Project Check-Ins

Keep in regular contact with long-running projects.

Common failure mode: failing to finish a project because you forget you even started it. Or letting it drag until your interests have shifted and it becomes a slog.

Creative/intellectual work often feels like it requires long stretches of uninterrupted time, so you procrastinate until you can find such a chunk. Which never comes. The project slips your attention as new shiny things arrive. Picking it back up months later, you’ve lost so much context it’s impossible to know what you even intended — and the guilt of that makes you procrastinate even more.

The fix

Make regular project check-ins. A daily or few-times-a-week recurring task: “spend 30 minutes on this project.”

You don’t even have to work on the thing. Just allocate fifteen minutes to hold the project in your mind. Open the document and look at it. Read the code. Don’t write anything — just read. You’ll come up with tasks to write down.

Think. Plan. Build up the structures in your mind, refresh the caches. If you can do → do. If you can’t do → plan. If you can’t even plan → read.

When you’re in regular contact with a project, you no longer feel you need a giant empty runway of time. You can work on it in shorter chunks.

To manage long-term creative work, keep in regular contact. That doesn’t mean work on them every day, but maybe look at them every day.