Grow With Soul - Episode 136: Projects and Productivity Q&A
Today is a Q&A episode where I’m answering questions submitted by you on Instagram all about projects and productivity. I’m covering rediscovering drive after burn out, procrastination, time blocking, structure, and overcoming fear to do the thing you want to do. In the survey I did a few weeks ago, many many people said they were struggling with actually doing the thing they really wanted to do - whether that was starting it, keeping it up, or calling it finished.
So, I am working on a practical course called Do Your Thing - a no-frills container of templates and worksheets to help you start, continue and finish the thing you want to produce. If this episode resonates with you, then Do Your Thing might help you to, well, do your thing.
What I talk about in this episode:
Carefully picking a project to work on when you’ve been ravaged by grief
Redirecting your energy from procrastination, and choosing just one idea
My approach to structure within my week
How I manage projects
The peace in failure
Pin for later:
Read the episode transcript:
Today is a Q&A episode where I’m answering questions submitted by you on Instagram all about projects and productivity. I’m covering rediscovering drive after burn out, procrastination, time blocking, structure, and overcoming fear to do the thing you want to do. In the survey I did a few weeks ago, many many people said they were struggling with actually doing the thing they really wanted to do - whether that was starting it, keeping it up, or calling it finished.
So, I am working on a practical course called Do Your Thing - a no-frills container of templates and worksheets to help you start, continue and finish the thing you want to produce. If this episode resonates with you, then Do Your Thing might help you to, well, do your thing.
I am grieving and it’s made me burned out. How to find creativity and drive again?
Firstly, I am so sorry for your grief. No wonder you are feeling burned out. Loss is a ravaging thing, and it takes everything we have in our bodies, minds and hearts to stay upright through the day. There is all this love and want with no outlet and so it burns and burns and all we can think of is everything better we should have said. You have been in the fire.
With regards to your question, I suppose I wonder whether finding creativity and drive again is something you feel you should do. I think we sometimes feel the cultural emphasis to keep on carrying on and maintain output when our insides are disintegrating - you do not look hurt so why aren’t you working? Are you ready to start again, or are you only feeling like you have to?
Let’s assume you want this for you, although take the biggest permission slip to do nothing if you don’t. Let’s assume you want some creativity and drive to start feeling more like you, to start rebuilding some confidence.
The way to feel more burned out is to force it. Don’t pick a project that feels useful or quick or profitable - pick a project that makes your insides flutter. Create around the thing that is in your head and pushing against your skull trying to get out. Even if you’re not going to “put it” anywhere or use it for something - a project to bring you out of burnout is not about the finished result, the process is the result. The result is that you follow through on a promise you made to yourself, the result is that you show yourself you can do it and you feel more confident, the result is that you are doing something you want to. Small steps, even smaller than you’re thinking. The bar for productivity can never be too low. Give yourself every opportunity to overachieve.
How do I get past procrastination, as someone with ADHD and lots of ideas that go nowhere?
Now I do not know anything about ADHD, but I will tell you what I think about procrastination and productivity and you can take what feels helpful from that.
I think we’re supposed to have lots of ideas that go nowhere. If we acted on every idea we ever have we’d never leave the house. I have Google Docs and entries in my Notes app of ideas I just had to write down and remember and then never ever looked at again. Sometimes we have ideas that are just there to hone our idea-creation muscle - they aren’t supposed to be anything, they’re just practice. Don’t beat yourself up for not following through on lots of ideas because the point is you’re not supposed to.
This becomes a problem when you start to believe it’s a problem. From July 2020 to February 2022 I didn’t follow through on a new idea. I relaunched things that already existed and was producing content but I didn’t release a New Thing for 19 months. It wasn’t that I didn’t have any ideas at all during this period, just that none of them were good enough ideas that I could commit to them. They were practice ideas. Now there were times where I did experience this as a problem, where I thought “holy hell I’m never going to produce a single new thing ever again”. But most of the time I trusted I would eventually. When the right idea came I’d know and I’d do it. And I did.
If you believe that your ideas that go nowhere is a problem, then it’s going to be a problem. You are going to start building stories of beliefs and seeing evidence and feeling like you’re losing control and all of those things are going to consolidate your belief that there is a problem. What if there isn’t a problem? Because you are following through on ideas because you’re procrastinating. You’re having ideas for things you can do to procrastinate and you’re following through on them. There’s some proof that you can do it, just you would maybe prefer to redirect that energy.
I sort of imagine you in one of those plastic tubes where they turn on a blower and cash flies around and you have to grab as much as you can - you have all these ideas flying around and you can’t get your hands on a single one of them. Just try to catch one bill. You’re wasting energy trying to chase and follow all of the ideas: choose one. And then don’t fight yourself. Build in windows for procrastination into your day and project plan (I do this!), don’t let it be something to beat yourself up about. Create a vent for that need by doing the washing first or listening to some music or staring out the window and then quietly close the door and start. Set low expectations, do just ten minutes or one paragraph at a time. Slow progress is still progress.
Do you block out hours of your day for certain things?
Some people will time block fanatically. There will be neatly drawn boxes in 90 minute increments in planners or colourful squares in a digital calendar and all power to these people who have found that structure works for them. I am not, however, one of those people.
I did try really hard to be a time blocker because it does make sense. A time and a place for everything, short blocks of time that help you keep pace and not take too much time dithering over things. I used to have paper planners in which I would draw little arrows blocking out the hours I would be working on this and that. The trouble is that I hate structure.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of structure, I just react against it. I don’t even really like having to make appointments for things like the dentist or the hairdressers - they sit in my calendar like a ball and chain. Any time I try to structure my days my brain decides that it wants to do the opposite. I haven’t always been like this, I used to like order and neatness, but I think as I have become more myself and slowly released my reliance on control, I find that my natural state is one of thriving in chaos.
