Drops in the Bucket: Four Ideas on How to Make Progress on Your Creative Projects

Creativity5 to 10 Minutes
Written By Cliff Guren
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Creativity is choice: the result of prioritizing your creative work over the other areas of your life making demands on your time and energy. Easier said than done in some circumstances, but we are all subject to the non-negotiable fact that there are only 24 hours in a day—and our days are numbered. So, what are you going to do with your one life? If you’ve chosen to make your creative work a priority, but are struggling to find the time you need, this article is for you. 

The widely celebrated and prolific creative non-fiction writer John McPhee confessed in a Paris Review interview that he’d “do anything” to avoid writing, adding “you don’t want to go there because there’s so much pressure and so much strain and you just want to stay on the outside and be yourself. And so the day is a constant struggle to get going.” And yet McPhee wrote over a hundred articles for The New Yorker over the course of his career and published over 30 books. How? One drop at a time:

But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.

McPhee’s example is a reminder to us all to avoid the “all or nothing” mentality that keeps us from making progress toward our creative goals. One drop at a time fills the bucket.

The ideas below will help you reprioritize your task list, regain control of your time, and make steady progress on your creative projects. They are stepping stones that will help you begin to overcome the inertia we all grapple with from time to time and rediscover the satisfaction of doing your creative work.

Reprioritize Your Task List Using The Eisenhower Decision Matrix

You may already be familiar with the Eisenhower Decision Matrix (also known as the “Eisenhower Matrix” or “Eisenhower Box”), a tool that was inspired by a quote attributed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." (It turns out that when Eisenhower said this in a speech, he was quoting an unnamed former college president.)

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix

The Eisenhower Decision Matrix

The matrix has four quadrants designed to help you prioritize your list of tasks:

  • Urgent and Important: This is your “Do” list. Because these items are both urgent and important, they demand your immediate attention.

  • Important, but Not Urgent: This is your “Decide” list. These items are important, but not urgent. Therefore, they don’t require your immediate attention. Typically, these are items associated with long-term projects and goals.

  • Not Important, but Urgent: This is your “Delegate” list. These items are urgent and demand immediate attention, but don’t necessarily require your knowledge or expertise to complete, and therefore don’t warrant your attention and time. Ideally, you’d delegate these items to someone else. However, if you don’t have anyone to delegate to and the consequences of not doing them aren’t severe enough, you may choose to reschedule them or ignore them. It’s not an ideal response, but it’s a realistic one.

  • Not Important and Not Urgent: This is your “Delete” list. These items aren’t urgent or important, so you can ignore them without any meaningful consequences.

You’ll find lots of information on using the Eisenhower Decision Matrix on the web. (I’ve included links to a few helpful articles below.) My focus here is on distinguishing between tasks that are “Urgent and Important” and those that are “Important, but Not Urgent”—and how to ensure that tasks associated with your long-term creative work transition into the “Urgent and Important” quadrant. 

It’s easy to focus all of your attention on the items in the “Urgent and Important” quadrant, but that would be a mistake. What’s “urgent” isn’t always determined by you… It’s often determined by someone else, or circumstances that are out of your control: your boss, someone delegating to you without your consent, or a crisis in an area you’re responsible for (such as your home). People come first, so you’re going to rearrange your priorities if a family member or friend needs your help, but beyond that, it’s worth pausing to consider whether someone else’s urgent item is a reason to completely forgo your creative work for the day.

The world we live in pushes you to focus on immediate satisfaction, short term goals, convenience, and quick fixes. But the urgent tasks foisted on you by others will divert your attention from your long-term goals, from the possibilities waiting for you in your creative work, and potentially from your ability to find your own happiness. I know that I’m grumpy, short tempered, and depressed when I’m unable to find time over an extended period for my creative work. When I find myself in this situation, I have to re-evaluate what’s on my Urgent and Important list and be merciless about reprioritizing other people’s priorities, even if there are consequences.

Regain Control of Your Time By Learning to Say “No"

In a world filled with diversions and demands, prioritizing your creative work isn’t just about saying “Yes” to your creative impulses, it’s also about saying “No” to the things that fill up your day. You need a “No List.” In her book From Chaos to Creativity, writer Jessie L. Kwak calls the No List “a spam filter for your life.” She adds: “It keeps you from taking on the wrong opportunities, because those prevent you from saying yes to the right opportunities later.”

What goes on your No List? The things that are toxic to your creativity, such as:

  • Addictive diversions like social media, YouTube, online shopping, reruns of The Office, and The Great British Baking Show.

