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 with big, inspiring, self-generated projects, we struggle. We simply never learned how to work any other way.
Fortunately, it turns out there is a predictable internal logic to how creative projects move and how they break down. Once you can see it, you can locate exactly where things are going off the rails, and avoid those pitfalls. You can use this logic to see where you’re going and prepare for your next steps. You can use it to build out highly-personalized support systems that integrate with your lived reality so that momentum becomes natural to you.
That logic is the Creative Engine, a four-phase framework for finishing any self-generated project that I’ll explain in full below.
Everything you're about to read emerged from the Creative Focus workshop, and it’s the approach we implement together in that program. Learn more here →
This article covers a lot of ground, and I want you to get the most out of it. We’ll cover four main questions that apply directly to your creative practice.
Think of a project that's currently stalled. What phase do you think you're in, and what does that mean about what’s coming up next?
When you have an idea you’re excited about, how much preparation do you do before you're working on it?
Do your projects tend to get difficult in similar spots, or does it feel random?
When you finish something (or get close) how quickly do you move on to the next thing? Do you ever really stop, celebrate, and close the book before starting again?
Keep these in mind as you read, and I’ll come back to each one where you’ll have learned what you need to answer it for yourself.
Building backwards to discover how creative work happens
I built this framework over a decade working with creative professionals through individual coaching and the Creative Focus Workshop, teaching art school for 25 years, and as a cartoonist and author myself, finisher of many deadline-free books and wide-ranging creative projects.
My own experiences as a creative had taken me through the Creative Engine cycle, including every breakdown spot, multiple times. But I couldn’t articulate the solution until I had been working with students and watching them go through the same process over and over for years.
So when I set out to help creative professionals finish their self-generated creative projects back in 2015 in the Creative Focus Workshop, I was just teaching what worked for me. I’d learned a toolbox of ideas, and I would reframe them and hand them on to my students. But very quickly I saw that what worked for me didn’t work consistently for everyone. So I listened to them, and created activities and approaches that were responsive to their questions and needs.
I tried for years to come up with some systematic way of describing how the process works.
Right at the outset, I leaned on my cartoonist skills, and worked with visual metaphors. I’d come up with the idea of a life ring as the symbol of what the Creative Focus Workshop can be for creatives who are struggling to finish projects, and that became the logo. That led to an image of me, with the life ring, standing in a lifeboat in a sea of overwhelming creative projects.
As I strengthened the structure of the program, I built the “Creative 360” framework (that later turned out to be just one phase of the overall process).
Then I went through a whole phase of gamification, using a video game-based “skills tree” approach where I used the metaphor of nautical roles — Logistician, Navigator, Captain — to represent competencies of creative project-finishing.
(If you ever find yourself wondering where all that nautical imagery comes from in the Creative Focus Workshop branding… you have your answer.)
But I did not have a big overarching theory.
I just worked through the same set of steps over and over. And it worked. Over and over, it worked. Even for people who use just some of the steps and tools, it works.
I would get client comments like, “Are you a witch? As you've pointed out several times, we've heard this all before. Most of it, I've even tried before, but somehow, this time, everything is clicking together, and I believe I am making huge progress.”
“What is this magic?”
But I know it's not magic. What we do in the Creative Focus Workshop is 100% human and knowable, repeatable, and achievable.
This was a sign that there was something underneath all that success, something more powerful than a collection of tactics.
It meant that there was internal logic to it.
The Creative Engine: a four-phase framework for finishing any self-generated project
The Creative Engine is my four-phase framework — Collect, Decide, Act, Reflect — for finishing any self-generated project. When you understand the four phases, you can finally see where you're getting stuck, and why, so you can change your patterns.
This framework applies at all levels of altitude on a project, from the worms-eye hyper-focus of a single day's work all the way through to the outer-space-level view of an entire body of work.
The Creative Engine is the structure that describes every one of your challenging projects.
Prefer to learn by watching?
I teach the full Creative Engine in a free recorded class, including recorded Q&A sessions that go deep on how the framework applies in real situations.
The four phases of the Creative Engine, and where each one breaks
The Creative Engine describes four key phases of any project that, when shorted, skipped, dwelled on too long, or misunderstood, will cause mysterious, painful breakdowns in your progress.
It also predicts where resistors like perfectionism, impostor syndrome, scarcity thinking, and procrastination will typically appear and drag you down...and it helps you be prepared by designing solutions for your recurring issues.
