Blog
Articles on finishing self-generated work and building expertise-based creative businesses, with the Creative Engine, Ground Truth, and Capacity frameworks.
Finish Projects
The Daily Top 3: The 5-minute method to finish your most ambitious project
You’ve got too much on your plate, and your most important work is always the first thing to slide off. You don’t have to drop everything and move to a cabin in the woods to fix that. You just have to choose. The Daily Top 3 is a simple, 5-minute routine for picking the few things that are most important each day, so the work that matters gets done and the rest waits its turn.
Against grit: Why setting the bar low is the way to get creative work finished
You think your problem is that you’re a flake, that you don’t have what it takes to finish. But look at your life. You’re one of the scrappiest, hardest-working people around. You’ve got grit to spare. The problem is that grit is the wrong tool for creative work, and even if you had more of it, that isn’t how you’ll get the thing done.
How to build a creative habit that sticks
You want to make your own work every day. But it has no boss, no deadline, and no one waiting on it, so it’s the first thing to go when the kids, the job, and everything else start in on you. Most habits fail because they’re built for an imaginary someone with perfect discipline and a life that runs like clockwork. This is how to build a habit for the real you that you can actually stick to, long term.
Quota tasks: Finish your creative work without deadlines, word counts, or willpower
How to keep your dream project from becoming a toxic waste dump.
Speaking
Dynamic talks and workshops on the two things creative professionals struggle with most: finishing their work and getting paid for it I’m Jessica Abel, author, cartoonist, and business coach for creative professionals.Since 2006 I’ve delivered keynote talks and hands-on workshops at conferences, universities, accelerators, and corporate events for groups of 4 to 400. My talks focus on two things creative professionals struggle with most: finishing the self-generated work that’s most important, and building expertise-based businesses that generate reliable income without consuming their creative life. The connective tissue between both is capacity – specifically, the capacity crunch that keeps talented people stuck, reactive, and working nights and weekends no matter how great their work is. I think of my audience as…
What is a Flexible Container? A methodology for finishing creative work tailored to your real life
The Flexible Container A methodology for finishing creative work built to fit to your real life Hofstadter vs Parkinson I’d like to introduce you to two fake laws of nature. Hofstadter’s Law (not a law!) was invented as a joke by the writer Douglas Hofstadter. It states that everything always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. That means, whatever you’re setting out to do, imagine you make a best-case and worst-case estimate for how long it’ll take. Take into account Hofstadter’s Law, and you’ll see that your worst case isn’t even close. But then the actual time it takes is even longer than the “Worst Case Taking Into Account Hofstadter’s Law.” If you’ve…
The Creative Engine: The framework for finishing your most important work
THE CREATIVE ENGINE THE FRAMEWORK FOR FINISHING YOUR MOST IMPORTANT WORK The productivity industry has a massive blind spot built into it: everything it teaches assumes your work has a deadline and someone waiting on it. When that’s not the case, the standard advice is to recreate that punishment-reward system: find an accountability partner, set artificial deadlines, treat yourself like an employee. And that’s where it falls apart. That simply doesn’t work for self-generated, deadline-free projects, and even less so when they’re the kind of creative work that requires thought and white space to come into being. We’re all trained into dependence on external accountability with deadlines, consequences, and gold stars. No wonder that once we’re out on our own…