Hey, Creative LJ Peoples!

[allizon]

Maybe this is only an issue for those of us who are all ADD, maybe not, but:  

When you're thinking about/planning/even vaguely considering a Big Project, one which can't possibly be done in a week or less...how do you get started on something Big?  How do you know where/at what point to dive in -- how much planning or prep work is enough?  How do you measure your progress?  Or maintain your enthusiasm for the project and not let it just all...drift away?

I'm very curious here.  I want to do something Big but can't seem to keep my focus on any one project long enough, so I wonder if I'm just Doin It Wrong.  Help?

ETA:  So I successfully completed National Novel Writing Month -- I did just over 53,000 words in 30 days.  That was Big, right?  But it also had a very small window attached to it, and an external deadline (of a sort).  So I can sprint toward Big, but I think the kinds of Big Projects I'm vaguely thinking of here aren't so much sprints as marathons.  I clearly need marathon planning/training.  :)

ETA 2:  As I was responding to various comments below, a link to this post about discipline on Zen Habits popped up for me in Twitter.  Thanks, Universe!

Comments

[moominmolly.livejournal.com]

External accountability. :/ It helps me a lot if someone else is expecting me to finish, and it also helps me a lot to NOT plan too much ahead of time. If it's something I can refine as I go along, I prefer to set out a skeleton of what I intend to do and then just start in the hopes that enthusiasm will carry me through.

But... nothing really works even most of the time. I have the same problem.

[veek.livejournal.com]

That really, really depends on what kind of project. But one thing has been helpful to me pretty much regardless. I make an outline of the Big Steps in the project (move house; have a baby; kick ass in my profession; retire; dire), and then I make an outline of what needs to happen for the first Big Step to happen. (Move house = find house; arrange for moving; pack; move; unpack; settle.) Then break down just the first substep, if necessary, until the broken-down pieces are pretty small.

Other than that, I'd need more details. But I'm also reasonably good at this sort of thing, so ping me if you want to sit down and brainstorm. I *love* organizing.

[jacflash.livejournal.com]

I... struggle with this myself. What I do is this: Start with a ridiculously easy first step. Then a second step that seems similarly small. And so on, resolving to focus (mostly) on just the next step. If I think about the whole big thing I get distracted and overwhelmed. If I'm just taking one small step at a time I can just do it without getting bogged down in The Vast Implications or psyching myself out or whatever.

External accountability helps too, sucky as it might be.

[catya.livejournal.com]

How big? :)

[catya.livejournal.com]

Oh, let's see, something actual:

Figure out the parts of it.

Figure out what bit you can do without causing downstream trouble.

Do that bit.

Which reminds me I need to paint my doors. (no i'm not kidding)

[majes.livejournal.com]

53,000 words in 30 days

Wow! That is awesome. As it is now, I'd be surprised if I'm doing 5000 words a month. Well, assuming we are talking about novel creation type words and not post in LJ kinds of words. Time for me to climb back on the wagon.

[concrete.livejournal.com]

How about looking for a big process instead of a big result? Then you'll enjoy the process instead of waiting for the end to come.

[oceanic.livejournal.com]

If you ever find a process that works, let me know. I've been breaking down the Big Comic into stages and micro stages and nano/femto/pico stages for about three years now, and I get discouraged after about three days every time I start work on it again.

The scheduling thing someone mentioned above is a good idea. What I really need, though, is a brain de-gausser that fills me with hope and creative zing.

[roozle.livejournal.com]

So, a deadline helps a LOT.

For Somerville Open Studios, I had an ambitious list of goals and I got to a lot but not all of them. And I had a lot of support from family and partners, but I feel like it was pretty self-motivated.

I would say that first I did more or less what veek said about breaking things down into steps. But then I worked backward from my deadline and set internal deadlines for the steps. So I could look at my steps and say "even though there's three months to go to SOS, if I haven't gotten to step N, I'm not going to make it." (And of course I didn't get to all my intermediate steps, so there was some incremental replanning and dropping things that were lower priority...) Thus, short little deadlines and much less chance to fool myself with "I can catch up tomorrow".

I try to do the same thing with Arisia, but then I'm working in concert with a bunch of other people who have rarely gone through the same scheduling process, so there's a last minute scramble anyhow.