You can use the Creative Engine to create a kind of checklist for next time you get stuck: you'll be able to predict where resistors are bound to pop up, determine what phase you're in and where you need to go next, and figure out how to get back into action.
Let’s take a look at each phase.
Collect, and the trap of unending preparation
The first phase of the Creative Engine is Collect. Collect is all about brainstorming, research, gathering resources, and identifying options. This is also where you get clear on your current capacity to follow through on projects.
Collect is fun, it’s generative, and it’s necessary for everything that comes afterward.
When you execute on the Collect phase well, you’re gathering everything you’ll need to make a high-quality decision about what’s next and laying the groundwork to actually carry your idea out. For example, Mel, a client who’s a cartoonist, was researching St. Francis for a biographical and philosophical work. Medieval theology, Franciscan history, philosophy of poverty, the art historical record… the research pool for a project like this essentially has no bottom.
The pitfalls of Collect are all about getting stuck there.
- Falling in love with the research and feeling unequal to the task of analyzing it and creating something new.
- Feeling like there’s always one more thing to learn and master before you’ll be “ready.”
- Seeing the multiverse of possibilities unspool before you and feeling like you want to do it all (or at least a large percentage of “all”).
- Conversely, having specific holes in your information that make it hard to make a quality decision.
That’s what happened to Mel. With her topic, there’s essentially no end to how much she could do, and still not “finish.” This on top of feeling unsure of her comics chops and wanting to learn technical skills, all before she could start.
To be clear, Collect is necessary. It's powerful. You need Collect, but you also need an exit plan, where you're able to make decisions and take next steps.
What prepares you to know those next steps is a tool called the 3 Cs — Capacity, Criteria, and Commitments. With the 3 Cs, you start by assessing your current available capacity: the time, energy, and emotional bandwidth you can assign to this work. Then you investigate your criteria: what you need this project to do for you. And your commitments: your ideas or options. Gathering this data sets you up to make rock-solid decisions.
The 3 Cs are the first major tool we work through in the Creative Focus Workshop. They're how you use the Collect phase as a launchpad for confident decisions.
This is how you can feel empowered in your own judgment, so you're ready to take imperfect action and keep moving even when you don't feel totally ready. Because the next phase is Decide.
Decide, the phase almost everyone skips
The second phase of the Creative Engine is Decide. In Decide, you weigh options and focus your efforts in a single direction. Decide takes little calendar time, but its impact resonates throughout the life of a project.
Decision-making is easier, more reliable, and gets better results when you are using actual data (i.e. the 3Cs of Collect) to pinpoint your best options. Those data can and should include how much you like an option or idea! Your emotions count. But they can’t stand alone.
The pitfalls of the Decide phase are mostly about…not deciding.
- Seriously, this is the most-skipped phase of the Creative Engine. Yet skipping Decide is a recipe for second-guessing, getting stuck, and resistance to action. Not deciding can drag a project out by weeks, months, even years.
- Not deciding leads to feeling scattered and unfocused, and that opens the door to the distraction of shiny objects and diving back into the Collect phase to keep “preparing,” because that feels safer.
- Facing a decision without quality decision-making tools can lead to procrastination and catastrophizing: What if you make the wrong decision?
- If you do decide, but you doubt the quality of your decision, that can have the same effect as not deciding at all, only it’s even more deflating because it can lead to feeling shame for switching gears (thus being a “quitter.”)
In the Creative Focus Workshop, the Decide phase gets more dedicated attention than any other, because most of us were never taught reliable decision methods, and without them, this is where most people's projects die. The tools we use (the Prioritization Matrix, the One Project Rule, Pre-Deciding) are designed to help you operationalize what you know about what’s important to you so that you can make reliable decisions you can actually stick to.
Lisa, a photographer, could use her same set of skills to develop a coaching program for individuals, build a self-study course, or create a program for high school students. Each project would entail a huge amount of work, be aimed at a different audience, and lead her to an entirely different future. Without clearly deciding which path to take, she risks spending years living with all three ideas, and finishing none.
The Decide Phase is where all your Idea Debt piles up: All the ideas and half-finished projects you’ve piled up over the years that haunt you and wear you down, yet never seem to get off the starting blocks.
When you do decide, based on the real criteria for success that you’ve named for yourself, it also means you’re going to sideline or sunset other projects that are yammering for your attention, and clear your mind so you can focus and move forward confidently in the next phase, Act. This is what we call the One Project Rule.
