When it comes to creative work, why is it so hard to get down to business? In this blog post, Justin shares what he's learned about productivity in creative work over the last 10 or so years.

When it comes to creative work, why is it so hard to get down to business? You just have to outline the bare bones of the course, write the campaign strategy, or sketch a few logo ideas. You know: It won’t actually take very long. Just a few minutes! Maybe ten (fifteen tops). But you can’t seem to find that time.

Or is it you? Have you lost your edge? Usually the pressure works in your favor. The squeeze makes your best work emerge (are you toothpaste?). But not this time. And, really, not the last few times. What changed?

I’ll tell you the secret at the top. Creative work takes a really long time. You think fifteen minutes, but in truth you have to feed it hours. Wait, that can’t be right. Right?

Let’s start at the end and work backwards to tally up what actually goes into the “real work.” You know the to-do you’re thinking of takes fifteen minutes. But you had to write two bad drafts before this great one (it happens), so say forty-five minutes.

You managed your coworkers’ demands on your time today. Guarding your calendar kept interruptions away. As your mother wryly used to say, you don't need peace and quiet all the time, but a piece of quiet would work wonders. Making the space in your day took five minutes ten different times.

Maybe you took a walk too, which really helped you see today’s true priorities and get your metabolism going. Walk: fifteen minutes.

You had the energy because you ate breakfast, not just coffee. Even if breakfast came from a cereal box or a freezer, it took an extra ten minutes to prep and eat.

You felt clear-headed when you woke up today, which means you slept better last night. That took an extra hour of eyes-closed time. To get to sleep, you read in bed for thirty minutes instead of clearing your inbox for tomorrow. You made dinner a balanced, unwinding meal too—that cost another hour and a half, even if you left the dishes for later (they need to soak, right?).

The motivation for last night’s dinner came from the self-care you did before it. You squeezed in a short run, meditated, read a novel, or caught up with those friends you’ve been playing calendar tag with for weeks even though you really do like them (you do!). It only took an hour. These conscious actions told your inner kid—the one who’s coming up with these great ideas out of nowhere today—that you care for her or him, too. They paid it forward at crunch time.

So, the real work only took fifteen minutes. But making it possible required an additional five hours and forty-five minutes. Just for those fifteen minutes! The grand total comes to six hours.

Your creative work itself formed the tip of a ginormous temporal iceberg.

Knowing that this is how creative tasks work means the end of your guilt about not getting to that to-do before. Instead, acknowledge the hours of work and self-enriching time you must give to the true task of creating your own optimal conditions. Lay the groundwork. If the real work only took fifteen minutes, anyone could do it all the time, including you.

Going to yoga? Catching a matinee? Reading a book? Suddenly, that’s time very well spent. Give yourself credit for all those hours being part of the process, even part of the work itself.

We at Pathwright build our platform to be a clear, pleasant place to do your creative work when you’re ready. We can’t create more hours in your day, but we can make sure you don’t waste any of the ones you do have. We’re all in this together.

We couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill we had no way of switching off or even slowing down. Recovering a more natural rhythm of work and rest humans are wired for, here are five benefits of working in 6-week cycles that we can't do without.

During the summer after I graduated from college a sinking feeling began to creep up on me. While I'd readily said "goodbye" to school for good, now I was looking at a seemingly-endless expanse of time ahead of me with no new semesters, long breaks, advancements or graduations to look forward to... just work and whatever I made of it. I like work and making my own path through it, but something about this horizon of unstructured sameness unsettled me enough that I got very close to signing up for more school.

Over the following decade, I got used to the never-ending stretch of time, and we began to build Pathwright as a never-ending series of projects. (Software is never "done".) We'd start and finish projects and then pick up the next. We hit (and missed) plenty of launch dates in no particular rhythm. We tried out many project management tools and methods from kanban boards to project management software to sticky notes and saw marginal improvements.

