so there’s usually a high motivation to begin. (If not, if you’re detecting some difficulty starting, please see our Procrastination articles for practical advice on how to get started).
2. Monitor and reward your progress.
From the get-go, establish routines to monitor and acknowledge your progress. Give yourself credit every session and/or every day for every conceivable victory. If you have your project broken down in tasks, you could give yourself a check mark or star on the one(s) that you progressed on today. For example, if you’re writing a screenplay, you could give yourself credit for things like
– Showing up
– Developing characters
– Sketching the outline
– Refining the beat sheet
– Research
– Brainstorming possible scenes
– Each page you draft
– Etc.
You might feel odd rewarding yourself for X when you’ve still got Y, Z, A, B, C & D to do but it’s a key element of effective project implementation. If you don’t reward yourself now you’ll slow your progress and jeopardize your motivation. If you do reward yourself along the way, your project will unfold faster and more pleasantly.
What would be an easy, fun way to record your progress? For example, you could keep a project journal, put gold stars or stickers on a calendar, or keep track on a whiteboard, journal or index cards. Creativity guru Julia Cameron advocates creating a ‘Ta Dah’ list every evening to chronicle your accomplishments.
Joe’s Goals is a free website that lets you set as many goals as you want and track them by add check marks if you “visited” them today.
Another option: have a ‘progress buddy’ to whom you can report your progress – by phone or email. Or use your favorite social media outlet – like Facebook or Twitter — to tell the world what you’ve done.
If there’s a way to chart your progress on a graph (e.g. amount of time/pages/product per session) that’s fantastic because it’s a visual, at-a-glance image of your progress. It might go up and down a bit but you can see the general trend, which can be motivating indeed.
3. Find the support you need.
A key component of successful project implementation involves gathering the support you need:
- Information
- People
- Financial
- Technical
- Supplies and Materials
4. Establish momentum
The best way to establish momentum in your project is to focus on reasonable, do-able small steps…and to do them consistently. The fact is a journey of 1,000 miles will be completed in only 200 days, a little over six months, if you walk only five miles a day.
Writing only four pages a day, a 112 page first draft of a script can be completed in a month — and that’s with taking Sundays off. If you’re a busy person who can only write on the weekends, you can still complete that 112 page script draft in three months, if you write four pages each Saturday and four pages each Sunday. If you can only swing one writing session a week, no problem…by writing four pages per weekly session, you’ll still complete that 112 page draft in six months.
Ask yourself: What are the small steps you can take on your project? What schedule is reasonable and doable for you? How can you make a firm commitment to the schedule you’ve chosen?
As soon as you get rolling, you’ll experience the benefits of this slow-but-steady approach: Every session becomes an accomplishment. Your project becomes self-motivating and self-rewarding. Your enthusiasm and creativity will flow even when you’re not working on your project. Ideas will pop up all the time. Getting started during a given session will be easier and more fun than if you’ve abandoned your project for a time and have to start cold, asking ‘Okay, where was I on this again?”
5. Keep going
The idea here is to focus on enjoying the creative process, not the delayed gratification of the end product.
And by ‘enjoying the creative process’, we mean actually deriving pleasure from it. Cultivate a ‘yay!’ attitude towards the time you spend on your project — “I get to” “I want to” “I’d like to” — rather than “I have to” or “I should” — an ‘oy’ attitude that can be pretty darned demotivating. (No one is forcing you to do this project, so you must want to do it, right?! If it doesn’t bring you joy, why bother?)
6. Conduct regular progress reviews
This is a critical component of successful project implementation: schedule regular appointments to assess your project. Using the time frame that makes sense for you – be it weekly, monthly, quarterly and/or annually – ask:
- What’s working well?
- What’s not?
- What adjustments do I need to make, going forward?
7. Make Adjustments as Needed
No project hums along tickety-boo, with no surprises, from start to finish. Every enterprise encounters glitches and bumps along the way. An important part of successful project implementation is flexibility and making necessary adjustments along the way.
For example, if you find yourself overwhelmed, break your present task into smaller pieces. If you get ‘stuck’, brainstorm solutions. If distractions are an issue, review the solutions in our Distractions articles. If your motivation is flagging, try the ideas in our Motivation posts. If life intervenes, get back on your schedule as soon as the crisis passes.
