Published Feb 10, 2020, updated August 2, 2026

Here is the essential dilemma of the committed creative person:

You want to be a creative who creates. Every single day. You want that creativity to be the fire that powers everything, the salve that helps you bounce back, the path that leads to the future you envision for yourself.

You want to be consistent. You want to be present with your work. You want to finish big things.

BUT. Things are crazy out there. Everything gets in the way: You’ve got kids and aging parents and friends in crisis and a job (or jobs) and some kind of neurodivergent brain and and and.

Worse, every other domain of your life has external scaffolding, stakeholders, demands, deadlines.

An employee has a boss and a paycheck. A mom has kids who need feeding and ferrying around. An adult caregiver child has alarming emails and texts from parents.

You want to be a creative who creates. Every single day.

Whereas your creative identity is yours alone. Not only is no one checking your progress or waiting for the outcome, but if you’re not actively making money with whatever you’re doing, other people feel perfectly OK asking you what is the point of this activity?

How can something so central to our identity and so compelling be so difficult to follow through on?

And how can we fight back, and claim that time for creative work?

The difference between dreaming and finishing: a creative habit.

What we can’t do is sit around waiting for inspiration to hit with enough force to jam its way into your day.

Instead, the key is exactly what you think it is: consistency. Showing up. Repeat that often enough and your dream of being a creative who creates becomes reality.

That means habits.

Habits get a bad rap. They sound so boring: “Sure, I’ll do the same thing EVERY DAMN DAY FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE. NO PROBLEM.”

Most of us have tried to establish a habit, had it fall apart in a week or two, and come away feeling like we’re just not cut out for it.

But you are. We all are. In fact, a study found that 65% of behavior is habitually instigated, meaning we’re not dithering and thinking about it, we just do it.

Your human brain is built for habits. You just need a way to construct one intentionally. Most habits fail because they’re designed for a person with a bottomless well of grit and a life that runs like clockwork.

A durable habit is fitted to your real capacity and your real life, so that it can flex when you need the space, and snap right back into place, instead of falling apart the first time a wrench hits the works.

Why habits are so powerful

A habit is a shortcut to creative flow.

As a baseline, there is some level of friction around starting a creative activity. That’s because creative work is not easy. It involves using your brain in novel, demanding ways. Because your brain likes to conserve energy, there will always be a bit of resistance to starting work, no matter how excited you are about it.

By the way, your brain conserves energy for real, understandable evolutionary reasons. The brain, despite making up something like 2% of body weight, uses 20% of the calories consumed in a given day. That’s why your brain is tuned to save energy where it can (aka it’s not laziness).

It’s always going to take a tiny bit of willpower to get started.

HOWEVER, there are plenty of other factors that increase your resistance when you’re trying to get into the groove with your work. Not knowing exactly what you’re doing, not being able to decide whether now is a good time or not, having other things waiting for you and lacking a defined window of time for the work, insisting that you have to spend a lot of time on the work, or achieve a great deal in a single session…

When you thoughtfully design a creative habit, you can lower the bar to entry to just that one little moment of willpower and make it as easy as possible to get over the threshold and get started.

The mechanism: The power of pre-deciding

The way habits reduce the cognitive load so that it’s at a level you can handle is via offloading decision fatigue. Decision fatigue, as Grant Pignatiello and colleagues describe it in their conceptual analysis, is “the impaired ability to make decisions and control behavior as a consequence of repeated acts of decision-making.”

Which is what happens when you tell yourself you’re going to “work on my book” today, but then you have to battle your calendar and piles of to-dos, and shut off your phone, Slack, and email for an hour in order to make the space for it. That’s just too many difficult decisions to make in a compressed window of time.

And then, trying to re-make all those decisions every day compounds the problem. So how can you deal with those efficiently so that there’s any hope of preserving energy for those inspiring big projects?

We can’t avoid every decision that arises, but a large bulk of the daily decisions that accrete into giant arterial blockages can be prevented by implementing two powerful strategies: pre-deciding and category decisions.

Pre-deciding

Pre-deciding means making highly specific decisions about when, where, and how you’ll do the work…ahead of time.

Before you sit down to work.

Of course, pre-deciding is really just deciding. The term is my way of reinforcing that the decision happens well before it needs to be implemented.

That distance between decision and action is why it’s easier to decide. Psychologically, you’re making a decision for future-you, so the pressure and overwhelm that can confuse you when you’re faced with a choice for what to do right now is less intense. You’re able to consider the tradeoffs without fully feeling the pain of making them (yet).

Category decisions

Category decisions take pre-deciding up a notch. In this case, you’re pre-deciding how you’ll handle a given situation, every single time.