In other words, we worked pretty much the same way as every other company. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill that we couldn't switch off or slow down. As the product and team grew and projects stacked up, we ran into frequent periods of intense work and subsequent burnout. After a particularly rough stretch of time leading up to launching Pathwright 2, we knew we had to get off the treadmill. That's when we stumbled across this article about how Basecamp works in six week cycles. We've learned a lot from Basecamp over the years and had nothing to lose by giving this method a try in the new year of 2017.

Most new ideas we try on for size work to a degree, and we adapt them a bit for marginal overall improvement. But this idea was not like that: It worked immediately. It worked amazingly. And it's still working.

Now, it's hard for us to imagine not working in six-week cycles that we refer to as "Trails." In addition to recovering the more natural rhythm of work and rest we humans are wired for, here are five benefits we can't do without:

1. Time-boxing projects into six-weeks helps us plan smaller & smarter.

It's notoriously impossible to predict accurate timelines or costs for software projects (and that's true of any multifaceted, creative project). Humans are simply no good at predicting the future. Once we finally accepted our finite planning powers, we gained a tremendous amount of mental clarity and focus from simply limiting our time horizon for projects to "what can we realistically accomplish in just six weeks?"

As for how many projects we plan during one trail, we followed Basecamp's lead and commit to:

⛰ Expeditions: A few bigger projects that will take four to six weeks.

🏞 Hikes: Seven to ten smaller projects that take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

After the first few trails of taking on quite a bit too much, we added a "Notch Day" smack in the middle of the six weeks that acts as a checkpoint to review project progress, share feedback, and help each other edit down projects to even smaller sizes when we can.

2. We get to hit the reset button every six weeks.

While we try to keep projects within the six weeks, we don't stress out if we don't quite make it. Instead, we hit the "reset" button during the two weeks in-between trails.

We call these two in-between weeks 🏕 "Camp weeks" which are a break from focused projects to focus instead on review, exploration, and planning at a slower pace.

Any projects not finished in the previous trail are reframed and reshaped as a new project for the next trail or put on a waiting list for a future trail.

3. There's time to look back, think, and plan.

Our 🏕Camp Weeks in-between each Trail are a welcome respite. We take a slower pace, re-orient ourselves towards our goals and mission, and begin to map out the next six-weeks of work.

Camp weeks not only provide us with a nice break, but also help us zoom out from periods of detailed focus to reflect on our mission, strategy, and goals. This big picture review every six weeks helps us avoid the common pitfall of prioritizing the urgent over long term impact.

4. We have a rhyme and reason for saying "later."

Before we worked in trails, it was more difficult to tell team members and partners with a great idea or pressing need that we'd have to get to it "later." While later is necessary 93% of the time, it could come across as subjective and arbitrary when our only framework for planning was whatever we decided was next in line. Additionally, we spent a lot of time and energy attempting to synthesize all this new feedback with current plans as it came in (which was all the time).

Now that we work in Trails, we can simply share that we'll consider the idea during an upcoming Camp Week and get back with them — and then forget about it until then. While we still have to say "later" to most requests, at least there's a rhyme and reason behind it and our team and customers have all generally found knowing the rhythm of our work reassuring.

5. We get to share more of what we've accomplished.

🏕 Camp Weeks carve out enough time to share what we accomplished in the previous trail with our team and customers every seven weeks. We call this 👩🏼‍🏫 "Show & Tell" and it's become a something we look forward to. It's a bit like a mini-graduation we get to experience together six times a year. We're twelve trails in now, and I'm still amazed by how much our team accomplishes in just six weeks.

If you feel like you're running on a treadmill, experiencing bouts of "sprints" and burnout,  then  it's time for you to try something new as well. We unequivocally recommend giving some form of this work & rest rhythm a try and would love to hear how it works for you.

Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email lydia@pathwright.com with thoughts, questions, or topic suggestions.

The Secret to Creative Work

5 Reasons Why We Work in 6-Week Cycles

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