Act: turning procrastination and distraction into consistent creative practice
The third phase of the Creative Engine is Act. Act is what we have in mind when we talk about “getting work done” because it’s where the work takes concrete shape. But notice, there are two phases that precede it!
Act requires Collect, because that’s laying groundwork, and it requires Decide, so there is a clear path. But nothing gets finished without taking action.
The pitfalls of the Act phase often relate to going on automatic.
- When you get so busy you don't know what to do, the reflex is to cram more in rather than pause and reassess. Living constantly over capacity leads to burnout.
- Act often cycles back to Collect when taking action leads you to realize there’s a gap that needs filling in your information. This is normal and expected, but it can trigger self-blame if you think you “should” be moving faster.
- Feelings of self-doubt when comparing yourself to others, or just feeling unequal to the task ahead can come up in Act. The Creative Engine itself can help in these cases with the Reflect phase, where you can remind yourself that this is part of the process and doesn’t mean you’re broken.
Act can be long. It can take weeks, months, or even years. And most people hit very challenging stages of work where they struggle to keep their focus on the work and keep the faith that they will finish.
That’s why it’s so crucial to have a support system to see you through. This is what I call the Flexible Container.
The Flexible Container
The Flexible Container is a planning system for your self-generated creative work that's designed to bend without breaking: structured enough to keep you moving, flexible enough to survive contact with real life. It is the Act-phase infrastructure that we build together in the Creative Focus Workshop to put consistent progress in reach for everyone.
Shelley is a writer working on a complex, multi-protagonist novel, but she’s coming out of years of hard-deadline-oriented work as a screenwriter, and as a result, struggled with the long, deadline-free nature of novel-writing. Her actual goals were to be present with her work and make consistent progress, but those goals were undermined by self-critical thoughts about not hitting self-imposed deadlines.
Shelley implemented a Flexible Container adapted to her needs, leaning heavily on time-based Quota Tasks to reinforce her goal of presence. As a result, she worked steadily through her manuscript even as her anxiety about the work eased.
Using the Flexible Container, you can develop a sustainable and personalized practice for doing the work consistently without self-recrimination.
Reflect pulls all the other phases together and makes the engine go
The fourth phase of the Creative Engine is Reflect. Reflection is how you go from “trying” to focus and be more productive to a full change of identity: You are The Person Who Does the Thing.
Reflect might look like journaling, or quarterly or annual planning, even morning pages, anything where you take a moment to step back and get some distance on what you're doing and think it through.
Reflect is the second-most-skipped phase, and probably the least understood. It’s where you learn from your experiences and use them to set your path forward. Reflection—and then implementing what you learn—is critical if you want to avoid reinventing the wheel every time you embark on a new project or phase.
Reflect can hit several typical pitfalls:
- The end of Act is often a sprint. You're exhausted, running on fumes to get to the finish line. A pause feels not just impossible but almost alien when you're that close. That can mean that instead of realizing you need more than ever to take a pause and reflect, you skip it. As a result, you keep repeating the same mistakes.
- You do reflect, but you don’t go through the process of implementing what you learn into your methods or plans going forward.
- You write about your vision, but you don’t use the Collect and Decide phases to determine your best next actions to try to close the gap with where you want to be (aka “manifesting”).
Tom had wrapped up a huge podcast project and was not sure what was next. He barely had the attention to think about the podcast; it felt done, cooked, behind him. He was struggling to talk about the podcast publicly to help gain attention for it, and he had a long list of ideas for what’s next, but felt alienated from all of it. When he took a few days to reflect on the podcast, see how far he’d come, and raise a glass with his wife to his achievement, he started to want to talk about it again. And then he realized that he couldn’t just roll into the next thing with the same energy, so he slowed down to explore what he really wanted to do next, which gave him a chance to breathe and see the ideas on his list from a new angle.
It’s easy to feel like reflection is a nice-to-have, but in fact it’s the key to continuing to improve both the content of your work and your work process. And building Rhythms of Reflection into your life on a daily, weekly, and quarterly basis is how you feel those effects almost automatically.
At the beginning of this article, I prompted you to think about a project that’s currently stuck. Having read about the four phases, which phase is your project in? How can you tell? Does that surprise you?
Note which phase comes next, and think about how you might move into that phase intentionally.
