Help me accomplish my creative and personal goals through planning
August 15, 2015 4:24 PM Subscribe
What are some ways in which I can organize and plan so that I can accomplish my creative goals?
I've been feeling pretty badly about myself lately; unaccomplished, unsuccessful, lazy. I haven't gotten enough done that I want to get done. I'm not being too hard on myself, I am letting my potential go to waste through procrastination and a fear of failure.
So, creative types: writers, artists, musicians...what are some tips that you can give me to accomplish my goals? I've never scheduled creative time because it's somehow seemed counterintuitive, and I've relied on spontaneous bursts for almost everything I have to show for myself so far. Is it normal to sometimes, at least, just push through and keep working at something, like pulling teeth? To schedule it seems lacking in romance, but that's a perspective that needs to change so I can actually feel better about myself.
Thanks!
"In fact, the most important matters can be the least urgent. They will never scream to be at the top of our lists, but they will haunt us if left undone."
I've been feeling pretty badly about myself lately; unaccomplished, unsuccessful, lazy. I haven't gotten enough done that I want to get done. I'm not being too hard on myself, I am letting my potential go to waste through procrastination and a fear of failure.
So, creative types: writers, artists, musicians...what are some tips that you can give me to accomplish my goals? I've never scheduled creative time because it's somehow seemed counterintuitive, and I've relied on spontaneous bursts for almost everything I have to show for myself so far. Is it normal to sometimes, at least, just push through and keep working at something, like pulling teeth? To schedule it seems lacking in romance, but that's a perspective that needs to change so I can actually feel better about myself.
Thanks!
"In fact, the most important matters can be the least urgent. They will never scream to be at the top of our lists, but they will haunt us if left undone."
There's a difference between scheduling and pulling teeth.
I frequently get the jitters when working on projects I care about, especially early on. I pick a time and commit to working for fifteen minutes. If it's still like pulling teeth after fifteen minutes, I'll often move on to something else, but usually fifteen minutes is all I need to forget my anxiety and get into a flow state.
In conclusion: try scheduling time but only committing to fifteen minutes.
(A side note: if after fifteen minutes you decide to stop, don't beat yourself up. It will cause you to associate guilt and self-loathing with your creative work. Instead, be as positive as you can be: congratulate yourself for trying, think happily on the next time you'll try, and go treat yourself to a cup of coffee or a brief walk in the sun.)
posted by galaxy rise at 6:50 PM on August 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
I frequently get the jitters when working on projects I care about, especially early on. I pick a time and commit to working for fifteen minutes. If it's still like pulling teeth after fifteen minutes, I'll often move on to something else, but usually fifteen minutes is all I need to forget my anxiety and get into a flow state.
In conclusion: try scheduling time but only committing to fifteen minutes.
(A side note: if after fifteen minutes you decide to stop, don't beat yourself up. It will cause you to associate guilt and self-loathing with your creative work. Instead, be as positive as you can be: congratulate yourself for trying, think happily on the next time you'll try, and go treat yourself to a cup of coffee or a brief walk in the sun.)
posted by galaxy rise at 6:50 PM on August 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
Schedule some retreats. I have great ideas but I find it hard to move them forward meaningfully in small blocks of time squeezed into regular life. Take a couple days and go somewhere alone - a friend's house where you're housesitting, a hotel room in the off-season, a writers' residency or retreat center - and you'll be amazed how much progress you can make outside the clutter of regular life.
posted by Miko at 7:58 PM on August 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Miko at 7:58 PM on August 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Best answer: "spontaneous bursts" are what non-pros wait for. Get up every day, eat breakfast, drink coffee, brush your teeth, walk the dog/clean the litter box. and sit down/stand up, and get on with it.
No serious artist hangs out, hoping for the mood. Romance has nothing to do with results.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:03 PM on August 15, 2015 [16 favorites]
No serious artist hangs out, hoping for the mood. Romance has nothing to do with results.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:03 PM on August 15, 2015 [16 favorites]
Best answer: Two techniques, used together, enabled me to get my novel written.
First, I stopped worrying about the times that my past self had let me down by failing to write it. Instead, I started thinking about my future self, and how I was going to give him the amazing present of being the author of a published novel.
Second, I broke a massive and intimidating task down into specific, concrete, achievable, daily goals.
My thoughts went something like this:
I'm thirty-five. As a fortieth birthday present, I want to give Future Me the gift of being a published novelist.
It'll take about a year for the novel to come out after the publisher buys it, so I'll need to sell it by my 39th birthday.
