enrollment closes in...

Day

Hour

Minute

Second

Missed days aren’t important. Coming back is.

Keep Rolling

Build a creative habit that will survive real life

Design, build, test, and troubleshoot a creative habit until it fits right into your real, messy life.

ENROLL NOW

Three live sessions over two weeks.

Dates: September 30, October 5 and 14, 2026

11 am - 12:30 pm ET

ENROLL NOW

You want to be a creative who creates, every single day.

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

But everything gets in the way: kids, aging parents, a job, or jobs, some kind of neurodivergent brain, and and and.

And unlike every other part of your life, your creative work is yours alone. No one is checking your progress or waiting for the results.

That sounds bad, but let’s be clear: YOU are not the problem. Your life is not built wrong, you’re not screwing up.

The problem is that most advice on habits is written for the theoretical person you could be, if only you were already someone with impeccable habits.

Typical approaches are predicated on clockwork schedules, CEO-level executive function, and no one else needing anything from you unpredictably, like, constantly?

Obvi: not your life (because not anyone's life).

That's not how we play at Autonomous Creative.

You need a habit that's built to bend when life goes weird, then snap back into place

(instead of falling apart the first time a wrench hits the works).

Be part of the pilot cohort!

I've taught this habit-building process for years inside the Creative Focus Workshop. What's new is the depth, and the packaging: three brand-new interactive tools, and three live sessions that include full coaching through the customization of your habit, which is the key to a habit that sticks.

Being in the first group means you get my full attention in a small group. I will answer all the questions and work with you on your own habit. I'll also want to hear what's working for you and what's not so I can fix both in the moment and going forward.

Build a creative habit that finally sticks

Size your habit to your real week, so you're not setting yourself up to fail.
A habit that asks too much is doomed from the start, so we begin our work with an honest read of your time and energy right now (and we include the caregiving, the day job, and the bureaucratic mess nobody else pays attention to).
Make all the hard decisions in advance, with my support, instead of when you're facing down the usual cascade failure.
We'll walk through when it happens, where, for how long, what's on the desk when you sit down, and what you will move out of the way to make room. When you decide ahead of time, you avoid last minute panic.
Build the bad-day version before the bad day.
We'll design the backup plan you're going to need before you need it. What to do when you've legitimately got no time. What to do when you're sleeping on your best friend's couch. We set you up to keep rolling no matter what life brings.
Investigate what went wrong in the design, instead of assuming it's your fault.
When the habit slips, and it will, we will work out which part of the design failed you, and what to change. Every answer starts with a design change, not "be better."
Leave with your habit written down, in your own words.
You'll have a one-page design of your habit (and contingency plan) that you can print and stick above your desk.

One creative habit, fitted to your real capacity and your real life.

Three live sessions: Wednesday, September 30, Monday, October 5, and Wednesday, October 14, 11am to 12:30pm ET.

All three sessions are recorded, and the recordings are yours to keep.

Refund policy: if you're not happy with the workshop after Session 1, you can get a full refund, no questions asked. Just send us an email before Session 2.

enroll now

How we'll do it

You can learn the theory all day, but to build a creative habit that sticks, what counts is customization. That's what we'll focus on in our live sessions.

Session 1, Design.

You'll build a habit sized to the capacity you've actually got, with the fallback for bad days laid out before you need it.

Session 2, Adjust

You bring me what's going wrong. We'll work out whether the habit needs adjusting or you're fighting yourself, and fix the setup in the session.

Session 3, Pressure Test

We talk about the days you missed. You'll leave with a firm grip on how to restart without starting over.

The Habit Designer tool takes ten minutes solo. With me, it takes forty.

When I walked a group through the Habit Designer at a comics festival in September, we spent forty minutes going step-by-step through questions you can fill in by yourself in ten.

Why is this a good thing? Because the extra half hour went to three questions people need help to answer well.

The quota, meaning how much you'll do in a session. On your own you'll write down “500 words” and be behind by Thursday. We'll get into why we count time instead of output, what a reasonable number looks like for you, and what to do on the day you get into it and don't want to stop.

Where it physically happens. The Habit Designer asks for “one physical anchor.” Working out what that means in your actual life takes walking through your morning out loud: how you move through your kitchen, which chores grab you on the way, and what you can put in your path to hook you like a fish on a line and pull you to your desk.

What you're giving up. You already do something with all twenty-four hours every day, so the tool asks what you'll stop doing to make room. Alone, you'll struggle to be brave, because it's the question with a real tradeoff in it. In the session we name what's taking the hit, and what you'll do with it.

That's the difference between a design that looks good on paper and one that holds up day after day.

Who you're learning from:

Hi - I'm Jessica Abel

I'm a cartoonist, author, professor, and coach.

I've been a creative pro for 30 years, taught art school for 25, and I've run my own coaching business since 2015. I help creative professionals get their most important work off the back burner and out into the world.

This habits methodology comes directly out of my coaching work in the Creative Focus Workshop, and reflects hundreds of coaching conversations where I helped people struggling to stay consistent design systems tailored to their real lives.

Creative work is challenging enough on its own. I want to help you get everything around the work out of the way so you can put your energy where it counts.

enroll now

Here's exactly what you’ll get

Three live sessions, 4+ hours of hands-on workshop time, plus the recordings. I coach you through the whole process and we workshop the customization together.
The habit-building process I've refined over years of 1:1 coaching. Establish the capacity container, then design the habit, then fit it to your life.
The Capacity Meter. An interactive coaching tool to assess the time and energy you've actually got right now. Design with that as the baseline and your habit fits without fighting.
The Habit Designer walks you through building your custom habit with clear coaching questions, one decision at a time. You end up with a complete design sheet to work from.
Your contingency plan, built before you need it. You’ll need it! We all do. So we do the work of creating fallbacks ahead of time.
Habit Fix-It: there whenever you hit trouble, to walk you through exactly what's going wrong and what to do to get back on track.
Email checkins between sessions. Through the two weeks as you're implementing your habit.
Ongoing access to everything, replays included, so you can come back whenever you need a refresher.
Apply $129 Enrollment Credit toward the Creative Focus Workshop. Work with me to finish the challenging projects that are on no one's agenda but your own.

Enroll now for $129

Stop setting yourself up for a fight every time you sit down to work

You'll know exactly what you're doing tomorrow morning, because you decided in advance instead of at 8:25 when you're 10 minutes late to get out the door.

You'll keep rolling through a bad week without losing the habit, because you built your backup plan before you needed it.

And you'll be someone who creates most days because your habit is scaled to your real week.

The work you love is not a problem that needs fixing. Everything around it just needs to get out of the way.

enroll now