Those decisions could be ones you face constantly, or they can be things that just come up every once in a while.

Or, if you’re failing to invoice regularly, perhaps you decide categorically that you have a post-lunch session with your numbers every Friday. You put the session on your calendar so that nothing else can be scheduled at that time.

A habit is the most automatic category decision you can make, the one that kills daily decision fatigue by deciding once, in advance, for future-you when and where and how you’ll do the thing you want to do.

[Pre-deciding and category decisions are just two of the decision tools that help you keep cycling through the Creative Engine and finishing your self-generated creative work. More on how the Decide phase gets your project moving here →]

What is a habit for? There are two ways to use it.

As a daily creative practice

A habit can be an end in itself: the literal activity you are doing every day.

• 20 minutes of meditation
• brushing and flossing teeth
• Morning Pages.

Success in this case is presence. It’s simply showing up and doing the thing, basically the same way, every day.

As a container for ongoing work on a larger creative project

But a habit can also be treated as a container, a protected unit of your time and capacity that you use in a specific way. With creative work, which often comes in large arcs leading to a project completion, this can be a much more useful conceptualization.

If you’re working on a book, for example, your work will change over time, from brainstorming and researching (the Collect phase), to outlining and aligning your ideas (Decide phase) to drafting, redrafting, editing, polishing and so on (the Act phase). All of it is “writing.” So if you develop a habit of spending an hour a day on “writing”, you can use that time moving your book ahead, no matter what phase it’s in. Success is consistent time on your creative work.

This is where Quota Tasks overlap with habits. A Quota Task is a set quantity of time you’re planning to devote to something: “spend one hour working on X,” rather than “finish X.” It’s highly effective for finishing long, demanding, messy-middle projects without ever setting a deadline…but a Quota Task without a habit frequently doesn’t fly, because it doesn’t have an established slot on your calendar to happen in. Without that slot, quotas are the hardest kinds of tasks to force into your days, because they are so flexible and amorphous. That lets everything else seem more urgent. [Read about Quota Tasks here →]

How to build a durable and functional creative habit

The process of designing a habit is well-established. It’s a quick, 4-step process.

1. Which habit? (Start with just one)

Identify one new, uncomfortable thing you know you need to start doing on a daily or weekly basis in order to build your momentum.

This could be writing for 30 minutes every morning, making one sales call every afternoon, or reviewing your business finances every Friday.

Alternately: if you need to make sure you’re moving your large project forward, you can decide to create a container-type habit that will support your Quota Tasks in a specific area.

2. Design your habit around what you already do.

There are two pieces to this: a trigger, and the habit stack it kicks off.

In Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit, she talks about how she goes to the gym every morning before dawn. She puts her gym clothes on, gets in a cab, meets her trainer. That’s her commitment to her practice.

Tharp then says: “The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go, I have completed the ritual.”

I think her ritual (habit) doesn’t start with the cab. It starts with the legwarmers that she lays out the night before to put on in the morning.

Seeing the legwarmers in the morning is the trigger, in this case a visual cue, for a cascade of actions: put the gear on, call the cab, and get to the gym. They’re a habit trigger.

A habit trigger is an action, event, or cue that will indicate to your non-conscious brain that it’s time to initiate your new habit.

The easiest way to create a functional habit trigger is to link your habit to another habit you do every single day. James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, calls that “habit stacking.”

A habit stack is a cascade of habits that trigger one another in order.

For instance, you might decide to do a 5-minute stretching routine every morning right after brushing your teeth. Assuming brushing your teeth happens every morning, that’s an established habit. Then you stack the stretching routine onto it, and, with practice, one habit sets you up for the next.

When this sequence solidifies, it becomes like listening to a favorite album. Before a song even ends, you start to anticipate the opening bars of the next song.

Start here: Identify something ultra simple (mundane!) that you do daily.

Something you take for granted. Something so easy or so ingrained that you can’t not do it daily. Ideally this will be something that’s at the end of an existing habit stack, like your morning routine.

What’s the last thing you do in the morning every single day, before your day becomes variable?

• Pour a cup of coffee in the kitchen
• Sit at my desk after arriving at work
• Load the breakfast dishes

Now, “stack” your new habit onto this current daily habit. Schedule your new habit right after that ingrained one.

Picture exactly what you’ll do next. Where will you set down your coffee cup? What drawer will you open? Which tool will you pick up?

Be super-specific.

3. Codify your habit stack

Write your habit stack as a when-then statement in this format, via James Clear.

After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT] at [time] in [location].

