@Suzanne: I’m working on the Freelancer planners. I’ll have to remember to send it out to you prior to releasing it to everyone for feedback. Thanks for motivating me to get them done!

@J.D.: Value-delivered is huge, especially since it fits with the reality of how we work. Having the track record of projects done frees us up to remember that we’ve gotten things done, rather than the aimless hoping that we can sometimes get into.

@Rich: You are so not alone. I would mention random topics that I’ve spent hours researching on Wikipedia, but then we’d both go and spend more hours on Wikipedia.

@Zoe: You’re right – every day is a great day to recreate ourselves. Yet we tend to batch it all at the beginning of the year once the yuletide has come and gone. So the goal: make perpetual motion perpetual completion.

@Juliet: I’d like to see how you’re doing it – is it too much information with your notes, or too little? Or is the spark time just too great between projects?

@Tamara: The biggest trick for you, I think, will be to learn to do less and relax afterwards. We’ve talked about this, though – so I have an unfair advantage. But you’re now about to the point that all you have left to do is create. Isn’t it terrifying and exhilarating at the same time?

@Andre: Great insights, Andre. I think our alternative perspectives arise out of the way we think about projects – we’ve had discussions about the difference between types of creative work.

I think, for instance, that it’s easier to bookmark coding tasks, because the rigidity of the tasks is such that you really can get it out of your head. “Finish chorus” – in the context of songmaking – doesn’t hold the same grip – there’s so much batched in your creative short term memory that creative momentum really matters.

Sure, you can right down the chord progression and try to get it back, but it never really does come back to you. So there is a balance between having a trusty system and using creative momentum, and a lot of that balance depends on the type of project and the context in which the work gets done.

Momentum is a good thing, but when people rely too heavily on momentum to finish a project at all, it’s a sign that they’re relying too much on their memory to manage a project — they’re trying to finish tasks before they forget where they left off. This is characteristic of Type-A bustlers who frantically switch between tasks while they’re still in mind.

If you’re reviewing your projects regularly (e.g. weekly), you always have this opportunity to make executive decisions on the next step to take with each of them. For instance, I have a programming project that I had to shelve toward the end of December, due to a January 1 writing deadline than I had to hit. Because the programming project was identified and externalized on my project list, I had no way to “forget” about it, since I would see the list at the end of the week; I had to made an explicit decision to cancel or defer the project. So I simply put “Resume Outlier” [the programming project] on my calendar for January 2. I didn’t worry about losing momentum, because I wasn’t using momentum to keep my attention fixed on a project overshadowed by a higher priority.

Get everything out of your head, review it regularly, and make sure you have an explicitly physical task for each project.

Andre Kibbes last blog post..Mind Mapping a Behavioral Model

I think I understand it. Now I just have to make myself stop the flitting and become productive!

I make a note of new ideas as I am working, but often find that they do tend to “go cold”. I don’t believe that it is because they aren’t good ideas, but, somehow the spark has gone from my heart. Your article has made me think about how to maintain the “spark” so that I can return to them and develop them.

I’m particularly interested in your “idea garden” concept.
“The trick is to dump the idea with enough information that you can return to it but not so much that it draws you away from your active project.”
Perhaps I need to look at adding more to the brief notes that I make.

Thank you for addressing this topic. I think it will be useful for me.

Juliet

LifeMadeGreat | Juliets last blog post..Juliet Tagged

Thanks for posting this article at this time of year. Though it seems silly to only do big resolutions at the end of the calendar year, it’s as good a time as any.

Zoes last blog post..Community Contemplation: How Will You Choose to Filter?