I have always had a giant list of projects I want to get to, spanning several notebooks and Google docs. The Arduino alarm clock I want to make. A painting series on oceans and clouds. The novel I’m currently writing.

The ideas would accumulate on the backs of envelopes, scraps of paper and in notebooks, and sometimes slip out of memory before I could act on them. So I created a hybrid system combining physical notebooks and online software to track my ideas and projects.

I thought this would solve my problems with getting projects done, but my newfound creative tracker had unintended consequences: pages and pages of paintings, articles, and research projects stretched all the way to the horizon. Moreover, in the time it took me to finish one project to my satisfaction, I added tens more to the list.

I’ve never gotten to the bottom of the list, and while I don’t particularly want to find out what dragons live in that eerie wasteland, not being able to get any closer to it gave me the frustrating impression of standing still even while I was writing, researching and painting like a maniac.

Since creativity seems something you can never have too much of, there’s a lot of advice out there about how to get better at generating and developing ideas. However, once you get good at coming up with ideas, you might have a new set of problems: choosing ideas, executing them, and managing your disappointment about the ones you don’t execute.

Over the last year or so, I’ve gotten better at these skills.

What to do with an idea so it will leave you alone

The lure of a new project is powerful. It’s something like:

Oh my gosh, it’ll be so much fun to make and I’ll feel like such a confident badass — and imagine what the finished product would look like, and it’ll be so effective and persuasive — then I’ll show it off and everyone will know I’m the real deal, especially those people who think I could never do anything — and I think I have all the materials except one, so I can just make these for a living, forever.

And then I add a to-do item in my bullet journal: Make [thing]. It gets lost among the other tasks, grocery lists, and errands. And when I see it again, the excitement that accompanied the idea is gone and replaced by a dull, cosmic guilt. As though I’m letting down the idea, the Muse, myself, and future readers.

Why do I feel an obligation to follow through on these ideas? There is no actual commitment to anyone, just because my imagination made a suggestion.

What I’ve learned recently is that I feel this tug because I have more thoughts on this project already forming in my brain, and they need to be expressed. That’s what this discomfort is telling me.

So now, I write down every idea that occurs to me. Not just a bullet point or to-do item but a full exploration of everything I like about the idea: what prompted it, open questions and parts I’m not sure about, and the first steps I could take to start. It feels like daydreaming.

The write-up (which I learned to do from this book) is not a complete plan, it’s just everything that occurs to me at the moment.

I keep writing until I’m satisfied. It usually takes me about two pages.

This information is a jumping-off point if I ever decide to act on the idea. I have a couple of notebooks only dedicated to these write-ups, and I’ve often gone back and read them for inspiration.

When I write down the ideas pinging around in my head, I feel like I’ve accomplished something already, and not as obligated to complete the project as I would otherwise.

Photo by the author.

Taking a break from all projects helped me do the right projects

A few months ago, at an airport terminal, I had an idea for a fantasy short story. I scribbled down everything I knew about the story in a college-ruled notebook over the course of the wait and the long flight home.

When I got home, the story wasn’t done and I had momentum, so I kept writing the story in short sessions before workdays. I was pretty tired and needed a break from this and the many other writing projects I had, so I resolved to take this story to a logical stopping point, and then take a six-week break from all my projects.

When I did, I found that I was exercising a muscle I’d never used before as far as I could remember: restraint. My usual tendency was to have an idea and start working on it immediately. Now I had strict parameters for myself: that I could make idea write-ups or free-write, but no fiction or nonfiction writing.

Naturally, I still had projects at work. And I continued to paint pictures since that tended to relax me and not be as goal-oriented a project as writing.

The six weeks went by, and I found myself cleaning the house, reading, and exercising to pass the time. The idea write-ups accumulated without guilt or obligation. And I counted down the weeks to when I could start on the novel-length version of the short story I had written.

When I came out of this project hiatus, refreshed and a little crazed by boredom, I was able to plan reasonably. I’m currently working on a finite number of things. The first draft of my fantasy novel. These Medium posts. And painting as usual.

It’s become second nature to capture an idea without the expectation of starting it immediately because, for six weeks, that’s all I did.

Turns out I couldn’t go directly from an interminable list of projects to this reasonable situation. I had to pass through the state of having zero projects first.