There are two pieces to this format. “After [CURRENT HABIT]” is your trigger: the existing habit that kicks off the new one. “At [time] in [location]” asks you to think through exactly when and where this will take place, which is the basis for one piece of your habit-resiliency plan that we’ll get to in a minute, when we set the table.

4. Make space for the habit on your calendar

This part doesn’t show up in most of the typical systems for habit development, but it’s essential. When you decide what you’re going to focus on, you also need to do the really hard part: decide what you’re not going to do.

You’re already filling 24 hours a day with something. If you plan to do something new, or to do it more often, you will have to not do something else.

Your calendar is a portrait of how all the pieces of your life play together (or fight like spoiled children). Work and family and your creative work sit cheek-by-jowl. There are no walls between the parts.

If you decide to spend the hour after pre-k drop-off every morning working on your script (a Quota Task habit), what did you previously use this slot for? Email? Going to the gym? Scrolling Instagram? Whatever it has been, you need to consciously decide what you’re going to do with that activity. Drop it? Reschedule it?

When you protect that slot for your habit of focusing on your own work before the rest of your life claims it, that’s what I mean by paying yourself first.

Until this habit stack is solidified, add a reminder to your phone calendar with a notification, or stick a post-it note on whatever you’ll be stacking on, and get ready to do it tomorrow!

Sprinkle in a tiny bit of grit (minimum viable grit)

I’m on record as being against grit as a general approach to trying to get stuff done, but there is a time and a place for grit, and the initial stages of cementing a new habit are that time and place!

This is a primary reason that I recommend placing your creative habit as early in your day as possible, ideally at the end, or even in the middle, of your existing morning routine. This is when you’re going to have the most willpower available to you, since you haven’t depleted it with demands all day.

When the needle drops on your morning record, let the end of the songs you know so well kick off your new favorite tune, your creative habit.

What will break your creative habit, and how to prevent it

This process works. But even the best-designed, most-desired habits still break down all the time. If your habit is so rigid that it’s not responsive to real events, it will crack. And again, creative habits are perhaps the most challenging to stick to, since there’s no external structure or demand for them, and very little social reinforcement either.

I mean, I love the image of Twyla getting in a cab at 5 am on the Upper West Side every day for eternity. But most of us would have something come up in week 2 that would throw off the whole system, and then struggle to get back on the horse.

So…

How can you start a creative habit that will flex and accommodate real life…while remaining solid and consistent?

(A “flexible container”…if you will??)

First, and most important: SET THE BAR LOW

The idea of tiny habits is not new. James Clear talks about starting with a 2-minute version of your habit, and then building it day by day. It’s a way to minimize the starting energy you need, that tiny bit of grit.

I will go further: My mantra to anyone who will listen is this: “Set the bar so low you could roll over it. Drunk.”

If you’re resisting something you know you want to make a lasting habit, find the smallest possible version of it, and start there.

No…

Smaller.

Set the bar so low you could roll over it. Drunk.

If the 2-minute version of your new habit still meets with resistance, set the bar even lower and tell yourself that you must STOP after 2 minutes. Don’t allow yourself to keep going past two minutes.

Also: you can do this 2-minute-or-less version as long as you need to, until the doing of it is easy and automatic. You don’t have to ramp up fast to some impressive level.

You want to create the lowest possible threshold of entry to connect with the new habit, because success in actually doing the habit is far more important than whether the day’s outcome is noticeable or impressive. After all, your progress may be barely perceptible on a daily basis. But small results stack up.

I do a coaching call monthly with students in the Creative Focus Workshop, and over the course of several months, three of them had an ongoing discussion about establishing and refining a habit. All three, as it happens, were working on a daily-drawing habit, but the principle would extend to any practice-based habit.

Katrin had been struggling to fit drawing into her day, and I had coached her to lower the bar and just fill a page with lines. That’s it. A month later, she checked in. Despite three trips, two exhibition openings, a major examination, then COVID, she had still kept that minimal habit going.

This was inspirational for Tamara, who decided to try the same thing. The next month, she said, “Thanks to Katrin, I have now retooled my daily drawing practice expectations. I realized I had too many things that I was trying to keep up on when she talked about how sometimes she just draws lines. If that’s all she does that day, she did something with her hand and a piece of paper and a pen. And I was like, you know what? She’s absolutely right. So I have done that. And it’s reduced my stress massively.”

Tiny counts. It deserves to be called success.

People feel like they’re cheating when they set the bar low. Like it “doesn’t count” because it’s so easy.

Nope. It counts. You’re trying to add a cycle of attention into your daily routine. That’s real work.

In that same coaching session, Michi asked for help with her drawing habit.

