For most of this year, my weekly review has been one of my most effective, enlightening, and enjoyable creative practices.
I started doing weekly reviews at the beginning of this year after being convinced of the benefits by Khe Hy and August Bradley, two creators and thinkers I admire who rave about the practice.
The idea is that doing a short review at the end of the week allows you to:
- Reflect on the past week, identify what worked & what didn’t and tie up or reschedule any loose ends.
- Prep for the week ahead by setting an intention, a few goals, and planning out your schedule so you can hit the ground running on Monday morning.
While it took me a few weeks to set up my weekly review template and find my rhythm, once I did, the benefits were as advertised.
The review gave a satisfying kind of closure to each week and allowed me to go into each week with a strong sense of focus about where my effort will be most impactful or required. Projects flowed more smoothly, I got more important work done, and I felt clear on how everything I was doing contributed to my big-picture, long-term goals.
In short, the weekly reviews acted as a kind of lubricant that made everything I did run more efficiently.
Despite all the benefits, however, this week marks three months since I completed my last weekly review.
The reason is a kind of all-or-nothing perfectionism I refer to as Grandiose Ideation, which not only derailed my weekly reviews but regularly derails many of our creative practices, habits, and projects.
Fortunately for us, there’s a simple mindset shift that can help us avoid this fate.
But before we get to it, let’s take a closer look at the root of the problem.
Falling Prey to Grandiose Ideation
The start of a new practice or project is perhaps the most exciting and energetic phase of its lifecycle.
We’re buzzing with ideas, itching to dive in, and have the benefit of more than a few blind spots to the potential challenges and pitfalls along the way.
It’s also where we’re most prone to Grandiose Ideation.
In our enthusiasm about our new endeavour, we scope out a grand plan, including a robust feature set, slick design, and (perhaps wildly) ambitious goals.
For me and my weekly reviews, this meant building out a robust template for the review which would get me thinking deeply about what I had accomplished the past week, what I wanted to achieve in the week ahead, and how it all fit together with my big-picture goals.
The structure I’d laid out worked wonderfully. But there was a problem.
Every week, the review took me 1-2 hours to complete.
According to both Khe and August, one of the characteristics of a successful weekly review is that it takes no more than 30 minutes to complete. Any longer than this, and the friction to doing it becomes too great, and you’ll ultimately drop off.
Despite being aware of the potential friction I was adding to the process, however, I couldn’t help but lay out a grand vision for my weekly reviews.
At first, I didn’t see this as a problem.
I actually enjoyed the hour or two I spent every Friday afternoon doing the review and found it incredibly valuable. As the months progressed, however, my Friday afternoon reviews began to regularly get pushed to Saturday mornings.
Then they got pushed to Sunday mornings.
Then Sunday nights. Then Monday mornings. Then I started missing a week here and there.
Until finally, they got pushed off my schedule altogether.
Even as I began slipping, I resisted trimming down and streamlining the process of the review.
“If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it fully,” I thought to myself.
And in one sense, this is an admiral commitment to make to any project.
But it’s also one of the core reasons we end up failing and giving up on promising projects.
Dealing with The Dip
Our enthusiasm for any practice or project wanes when we hit The Dip, the point at which the fun fades and we’re faced with the reality that there’s a long slog ahead if we want to see the project or practice through to our desired results.
At this point, we realize that the project will likely never live up to our initial lofty ambitions, and rather than scaling it back, we often decide to shelve it.
If I can’t do it fully, I might as well not do it at all.
Grandiose ideation is a classic disruptor of projects and potential products. But it also wreaks havoc on less well-defined practices and habits.
“If I’m going to start running, I’m going to run 5 miles, three times a week,” we might think. Or, “If I’m going to be active on social media I’m going to post 5 times on Twitter, twice on LinkedIn, once on Instagram… oh, and 10 IG stories every day.”
Or perhaps even, “I’m going to do a weekly review that will include recapping every possible thing I might ever want to look back on in the future and plan for every contingency in the coming week…”
All of these lofty commitments, while noble in intent, have the unintended effect of planting the seeds for failure before we even start.
Clearly defined projects and products that succumb to Death by Grandiose Ideation are often the most painful or disappointing. This is because they likely have a timeline attached to them along with a very clear end result. Never mind that both may be wildly optimistic…
But while an abandoned project might be disappointing, it’s the long-term habits and practices we abandon that ultimately have the greater negative impact on our success.
This is because while the positive results of an ongoing practice may be subtle and ill-defined, they tend to compound over time, adding up to greater and greater impact, even if we’re not entirely aware of it.
But while practices and habits have incredible potential for positive impact, they’re are also much easier to abandon than time-bound projects with a clear beginning and end.
Most healthy practices don’t deliver an immediate dopamine hit for doing them. They take effort, the positive results are likely to be in the far future, and often end up feeling like a burden, with few tangible results in return for the time and effort we put in.
For this reason, Grandiose Ideation is especially disruptive to ongoing practices.
We’re already predisposed to abandoning them when things start getting tough. Heaping on greater scope and expectation before we even begin only stands to increase the gap between our vision and reality, leading to almost immediate disillusionment once we get into the practice.
Fortunately, when we’re aware of Grandiose Ideation and how it sets us up for failure, we can dance with (and around) it.
Shrink Your Ambitions to Improve Your Results
When it comes to a defined, user-facing product, the answer to Grandiose Ideation is to start by identifying and building a Minimum Viable Product, or MVP.
The MVP is the smallest version of the core product that the target group of customers will (hopefully) be willing to pay for. If it’s successful and people buy it, the product has been validated and you can expand on it from there. If it fails, you haven’t wasted that much time and you can move on to the next idea.