Skipping steps, and why it stops you cold
Here's the problem: Most people skip steps. It seems like an efficiency because you feel behind, you're in a rush, there are so many things you want to do, you want to save time. But what it does instead is throw sand in the gears and grind the engine to a halt.
There are two places in the Creative Engine where this is most likely to happen.
Skipping Decide
If you have a whole bunch of ideas for your project (or lots of project ideas) and you try to jump straight from Collect into Act to get started, very frequently you end up scattered and unfocused. You find yourself trying to do too much at once and that causes you to be distracted by other projects and shiny objects.
Without clear direction and well-grounded decisions, you may doubt yourself. Maybe you think you don't have enough information, enough training. This is when you start Googling grad schools.
The Decide phase does not have to be long, but if you try to roll straight from Collect into Act, you'll get stuck in decision fatigue and not be able to move forward.
Clear, specific and conscious decision making is the most important strategy you can implement to get your project done.
The second question at the beginning of this article asked you “When you have an idea you’re excited about, how much preparation do you do before you're working on it?” If you tend to get stuck in Collect and then skip straight to Act, you might either feel like you can never be prepared enough, or that you start trying to make progress but get distracted easily and lose the thread on how to move forward.
If you’ve been skipping Decide, how have Collect and Act felt? What effect has skipping had on your project?
Skipping Reflect
The second most skipped phase is Reflect, when people skip from Act to Collect. When you skip Reflect, you fail to learn from your successes and your failure points.
Was this a project you even liked? Did it do what you hoped? Why or why not? What will you do differently next time?
When you just dive in before you've even truly finished to the last thing, it's very difficult to gain from the experience, or even celebrate what you've achieved.
Both Decide and Reflect, the two phases that people often skip, are where you need to slow down and give yourself space to assess, and really think about the implications of what you've learned and what you've prepared and achieved.
Unsurprisingly, this is where most people's Creative Engine breaks down. Because we're racing ahead at full speed and feel like we're always late and everything's crammed in. And how can we possibly take time to think?
I would argue that this is the greatest possible efficiency you can make in your creative life: to commit to the Decide and Reflect phases, and make sure you take conscious pauses to think. Skipping phases will not speed you up. It will stop you.
Resistors crop up at transition points in the Creative Engine
But there's a deeper reason skipping happens when and where it does: the transitions between phases are harder than they look. Those joins between phases may look like innocent little lines on the sidewalk, but in reality they're more like vast chasms crossed by rickety rope bridges.
The reason is that when you're starting a new phase of a project, you're pulling yourself out of one type of cognitive activity, and starting a new activity that requires a new approach. You have to close things and open other things, and that's when you face context switching costs, which is when all the major resistors come flying at you.
These transitions are where resistors — the factors that drag on your progress, making everything feel like walking through molasses — hit hardest.
Shiny objects, shoulds, imposter syndrome, procrastination, perfectionism, scarcity, overwhelm: they may not stop you outright, but they make everything feel a million times harder.
Each phase transition in the Creative Engine leads to a specific type of transition between one kind of activity and another. That’s why specific resistors tend to ambush you at the same predictable points, every time.
I asked earlier whether your projects tend to get difficult in similar spots. If your answer was yes, do those typical snags for you map to transitions between phases? How can you use this insight to prepare for when the next snag comes up?
Collect → Decide
Collect, as we've established, is by far the most popular phase of the Creative Engine. People get stuck here all the time. That’s because when you’re in a phase of research and learning, making the transition to assessment of your options and making decisions can be really scary.
Resistors that pop up here tend to be in the family of perfectionism and imposter syndrome: Feeling like you're not ready, feeling like you should know more, feeling like you need to do more research. The Should Monster is a heavy presence here. This is the inner critic that catalogs everything you're doing wrong and everyone you're letting down, and it tends to hit hardest when you're about to take a creative risk. This keeps you making notes and doing warmup exercises, trying to master some skill before you start using the skill.
What you need to do instead is face the decision.
Decide → Act
In reality, most people just skip decide. They try to go straight into Act. They haven't figured out what they'll do. They're acting at random. And that can lead to shiny object syndrome, comparing yourself to others, and second-guessing yourself.
But assuming you are grappling with the Decide phase, between Decide to Act you’re likely to face perfectionism. You’ll feel like there has to be an absolute right answer that should become clear or you can't make a decision. You will doubt yourself. If you don’t have a strong decision-making process, you'll feel self-doubt about your ability to follow it through.