Yet without any structure at all I start to spiral into melancholy and find it all too easy to do nothing at all. So what I have to do is trick myself into having a structure, like putting medicine into a cube of cheese to get a dog to eat it. I have a list of tasks for the week (this week there were 14 work tasks and five errands), and they live in my Notes app where I space them out into days - so five tasks on Monday, three on Tuesday etc. There is no real rhyme or reason about what tasks go in what day, other than general urgency. And then on the days themselves, I know that I do creative work better when it’s the first thing I do, so I make it the first thing I do, and then in the afternoons I do more of the bitty or admin tasks. The reason this all happens in the Notes app is that in order for this structure to be bearable it needs to be changeable, so I am constantly moving, deleting and adding things within that weekly structure.
And that’s sort of it and I get the feeling it’s probably a bit of a frustrating answer because we all want to know how people do it and hope there is some hack or structure that is going to make the clouds part and there is the path to perfect work. I feel a bit like I’ve revealed the Wizard of Oz is just a man - or in my case, a chaotic woman. But the point is, the very best working structure, the absolute best method for planning your time is the one that means you get things done.
How do you manage longer term projects, such as putting a course together?
Having just described the chaos of my every day, you may be surprised to hear that for project management I have a spreadsheet. I think maybe the difference is that day to day organisation feels more like my life - I want to feel free in my life and a structure often feels like the opposite of that. When it comes to a project, I want to feel like I know what I’m doing and haven’t forgotten anything.
Quite often I need to let the idea percolate and play in my mind for anything from a few days to a few months - if I try to force it into a Thing too early then all the life gets crushed out of it. Then, I start a Google Doc and write disorganised nonsense for a while, and then I try to take that nonsense and put it into an outline - I start to see the shape of the thing, how many parts it needs to be, how much detail there is, how expansive or focused it’s going to be. There are often several iterations of this, but I need to know the shape and scope of the project before I can start the spreadsheet.
Then very simply, each column in the spreadsheet represents one week from the start of the project to the deadline. And in each column I write the tasks that need to happen to get the project finished by the deadline. I don’t say what days things are happening, I just know that those three things need to happen that week to keep me on track to the deadline, and so those three things appear on my Notes app list on that week and at some point they happen. And again, things are being constantly moved and pushed and swapped because the project is a moving thing and how the hell am I supposed to know exactly what will be needed at the start of it? I’ve said before, a plan is not a straight jacket - it’s there to support you, but you’re in charge of it.
How can I get over the fear of working on a project I’m worried will fail and actually do it?
The one way to guarantee a project will fail is to not work on it. I have told the story before of the year 7 sports day, where I am running in the 100m and realise I’m not going to win and pull up, faking a pulled muscle. Anything could have happened - the people ahead of me could have all fallen into each other, I could have had a spurt of energy - but by taking myself out of the race I ensured I wouldn’t win. And even if those things didn’t happen, even if I did come in last, I stopped myself from following through on something I’d promised to myself, and had to spend the rest of the afternoon remembering which leg to limp on.
What’s the worst that could have happened if I had lost that race? People would have laughed at me maybe, or been disappointed that I didn’t get us Sports Day points? The idea of failure is so much worse than the reality. So much. I could have survived that worst case scenario. I spoke in the Reflections on a Launch episode about how I had wanted to make 100 sales in the Mapping launch and made significantly less than that. I “failed” in that I needed to then change my entire plan for the year, but it was fine. I was disappointed, but only for a little while and that disappointment hasn’t caused irreparable damage. In the past I have launched things which made zero sales, and I am still here to tell the tale. Failure isn’t something to be afraid of, it can be a bit disappointing and it might ruin your day, maybe your week, but it won’t ruin your life. I’d be more worried about regret.
I suppose the question is, can you live with yourself? Can you live with yourself if you go on and live the rest of your life and then die without doing this thing? And maybe that sounds dramatic but also… can you? That’s not to say the only things worth doing are the things we will regret not doing on our deathbeds. But those are the things we tend to be most afraid of, because they mean so much and we just couldn’t bear it if they fail.
To fail trying is more peaceful than to regret never trying. There must be a great many things I failed at in my teens, and yet I only remember that race. If you do it and it doesn’t work, then you know. You can move on to something that might be better, or more likely, you change the way you market this project and reiterate it slightly and it gets a bit better and it fails a bit less the second time - however you’re defining it “failure” is never an end, but a beginning. Failure asks, ok so what are you going to do differently? Failure presents you with options, regret with dead ends. With regret you will always think that everything would have been different if you’d just tried, if you’d given it just 5% more. Regret confirms that you don’t have what it takes because you didn’t try.
Lastly, why is it that this project is only worthwhile if it is successful by external standards? Why is it not enough that you want to? Why is it not enough to say “I want to do this and so I’m going to” and that is it? I decided that I didn’t want to die without writing a book, so I’m writing a book. My preference is that it would be traditionally published and have all those bells and whistles but if I fail at that then there are other options but most of all, I just want to write it. And even if I die before it gets published it will exist in a computer folder and that really, actually, is enough. And it’s freeing. It doesn’t become more comfortable to do the thing you want to do, it just becomes more important. If it’s important, then it’s important that you do it.
Whether you have a business or not, Do Your Thing is a structure to help you take the Thing in your head that’s been nagging you and bring it into existence. You can pre-order Do Your Thing at a discount now and you will get each lesson as soon as I’ve completed it before the whole thing is ready at the beginning of April - go to simpleandseason.com/doyourthing.