It'll might take an agent a year of shopping around to sell, so I'll need to have an agent by my 38th birthday.
It'll take me a year of sending it around before an agent takes it on, so I'll need a sellable manuscript by my 37th birthday.
It'll take a year of rewriting before it's ready to shop around, so I'll need to start revising it by my 36th birthday.
That gives me one year to write a first draft. In my genre, novels are about 50,000 words. That means I have to write 4,167 words a month.
That means I have to write about 1040 words per week.
That means that every weekday, when I wake up, my goal has to be 208 words on paper. It doesn't matter if they're any good, because I've built in a whole year to revise them afterwards. I just have to get those 208 words down, whether they're divinely inspired or merely churned out.
Of course, it turns out that it's not quite that simple. Some days life got in the way, and I was sick, or too busy with paying work to spend any time on my novel. Some days I was so totally stuck that I couldn't turn out even 208 crappy words to be revised later. Some days I stepped back and realized I genuinely needed to do some research before I could write the next bit. Everything ended up taking twice as long as I had planned: two years for my first draft. Two years to revise it. Nearly two years to get an agent.
I tried not to get bogged down in whether I had met my goals yesterday, or if I would meet them tomorrow, and just do what I needed to do today. And when it became clear that the birthday present wasn't going to arrive in time for Forty-Year-Old Me, I just recategorized it as a gift for 41-Year-Old Me (and then 42-Year-Old Me. And then...)
The book is going to be coming out from Random House in 2017. Forty-Six-Year-old Me is getting a lovely, if slightly belated, present.
posted by yankeefog at 6:33 AM on August 16, 2015 [39 favorites]
First, I stopped worrying about the times that my past self had let me down by failing to write it. Instead, I started thinking about my future self, and how I was going to give him the amazing present of being the author of a published novel.
Second, I broke a massive and intimidating task down into specific, concrete, achievable, daily goals.
My thoughts went something like this:
I'm thirty-five. As a fortieth birthday present, I want to give Future Me the gift of being a published novelist.
It'll take about a year for the novel to come out after the publisher buys it, so I'll need to sell it by my 39th birthday.
It'll might take an agent a year of shopping around to sell, so I'll need to have an agent by my 38th birthday.
It'll take me a year of sending it around before an agent takes it on, so I'll need a sellable manuscript by my 37th birthday.
It'll take a year of rewriting before it's ready to shop around, so I'll need to start revising it by my 36th birthday.
That gives me one year to write a first draft. In my genre, novels are about 50,000 words. That means I have to write 4,167 words a month.
That means I have to write about 1040 words per week.
That means that every weekday, when I wake up, my goal has to be 208 words on paper. It doesn't matter if they're any good, because I've built in a whole year to revise them afterwards. I just have to get those 208 words down, whether they're divinely inspired or merely churned out.
Of course, it turns out that it's not quite that simple. Some days life got in the way, and I was sick, or too busy with paying work to spend any time on my novel. Some days I was so totally stuck that I couldn't turn out even 208 crappy words to be revised later. Some days I stepped back and realized I genuinely needed to do some research before I could write the next bit. Everything ended up taking twice as long as I had planned: two years for my first draft. Two years to revise it. Nearly two years to get an agent.
I tried not to get bogged down in whether I had met my goals yesterday, or if I would meet them tomorrow, and just do what I needed to do today. And when it became clear that the birthday present wasn't going to arrive in time for Forty-Year-Old Me, I just recategorized it as a gift for 41-Year-Old Me (and then 42-Year-Old Me. And then...)
The book is going to be coming out from Random House in 2017. Forty-Six-Year-old Me is getting a lovely, if slightly belated, present.
posted by yankeefog at 6:33 AM on August 16, 2015 [39 favorites]
This has given me something interesting to think about. The "write every day, just log the hours" advice is great, obviously works for many people, and is commonly encountered across the writer-sphere. But don't feel bad if that doesn't turn out to be your pattern. I am just at the tail end of completing two nonfiction manuscripts in a row, under deadline, so I've been writing pretty steadily since July of last year. At the outset I worked hard to try to have a daily writing shift and a word-count goal. I work more than full-time, a varied schedule, at a demanding job that requires a lot of screen time and writing time to begin with, and though I tried to get into a daily shift, I really found that I couldn't do anything of consequence with less than three hours, preferably bookended by at least an hour on either side for mental downtime. That was not easy to come by on weeknights. So, for me, the trick was to set aside large blocks of time - whole or half-days, whole weekends - and dedicate the time to writing-thons. I also found that word counts didn't mean a lot to me, since I have a super-iterative draft and revision process, so I thought in terms of sections and half-sections (I use Scrivener, so that was a natural fit).