Decision making is a very under-supported skill. We need to learn actual, literal skills for decision making in order to be able to make decisions that are so reliable that we can really stick to them and not feel that constant niggling doubt that can make us grind to a halt.
Act → Reflect
When you’re completing a project, or a phase of a project and it’s time to reflect on what you’ve done and what’s next, you’re likely to feel scarcity and overwhelm.
Creative projects tend to turn out even larger and more complex than you’d ever been able to conceptualize at the beginning, and that often means the end is a bit of a marathon. And there’s so much that coalesces around the end: production, launching, potentially marketing and sales.
You're trying to do 18 things all in parallel, and you're looking for efficiencies and productivity to get it done. When you’re overwhelmed, and you're acting all the time and you don't reflect, you can’t think about whether what you’re doing is effective and you can’t plan.
That's a breakdown point. You can go down the wrong road a long time, or get stuck doing too many things and never finishing any of them.
Failing to make this transition also means that often people don't celebrate and close the chapter on what they've achieved. They aren't able to appreciate how great the work is that they've done, and how important it is that they have finished at all.
Reflect → Collect
Remember, the Creative Engine is a cycle. So there is one more transition, which is back to the start. This one is tricky: When you finish a project, it can feel like a bit of a collapse. Maybe there's a new project that you want to start, or maybe you don't even know what that new project will be. This is where you get distracted and you feel resistance to moving ahead. It can be depressing and scary, and sometimes feels like you’ll never create again.
This is a big context switching moment. The biggest, in some ways. You really need to give yourself some space to explore, to think, to do research, to imagine again what makes your work interesting to you.
It's a whole different mode than cranking out a bunch of stuff, which is what you just did at the end of the Act phase.
This is a perfect moment to return to the Creative Engine. Recognize that you're entering a new cycle, and give yourself space to switch gears and enjoy Collect. The realization that the Engine keeps rolling can allow you to relax into it, and enjoy the momentum.
And now we're at question 4: How quickly do you move on, or try to, when finishing projects? If the answer is “immediately” or “I don't really finish, I just stop,” that may contribute to a feeling of being unmoored or disappointed, even after you’ve finished something you should objectively feel proud of. What would it look like to consciously take a pause and reflect on what you’ve done?
Reflect is how you incorporate new knowledge and insight. Consider what you’ve just done as you considered the questions throughout this article—locating yourself in the framework, identifying patterns, noticing what feels familiar. That’s Reflect in action, and it's what makes the difference between finding this interesting and actually being able to use it.
The Creative Engine as a diagnostic: Where are you right now?
When I first taught the Creative Engine Framework live, Jennie Spotila was there. Jennie is a writer and activist, and she's disabled with a chronic illness, myalgic encephalomyelitis, that radically restricts her physical and cognitive energy in a given week. She’s been an advocate for people with ME for decades, but it came at the cost of writing her memoir.
When she came to the first workshop I did on the Creative Engine, it changed her whole orientation towards her writing.
“I remember talking to Jessica a couple of years ago about how I had so many commitments… that I couldn't spend energy writing my book. And Jessica said that it sounded like I hadn't actually decided to focus on the book. And I had an internal head tilt at that… Now I get it. I see that I skipped right over Decide in my enthusiasm to Act.”
Just eight months later, she had finished a 250,000-word first draft.
Knowing the phases and identifying what you're skipping takes the mystery out of getting stuck. Skipping phases will not speed you up. It will stop you.
Here's what to do next
For now, don’t try to implement everything at once. Just identify the one phase or transition where your engine is currently breaking down. That's your entry point.
Ask yourself three questions:
- Which phase is your current project in right now, and what does that mean about what to expect next?
- Which phase do you consistently skip, and what happens when you do?
- Which transition is most difficult for you, and what can you do to prepare?
The Spiral Staircase
If this all feels a bit overwhelming, I want to pause for a second for a reset: No matter how long you’ve been stuck, you have been through the entire Creative Engine, many times.
If you’ve finished a story, or a piece of art, or a research paper. If you’ve published an article, or a blog post, or put a video on YouTube. If you’ve given a talk or taught a workshop. If you’ve planned a graduation party, or a group trip, or moved to a new city… you have completed trips around the Creative Engine.
And the beautiful thing is that Engine is not a flat wheel; it’s a spiral staircase. Each time you complete a circuit, you are one level higher. The phases also function at the scale of a session, a project, even an entire creative practice.
You know all of this. You just forget. The Creative Engine is how you remember.