  • Friends who no longer support or nourish you.

  • Social gatherings that drain your energy and confidence.

  • Clients and client work that no longer provide sufficient rewards (financial, creative, or otherwise)

  • A spotless house.

Just because you say No to certain opportunities and responsibilities, it does not mean those things won’t get done. You may not choose to clean the house as often as you used to, but that doesn’t mean someone else can’t take on some of the work, or you can’t hire help if you have the means. Always choosing to do everything yourself is a great diversion and excuse. It’s also a surefire way of ensuring that there’s never time for your creative work.

Once you start paying attention to the things that are diverting your attention and energy from your creative work, you’ll find new things to add to this list. Ultimately, your No List will help you reduce decision fatigue—your No List filter will do the work of deciding which opportunities to follow-up on for you. 

Commit Yourself to Your Creative Work with Self-Imposed Deadlines

Editor Christopher Cox’s new book The Deadline Effect investigates the power of deadlines on productivity and creativity. The word “deadline” comes from the publishing industry, but it’s original meaning had nothing to do with dates or times—it was a line on the printing press that marked the limit of paper size being used. Type set beyond the deadline wouldn’t show up on the page. It’s only in the twentieth century that the word came to mean the hour when a story was due.

Cox cites several studies that show deadlines increase productivity. But he also acknowledges that deadlines have a shadow side: it’s called the deadline effect. Deadlines often lead to procrastination. Why? Because we tend to underestimate the value of future gains and losses, and we also overestimate how much time we’ll have in the future. We focus on short term rewards at the expense of long term satisfactions and convince ourselves that we have more time to complete large projects than we actually have. Cox’s book studies seven different companies and the tools they use to overcome the negative sides of the deadline effect. 

Not surprisingly for us, the most effective way to overcome procrastination is to establish external checks on our tendency to procrastinate: systems designed to keep our projects on schedule and ensure quality. These systems include tools like interim checkpoints, working back from the deadline, and maintaining a constant state of readiness. Cox summarizes his book in seven words: “Set a deadline, the earlier the better.” Deadlines are forcing functions—and the earlier you set them the more time you have to adjust your course over the life of your project.

Put the Focus on Your Creative Work with Time Blocking

I said at the beginning of this article that I wanted to focus on how you move your long-term creative goals from the “Important, but Not Urgent” quadrant to the “Important and Urgent” quadrant—from work that you’re deciding how to approach to work you’re actually doing. Creative work isn’t like other kinds of work: it can be difficult to parse creative projects into discrete tasks and accurately forecast how much time each task will take. Note that I said “difficult,” not “impossible.” For example, it’s difficult to say exactly how long it will take to complete the first draft of a chapter of a novel, but easier to estimate how long a copy-editing pass of a chapter will take. So how do you ensure that you’re making progress on your creative work? The answer is “time blocking.”

Time blocking is the practice of dividing your day into blocks of time anddedicating each block to a specific task or related group of tasks. Implementing time-blocking effectively requires a weekly review and prioritization of your task list and blocking out time on your calendar for the coming week for the work you want to focus on. Your weekly review is your opportunity to promote your creative work to your “Urgent and Important” list and block out time for working on your creative project. You can’t control how much time it will take to write the first chapter of your novel, but you can control how much time you dedicate to the task. (Links to helpful articles on time blocking follow below.)

We all lead complicated lives. Choosing to make time for your creative work isn’t always easy, but these steps will help you get started in the right direction. Remember, your focus is on making steady progress…

  • Use the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to clarify and prioritize your tasks.

  • Free up time and simplify your opportunity analysis and decision making process by creating and maintaining a “No List.”

  • For your creative work that can be parsed into discrete projects and tasks, focus on small projects, set short deadlines, and make a firm commitment to honoring your deadlines.

  • For your creative work that isn’t easily parsed into discrete tasks, use time blocking to ensure that you’re making regular progress on your creative goal.

Of course, there will be weeks or days when you can’t find time for your creative work. Of course, you’ll occasionally miss a self-imposed deadline. Forgive yourself, let it go, and focus on the next day, the next opportunity. Your creative work will still be there, waiting for you to answer the call to add one more drop in the bucket.

Relevant Resources

On John McPhee:

On Deadlines:

On the Eisenhower Decision Matrix:

Note that Evernote has an Eisenhower Matrix template you can use. Create a new note and choose the Templates option, then look for the Eisenhower Matrix template in the template gallery. 

If you search the web for “eisenhower matrix” you’ll find a wide variety of downloadable matrix templates.

On Time Blocking:

Cliff Guren
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