Ultimately it's the same thing - creating intentional space for writing, and scheduling it. Spontaneous bursts really don't add up to anything and can't be counted on to bring a project to completion. I find a spontaneous burst is a good place to start a work, but a lousy place to finish it. But if you've tried doing a daily shift and find it isn't working for you, and you can't stick to it, you may be more like me, and make better progress doing an "intensive" every week or two weekends a month than trying to add it to a distracting, tiring daily schedule. Just wanted to note there is more than one way to skin a cat, and you have to keep fine-tuning until you find a way to make yourself sit down on some sort of regular basis and focus on nothing but your creative work.
posted by Miko at 7:01 AM on August 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Ultimately it's the same thing - creating intentional space for writing, and scheduling it. Spontaneous bursts really don't add up to anything and can't be counted on to bring a project to completion. I find a spontaneous burst is a good place to start a work, but a lousy place to finish it. But if you've tried doing a daily shift and find it isn't working for you, and you can't stick to it, you may be more like me, and make better progress doing an "intensive" every week or two weekends a month than trying to add it to a distracting, tiring daily schedule. Just wanted to note there is more than one way to skin a cat, and you have to keep fine-tuning until you find a way to make yourself sit down on some sort of regular basis and focus on nothing but your creative work.
posted by Miko at 7:01 AM on August 16, 2015 [1 favorite]
Twyla Tharp will tell you how the pros do this and show you how to do the same.
posted by Elsie at 1:58 PM on August 16, 2015
posted by Elsie at 1:58 PM on August 16, 2015
Best answer:
You could look around on MeFi, other Q/A sites, and around the web for loads of really good (probably even way better) advice and writings on this. I'd say it's more prevalent than you'd think. You're one among many - we're all in this together!
Depending somewhat on the context and your circumstances, I'd say it actually wouldn't have to be inconvenient - perhaps even easy and pleasurable! - to learn to program yourself into making it something so fulfilling and familiar you'd go into withdrawal like you would when it comes to accessing the web or socializing with people you like if circumstances were to prevent you from doing it.
How to best go about training yourself into a habit that brings you delight, you'd probably know better than any of us could.
What do you enjoy or find comforting? Maybe you can incorporate something into a "ritual" of sorts to begin a habit. Though of course I wouldn't advise becoming dependent on a specific setting to set yourself in motion, particularly one that's too different from the ones you have constant access to and/or spend most of your days in.
What do you find inspiring or provocative (which may be very different from enjoyable and comforting)? Maybe it'd be even more useful and practical to take those things as prompts to spark some sort of engagement from there, and keep at it regularly - after all, you probably consume cultural material on a regular basis, and just need to create a habit - compulsion? - of prioritizing really good ones. That could ease you into it.
Which leads me to wonder how the rest of your life has been and how you've been feeling about things - or the lack thereof - in general...
posted by pos at 5:58 AM on August 17, 2015
You could look around on MeFi, other Q/A sites, and around the web for loads of really good (probably even way better) advice and writings on this. I'd say it's more prevalent than you'd think. You're one among many - we're all in this together!
Depending somewhat on the context and your circumstances, I'd say it actually wouldn't have to be inconvenient - perhaps even easy and pleasurable! - to learn to program yourself into making it something so fulfilling and familiar you'd go into withdrawal like you would when it comes to accessing the web or socializing with people you like if circumstances were to prevent you from doing it.
How to best go about training yourself into a habit that brings you delight, you'd probably know better than any of us could.
What do you enjoy or find comforting? Maybe you can incorporate something into a "ritual" of sorts to begin a habit. Though of course I wouldn't advise becoming dependent on a specific setting to set yourself in motion, particularly one that's too different from the ones you have constant access to and/or spend most of your days in.
What do you find inspiring or provocative (which may be very different from enjoyable and comforting)? Maybe it'd be even more useful and practical to take those things as prompts to spark some sort of engagement from there, and keep at it regularly - after all, you probably consume cultural material on a regular basis, and just need to create a habit - compulsion? - of prioritizing really good ones. That could ease you into it.
Which leads me to wonder how the rest of your life has been and how you've been feeling about things - or the lack thereof - in general...
posted by pos at 5:58 AM on August 17, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
Sort of a GTD for creativity, now that I think about it.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 6:39 PM on August 15, 2015 [1 favorite]