Michi

I was so inspired by what Katrin said. I listened to last month’s recording, and you said then that you were going to do this, and you’ve done it. I’ve been trying and trying and trying so many times to just maintain a daily drawing habit and it seems so simple and I just fail.

Katrin

My default mode is just doing lines. That’s the bar. When I don’t know what to do, I just do this. That’s pre-decided. I draw other stuff as well, but that’s just to keep up the habit.

Michi

Yeah. When I don’t know what to do, I do a coffee cup. But then I get so fed up with myself that I think, what’s the point? And then I stop for a month.

Jessica

Okay. So that’s the problem. The problem isn’t that you can’t draw daily, the problem is that you say, what’s the point of the practice if I’m not passing some fancy bar?

The point of the practice is the practice.

Michi

Yeah, I know, I know.

Jessica

It’s one thing to know that, but to believe it deeply is another thing. Maybe articulating it in that way will help: The point of the practice is to show up to the practice.

You know, Lynda Barry teaches drawing spirals.

Michi

I love Lynda.

Jessica

Yeah. You can draw spirals and then you’re finished. Or you draw spirals and then you think of something. Or you have something you want to draw. Or today you do coffee cups, tomorrow you do spirals, the next day you do lines.

Michi, I think it’s very important to say, I’m going to just do five minutes, I’m going to draw lines, that’s it. The point is to fill a book with lines.

Michi

Right, okay. Tomorrow morning with my first cup of coffee.

Here’s why this point is so important: Judgment of the quality of the output had been stopping Michi from solidifying this habit for literally years.

I came across a post of Michi’s in a group discussion of habits from over a year before the coaching call above: “The thing I really want to make a habit, and keep trying over the years with bouts of occasional and temporary success, is a simple quick daily drawing habit. This remains elusive. The Trigger or Stack could easily be just sitting down with morning cup of coffee but I still can’t manage it. I suspect it’s judgement as to the value of it that’s getting in the way. It’s just a silly doodle.”

The point of the practice is the practice.

It’s presence, consistency, and showing up for yourself.

The objective isn’t to produce a masterpiece in one sitting. Instead, you’re cultivating the practice of showing up. You’re creating a minimal, lightweight, flexible container for your work that can adapt to external pressures and keep you going.

The point of the practice is the practice.

Do not challenge yourself to get back into your thing. There’s no value in that. The value is in the habit. As you consistently fulfill these small commitments, you begin to build self-trust.

You can learn to feed your brain dopamine through fulfilling your own promises. When you say, “I’m going to work on this for 2 minutes” and then you do it, and you check it off (you can even literally give yourself a gold star on a chart) that will give your brain a jolt. And your brain will feel, ”Wow, that was cool. I wanna do that again.”

Second (this is what makes the first possible), set the table

If you’re going to actually do the habit-action you planned for 2 minutes or less, you are going to need to be ready when that 2 minutes start. One of the biggest hurdles to fulfilling on a habits promise to yourself is getting all tangled up in the where and when, scrambling for your tools, misplacing stuff.

Mise en place (“meeze on plahse”) is a French phrase that means “put in its place.” This is an aspect of pre-deciding, expressed in physical space. Using the principle of mise en place means setting up your life such that doing the thing is easy, and that doing other things instead is harder.

And you do it ahead of time. The evening before, or at the end of each habit session, to be ready for the next.

• Clear space for your morning coffee at your worktable and set a coaster in place.
• Clear your (physical or digital) desktop at night and leave only the utensils and elements of your most important project available (perhaps even make them the only things visible).
• Put your running shoes in the hall by the door, and put your other shoes upstairs in the closet.
• Put your journal in the top drawer of your desk with your favorite pen clipped to it.

In that coaching call, Katrin and I discussed how to make her daily-lines practice more sturdy by setting up a space with colored pencils and a new sketchbook at the ready. I said, “If you’re trying to build this habit of exploratory drawing, you could say, for this week, I’m going to be using this set of pencils, and that’s it. Create those constraints and parameters around it so that it feels like you don’t have any questions to answer when you sit down in the morning. You just jump into action.”

Michi and I went back and forth about how to lower the stakes on her drawing habit. I suggested, “What about drawing on paper napkins at your breakfast table? Make a coffee ring and go from there?”

She replied, “I don’t use paper napkins…”

Another student suggested, “How about on junk mail envelopes? Those things stack up, or at least they do here.”

The idea is to set yourself up for sliding into your habit as easily as humanly possible. Think it through: what would that be for you?