But what about when the subject of our Grandiose Ideation isn’t a defined product with users to help us validate it?
What if, instead, it’s a habit, or practice, perhaps one that no one else will ever engage with beyond us ourselves?
For these cases, it’s worth thinking not about the Minimum Viable Product, but the Minimum Effective Effort (MEE).
Minimum Effective Effort
For any task, habit, or practice, the Minimum Effective Effort is the least amount of effort required to achieve a meaningful result.
In short, it’s the perfect counterbalance to Grandiose Ideation.
At the start of a new pursuit, when the excitement is flowing we have a way of viewing it with tunnel vision, looking only at the very best-case, absolutely most-effective version of the practice and ignoring everything else.
My weekly review template was a perfect example of this. The most effective (and least possible to do consistently) version of a review.
Knowing we’re in this stage and prone to Grandiose Ideation, it’s worth taking a moment to stop, take a breath, and ask what the MEE for this activity would be.
When we identify the lower floor of the “effective” range of activities, we immediately become aware of a whole spectrum of alternative effective versions of the practice to choose from. It makes plain the fact that while our grandiose version of the pursuit might be the most effective version, it’s far from the only effective version.
Knowing this, we’re able to take a more nuanced, measured approach to the activity, committing to an amount of effort we’ll actually be capable of sustaining over the long term.
Part of Grandiose Ideation is the fact that we tend to drastically overestimate the bandwidth we’ll be able to dedicate to a long-term, ongoing project or practice.
Sure, we’re excited at the start and have the energy and time in to creating a weekly podcast that takes 15 hours per episode to produce. But will we have that same energy and bandwidth six months from now when we’re firmly in The Dip?
Maybe. But usually not.
In my experience, it’s much easier to scale up a practice, increasing our effort once we’ve got our feet under us and as more bandwidth becomes available than it is to scale down when we’re floundering.
While identifying and pursuing the MEE is about scaling back our effort, however, it’s worth underlining the point that the Minimum Effective Effort is not the same as the minimum possible effort.
For a given pursuit, the MEE may actually require a substantial amount of effort in order to be effective.
Training for a marathon comes to mind as an example, where the minimum effective effort would require us to go for long runs multiple times per week over a long period of time.
The goal when identifying the MEE, then, is not to do the least amount of work possible, but the least amount of work that will get us a meaningful result.
This means that the first step to finding the MEE for a given pursuit is to identify what a meaningful outcome would be for the task at hand.
Identifying Your Minimum Meaningful Outcome
As it turns out, goal-setting is another area in which we’re often prone to Grandiose Ideation. As such, it’s worth thinking about the closely-related idea of the Minimum Meaningful Outcome.
Let’s look at an example.
If your goal is to grow your newsletter subscribers, for example, adding 1,000 new subscribers every month would certainly be a meaningful outcome.
But if you’re starting from zero or kickstarting a stagnant newsletter, perhaps the Minimum Meaningful Outcome is 25 new subscribers per month. Or maybe it’s simply net-positive growth.
The Minimum Meaningful Outcome for a given pursuit is something we each need to decide for ourselves, given our goals, experience, and current situation.
If it helps (read: if you’re a nerd like me), we can plot the range of acceptable outcomes on a graph.
Once we have an idea of the range of potential meaningful outcomes defined for ourselves, we can start to take a more informed view of what it might take to achieve them.
Usually, this will require some guesswork and is something we won’t truly know until we actually begin the practice and start getting some feedback. But we can make an educated guess based on research and talking with others who’ve pursued similar goals to ours.
When it comes to growing a newsletter, for example, we can ask people we know with newsletters about their process.
How much time do they spend writing, researching, engaging on social media, and more?
What kind of results are they getting from that effort?
Once we have this information, we can map it over our existing graph.
The required effort to achieve a given result is indicated here by the yellow line, and we can think of the Minimum Effective Effort as the point where the effort curve intersects with our Minimum Meaningful Outcome.
Note that I’ve drawn the effort curve as an s-curve based on my experience that usually, the relationship between effort and result follows a non-linear pattern.
At the start of many pursuits, we need to put in a decent amount of effort before seeing any result at all. As we continue, the return on our effort begins to compound, requiring less effort for greater results and perhaps approaching exponential growth, before finally tapering off when we reach a point of diminishing returns.
Putting the Minimum Effective Effort to Work
Viewed on a graph, we can clearly see the effort we stand to save ourselves by starting with the MEE versus falling prey to grandiose ideation.
But you don’t need to draw out a graph for every new practice or project you’re considering.
Instead, before you commit to a new project, no matter how promising it might be, stop, take a breath, and ask yourself:
- What is the Minimum Meaningful Outcome for this project?
- What would it take to achieve that?
- Is there any reason I need to do more than that immediately?
These questions can help you ground yourself before jumping into a project or practice that is ultimately doomed to failure by excessive and unnecessary scope.
In almost every case, it’s the project that gets completed or the practice that is done consistently that gets results. Achieving these feats, however, often requires us to scale back our initial expectations.
Once the habit has been built, or the MVP has been made, we can always add to it from there.
In my experience, however, we often find (with some irony) that the Minimum Meaningful Outcome is, in fact, enough.
That’s what I’m hoping to find as I reboot my weekly review this week.
Having gone three months without it, it’s clear to me which aspects of it I miss most, which were nice to haves, and which were pure fluff. As I reimagine the practice, I’m building it entirely around the MEE version of it.
A year from now, there may be things I look back on and wish I had included. But at least I’ll have been doing it consistently for that year.
It’s worth dreaming big and aiming high.
But don’t forget that while your biggest, most elaborate creative ideas might be the most effective solutions for the problems they seek to solve, they’re not the only ones.
And they’re certainly not the best starting point.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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