Anyway, I don't know if this is helpful. This doesn't work for me for things I either am trying to MAKE myself do or for things that don't have an external deadline; making up deadlines for myself has historically not worked for me. It also doesn't work for me for things that are just ongoing life changes -- eat more healthily for example -- but I am assuming from context that we're talking about a creative project.

[ceo]

For me, it depends on how much I understand the project going in, or how much I think I understand it. The biggest non-work project I've done recently (other than Benjamin) is the kitchen, and that started with some research, some machinery purchases and a lot of CAD work before I even got to making any sawdust. At every stage I had a pretty good handle on what I had to do, even though it's taken much, much longer than I anticipated. I think what made it work for me was strong intrinsic and extrinsic motivation: I love woodworking, and my existing kitchen was horrible. :-) At one point about halfway through I sat down and plotted out the entire rest of the project step by step, which helped a lot in tracking my progress.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

WoW, have I *ever* had this problem!

Here's how it's turned out for me. I don't know that our brains work the same, but there may be some overlap.

It turns out that if I plan a project by starting with how I want it to look or end up in the end, I'm pretty much doomed: Sometimes I start seeing the work ahead of me in a too end-goal-oriented way, and like many fine things that really should be savored, thinking about how to finish it makes the doing of it no longer fun, it just feels like a giant to-do-list that I suddenly can't do... all the advice to break a big project into little parts, doesn't help if I start feeling like doing the little parts is a chore, too.

Or, if I know how it's "supposed to" turn out, I keep embellishing it in my head, making the project more and more complicated; or I start thinking about how it's going to be received and how awesome it will be once people see how great it is, and then get hung-up in the details and never finish it; OR then, it's really not really going to be good enough at all, unless I embelish it or polish it more, or, or, or...

SO, the answer for me turns out to be that I will only plan a little bit ahead of myself, and then if I start wanting to imagine what it will look like in the end, I turn my focus back to where I am. Say, for instance that I decided I wanted to do... I dunno, let's say, a 6-foot cube with four faces and a top, all being cut pieces like the ones I've been doing. Cool, huh? Well, If I tried to plan out what that would look like and design it all on paper, then I'd be utterly daunted by the whole project. It would be months and months of work to execute and then would it really turn out to be good enough to be worth all that effort?

If I were going to do that, instead I'd do just enough planning to figure out how the structure would work, and maybe in a general sense what I want the silhouettes to be about. Then I'd design *one* and cut it out. Then I'd design a second to go with the first, maybe according to the original general idea, or maybe changing even that. Over the months the project would take to complete, it would evolve and adapt to what I'd already done and to what it started to become.

The thing is that if a piece of art is going to express something going on inside you, you can't expect to stay the same person for the duration of a really big project. You have to leave lots of room for growth and change and development of you and your ideas, or else it's like growing out of your clothes, but having to keep going to work in them.

Anyway, that's how I've come to handle the problem: plan only as much as I have to in order to get and keep moving, and then keep loose and adapt along the way. And be strict about NOT trying to peek ahead and read the ending first. :)

[sunspiral.livejournal.com]

I find it best to start with a mixture of obsessive listmaking and jumping right in with some part of the project that looks exceptionally fun. Also, everything that roozle and miss_chance say is good, except that I'm more at the "start at the deadline and work backwards to plan and then just do it" end of the spectrum, both for engineering and art.

[dancingwolfgrrl.livejournal.com]

I think what I do is this: I think of a huge plan, and then I figure out the vague outline of the next big step or two. I want to be a crazy urban farmer, so that involves figuring out how to manage the farming and figuring out how to manage the business, for example.

Then I figure out the immediate next step on those things. This is the basic idea of Getting Things Done: figure out the next physical action you need to take to move something forward. Sometimes there are several, which is good when you're procrastinating, as you can tell yourself you just have to do the easiest one :)

When I do that action, I figure out the next one. I keep some vague cloud of timeline in my head -- farming is convenient, as it has years, but "I want to have this cloud of stuff more or less sorted before summer" also works for me -- but don't worry hugely about it.

I've also started using reverse-engineered timelines like roozle mentions, although I agree they're best when some life or external factor makes a deadline important.