How to maintain the “habit of the habit” in the face of… life: Bookmark habits

In every life, there will be days or weeks where you’re in “crisis mode” and really have to just put everything else aside and focus on whatever it is, whether that’s a work project, a family illness, or a major holiday.

But “everything” doesn’t mean literally everything is put aside. Think about it: you’re still brushing your teeth, eating (something), sleeping (I hope), getting dressed…there are all kinds of habits you hold onto even when everything else goes weird.

Your creative work can be one of those habits you keep, as long as you’re a bit flexible about what that looks like.

Sarah Von Bargen introduced me to the concept of the “bookmark habit.” The concept is this: develop a miniaturized and portable version of your habit that you can do no matter what’s going on in your life.

This helps hold your place, like a bookmark. It helps you retain the habit of the habit, as Sarah would say.

So if your usual habit is to spend an hour on your writing every day, a bookmark habit might be “free write for 10 minutes in a small journal on thoughts related to my novel.” You could do that while commuting, or as you get set up in your office in the morning, or in bed before you get up. A former student made it her bookmark habit to go to her writing desk and read one poem. A smaller-scale version of your habit is still a habit.

If the habit you’re building is to walk outside for 45 minutes every day, your bookmark habit might be to walk a flight of stairs three times. (Obviously if you don’t have access to stairs this wouldn’t be a good bookmark). While stairs are quicker than a 45-minute walk, you’re still making time for the intended habit. You can use this bookmark habit when the weather is awful, while you are in a hotel or office building, or wherever you are.

Hint: your 2-minute starter habit can be a great bookmark. No need to reinvent the wheel!

Let’s review. What goes into a habit you can keep up with long-term?

Essentially: It’s built for the real you and your real life, not the disciplined you with endless free time you (sometimes) wish you were.

It’s…

• fitted to your real capacity. It starts out small enough to do on a bad day. (The bar so low you can roll over it. The two-minute version.)
• fitted to your real life. It takes a slot in a series of habits you already maintain, so it slides into your existing day instead of fighting it.
• low-friction. You set the table ahead of time, so in the moment, there’s nothing to decide or scramble for.
• forgiving. It bends like Neo in the Matrix when life throws bullets, and it’s full of self-forgiveness over a missed day, or several. (The bookmark habit, and it’s water under the bridge, you’re still the creative who creates.)
• measured by presence, not output. Showing up is winning, and that’s what makes it all sustainable.

Build your practice

The magic of building a practice is more than simply that you finish projects relatively painlessly. In the words of a Creative Focus Workshop alum, It’s that over the long haul, you get to declare, “I am a finisher.”

While chatting during Thursday’s Open Studio event, I described myself as a “finisher” because over time I have closed open loops on many partially done quilt projects. I’m not sure at what point the scales tipped from “procrastinator” over to “finisher,” but finisher I am. — Maggie Winnall, Quilt Creatrix

You don’t just do the action, YOU ARE THE THING

That is why habits matter. They represent identity change.

You don’t go to a spin class, you’re an exerciser.

You’re not writing 500 words. You’re a writer.

(And yes, you’re not smoking a cig. You’re a smoker. It cuts both ways.)

Identity change is the most important outcome of building a new habit.

In fact, one of the most powerful category decisions you can make is claiming a new identity for yourself that comes packaged with certain rules: I’m an organic gardener. I’m an index-fund passive investor. I keep kosher.

The difference is normalizing and making it part of your core identity: if you identify as someone who meditates and you miss a day, it’s no big deal: you’re already (and still) that person who meditates. You can jump right back into your routine.

But if you’re “trying” meditation, then miss a day or take days off, and you didn’t identify as someone who meditates as part of your identity? Then not doing it may signal the end of the experiment and the end of a habit before it can stick.

As you get started building this new identity, you’re going to need to be more intentional: You need to forgive yourself when you miss a day, and keep going. Beating yourself up over slip-ups only makes it harder to get back on track. Self-compassion, on the other hand, makes it easier to bounce back. Picking it up again tomorrow is how “trying” turns into “being.”

Daily affirmations are NOT how identity change happens.

You can’t wish or declare your way there.

But you can sneak up on it by just lowering the bar waaaaay low, and simply doing a tiny thing over and over.

Focus on today, and what will make today a little tiny bit better than yesterday.

As James Clear puts it:

“Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits.”

It can feel like if you aren’t seeing instant results, you must be doing something wrong. That’s when you’re likely to anxiously jump on some new tactic, or just quit showing up. But it will take time for momentum to build.

You must learn to trust the process and stick with it. As your habits take hold and you start to see compounding results, that’s when you will know that your identity has fully shifted.

Don’t just “work on your project.” Be the Person Who Does the Thing.