Before powering down at the end of every day, I review my task list and bump everything I didn’t complete to a future date, often the next day.
On good days, it’s a small number of non-urgent or unimportant tasks.
On less-than-good days it’s a large number of both urgent and important tasks that got crowded out by even more urgent and important tasks.
Regardless of the day, however, for the past six months there’s been one particular task that’s appeared on my task list every single day… and without fail, been bumped, incomplete, to the next day.
The task?
“Catch up on email”
I know, it’s wildly optimistic to harbour any kind of belief that this task could ever truly be completed. In fact, the mountain of unreplied-to email has only grown since adding the daily reminder.
And yet, I persist in deluding myself.
I created the task after wrapping up the PMA5 launch in the spring.
Launches have a way of crowding out everything but the most essential daily action items—of which there are always more than can possibly get done—and after spending 10 weeks in launch and then cohort delivery mode, I had fallen severely behind on all manner of non-urgent correspondence.
I did what I could to chip away at my inbox following the launch, but it wasn’t enough.
Because before I could catch up, I once again found myself neck deep in planning, executing, and delivering the launch of my next cohort, adding another 2.5 months of email backlog.
Last Friday night, from 9-11 pm I sat down and made the most significant dent in my inbox to date, working through 75 of the 300 or so emails awaiting a response.
It felt good to make a dent in the mountain.
But more interestingly, in going through the emails that had been piling up, I made a realization that instantly reframed my email problems.
The Price of Projects Gaining Traction
In sifting through and responding to the emails, I noticed that the majority of them fall into one of two categories:
- New subscribers to either Creative Wayfinding or Scrappy Podcasting who are responding to the prompt in my welcome emails to tell me a bit about themselves and their work.
- Requests to collaborate, guest on podcasts, contribute to projects, etc.
Based on these categories it’s clear that far from being a problem, the number and type of emails occupying my inbox are a sign that things are working.
The first category is the direct result of people subscribing to my newsletters (my #1 goal in my business). The second, a result of becoming better known and seen as an interesting voice in my industry.
Despite the positive underlying causes of my inbox overwhelm, the situation bothers me.
For one, the lack of responsiveness doesn’t send the message I want myself or my brand to convey, especially to new subscribers reaching out for the first time.
More personally, I have a natural inclination toward, structure and order, which means the lack of control over a task as simple as answering email is deeply uncomfortable.
And yet, one of the things I’ve had to come to terms with over the past two years as more and more of my projects have started to gain traction is that this type of discomfort is an inevitable price of creative progress.
Obligation Overwhelm
At the beginning of a project, our obligations tend to be low.
We likely don’t have an audience expecting anything from us on a consistent schedule. We don’t have paying customers and clients with deadlines and deliverables. And we don’t have partners and other stakeholders to whom we’ve made promises.
On the personal side, the project likely isn’t supporting us financially, so we have little obligation to ourselves to keep the project running.
Pure creative freedom in other words.
What’s more, we’re in experimentation mode, which means we might be playing with half a dozen (or more!) ideas, testing them out to see which has the greatest potential.
As some of those projects inevitably begin to gain traction, however, our obligations to each of them increase.
As traction leads to growth, it doesn’t take long for our obligations to even one such project to begin to crowd out other pursuits.
Which means that if we want to navigate this stage of the creative journey intact, triage becomes an increasingly important skill for us to develop.
Because the more success our projects accrue, the more difficult the choices we’ll face about what gets our best time and attention, what gets the leftovers, and what gets ignored.
Creative Triage
When we first begin to bump up against the limits of our bandwidth, the choices about what to focus on and what to ignore are fairly easy to make.
Other low-traction projects are often the first to be pushed outside the limits of our current bandwidth to focus on the more promising endeavours.
But as the project continues to gain momentum (which of course is our goal), it’s only a matter of time before other aspects of our lives begin to be pushed outside of our ability to stay on top of them.
Relationships with family and friends, our health, hobbies, and yes, correspondence—both business and personal—all have a way of becoming secondary to the demands of a successful—yet not fully self-sufficient creative project.
As with any type of triage, creative triage involves making many painful decisions.
In fact, the more painful a decision, the more potential upside the decision likely offers.
This means turning down promising projects and opportunities you desperately want to take on.
It means letting many of the fires in your business burn unabated—often indefinitely.
It means learning to accept the inevitable discomfort of never being able to get to everything you want to, or perhaps even feel you need to do.
All this, in the service of making progress on the small number of things that matter most—both for the project to be successful, as well as for yourself.
Such is the price of success.
We can try to fight the need to triage our various projects, tasks, and endeavours, attempting to maintain control over everything on our plate even as the demands of our creative platform exceed our bandwidth.
More often than not, this achieves little but undermining the quality and consistency of our work, not to mention our health, sanity, and satisfaction.
The alternative is to choose to embrace making difficult choices about where we focus our time and attention as an essential skill we must develop to reach the next level of success.
Because in the end, we’re most often held back not by the opportunities we fail to grab ahold of, but by those we fail to release.
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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