It is often the affliction of creative people that we have too many ideas and think of time as our most precious resource.

The solution?

0. Mission-Based Motivation

Reframing your situation is the key to making work play. Convincing yourself that your current project is “shiny” can be done by finding the one answer to Why are you doing what you do? [Ryan Lelek].

This must be one answer: what’s yours?

{Some examples to get you started: To make an impact? To learn? To innovate? To solve an unsolved puzzle?}

1. Write It Down

Leaving half-finished unconnected ideas in your mental cache detracts from your usable RAM. The fear that your new idea will be lost will pollute your focus on completing your current project.

I personally keep 4 notebooks:

1. Main composition book for brainstorming.
2. Personal journal in a plain text document.
3. Pocket sized Field Notes book for ideas that occur at inconvenient times.
4. Todos in workflowy.com

Free yourself from fear, and add to cached ideas when you have improvements. It is an amazing feeling to search through an old notebook and find that you’ve already worked out the answer to a current problem!

2. Set False Deadlines

We feel the need to autograph our work with excellence, which leads us to waste our time on insignificant details and feeling like our work is never fully completed (even if it is by other’s standards).

As Donald Knuth says, “The root of all evil is premature optimization.”

For drawing, I set a time limit of 2.5 hours. I set a time limit of May 3rd to submit my nonprovisional patent on my latest wheelchair modules.

These artificial deadlines allow you to feel like you’ve “finished” a project to the best of your ability, and move on to fully devote yourself to the next project.

Worry not, my friends. These 3 large changes may take time to become integrated into the busy lifestyle of an active creative.

However, that hard work is worth it! I’ve found that implementing these 3 changes allows me to satisfy my obsessive drive to finish what I’ve started whilst laying the groundwork for my future projects.

Hopefully, they will also help you!