Sometimes you’ll need to solve problems, sometimes you’ll need to change course….and sometimes you’ll need to pack it in. The trick is to recognize when it’s time to move on…or if you’re quitting prematurely for the wrong reasons.
Decide if the project no longer serves you or if you are just bored or depressed or overwhelmed and need to recharge. If something new emerges to capture your interest, ask what’s more important, it or your current project? Ask yourself, if I don’t finish my current project, will I regret it on my deathbed?
Here’s an important point for DaVincis: given our many ideas and talents, it is impossible to complete every project we begin. Luckily, there is no rule or law that dictates that we must finish everything we start. There is no reason to feel guilty or badly when it’s time to move on. So give yourself permission to abandon a project when appropriate. You’ll know when.
Another important point: when you leave a project unfinished, it is not a failure. Avoid treating it as such. Instead of griping about ‘wasted time’ or ‘wasted energy’, focus on what you’ve learned. Value the experience of working on the project for the time you did.
Note: If you do opt to pause or leave a project unfinished, do it deliberately and respectfully. For example, Barbara Sher recommends packing up your half-done projects and adding them to your ‘project shelf’ – a shrine-like collection of former projects’. Consider writing a ‘love letter’ to your project, honoring what you learned from it. Above all else, avoid beating yourself up, feeling guilty or otherwise icky.
8. Finish
As discussed sometimes, ‘finishing’ means concluding your involvement in a project and putting it aside. Other times, ‘finishing’ means pushing through until you really have completed what you set out to do.
There are several key challenges to finishing.
Problem #1: Pushing through the last 5 – 10%
The last bits of a project can seem overwhelming and insurmountable. How can you keep yourself from stopping short?
Solution: Ask others to hold you accountable. Arrange a reward for after you’re finished. Consider the techniques in our Motivation posts.
Problem #2: Bright, Shiny Thing Syndrome
About the time you’re almost done, you get distracted by the Next Bright Shiny Thing to come along. It’s new, it’s exciting and it sweeps your attention away from the more familiar project on which you’ve been working.
Solution: Be firm with yourself. Park the ‘Next Bright Shiny’ idea somewhere safe and promise it as a treat to yourself when you’ve completed your current project.
Problem #3: Fear of loss, premature grieving
Sometimes, when we’re heading to the home stretch on a project, we become filled with sadness…or concern about what will fill the void of this project, after it’s done.
Solution: Review your list of projects, practices and habits you’d like to do. Pick what you’d like to do next so you know you’ll have something interesting to turn to after you’re done your current project.
Problem #4: Perfectionism
If you find that last 5% takes as long as the whole rest of the project, you’re probably tinkering a wee bit too much, striving for a ‘perfect’ product. Alas, there’s no such thing. As Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, John Lasseter, said: “Our films are never finished – they’re just released.”
Solution: Realize that whatever you’re working on will never be perfect. Allow it to be ‘good enough’. Consider making it imperfect on purpose – like the carpet weavers who include an imperfection in their masterpieces. Be like Pixar and ‘release’ your work, rather than finish it.
9. Acknowledge your Accomplishment
Often, DaVincis tend to race right into the next thing – without giving a second thought about what they’ve just done. Do you shortchange your accomplishments? Do you scrimp on celebrating them?
If so, then at the completion of your next project, we encourage you to plan two special celebrations: One with only yourself. Pour yourself a glass of champagne or take a solitary walk in nature or a fun daytrip or a mini-vacation. Give yourself a treat to mark the conclusion of your efforts. Pat yourself on the back. Take some time for private refection, ideally journaling about your own private feelings about your project. What went well? What didn’t? What did you learn? What would you do differently, next time?
Plan a second celebration with friends and loved ones who supported you while you were doing the project. This is a chance to thank them and to allow them to share your success. It also validates your efforts and accomplishments publicly.
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Are you struggling with too many talents, skills, ideas? You may have The DaVinci Dilemma™! Find tools, fun quizzes, coaching, inspiration and solutions for multi-talented people at http://www.davincidilemma.com/ .
this is fantastic.