I (Todd Henry) spend a lot of time interacting with brilliant people and studying great minds, and the more I do, the more I’ve become convinced that how we define greatness ultimately defines our life.
If you define greatness as the pursuit of a bigger title and office, that will define your life.
If you define greatness as accumulating a lot of knowledge about something, that will define your life.
If you define greatness as being the best at performing some task, that will define your life.
If you define greatness as loving your family well, that will define your life.
If you define greatness as choosing to engage every single act and interaction in your life with purpose, that will define your life.
How we define greatness defines us. In the end, it’s probably the single biggest determinant of the course of our life.
I (Todd Henry) am hopeful that you’ve taken my encouragement throughout this book that the main reason to establish practices is to increase your capacity for insight and brilliance, not simply to cram more things into your life or to hack your creative process in some way. Again, there is no formula for effective creating and there are no shortcuts to experiencing brilliance when you need it. You will see results only when you are willing to let go of anxiety around short-term outcomes and pour yourself into activity that increases your capacity to experience future insights.
Over time, many of the practices in this book will become second nature. They will simply become intertwined with your lifestyle and creative process. But like anything else worthwhile, your first efforts will require a tremendous amount of forethought and follow-through. Once you’ve persisted in these choices, however, you will likely begin to see some welcome by-products in your life. Though it may take time to see these results, effective creating begins the moment you decide to reclaim the natural rhythms of your creative process and structure your life around them. This will require intentionality, choice, and discipline.
Intentionality means that you are approaching your life in a systematic way and not haphazardly. You know that you’re about and you’re working a system to make it happen. It means that you must constantly remind yourself of not only what you’re doing, but why you’re doing it (Checkpoints). You don’t want your practices to turn into unhealthy, counterproductive habits or for the system to turn upon itself because you’ve disengaged from the why behind the what. This is like poison to your creative process.
Any of your practices can become more harmful than helpful if you don’t adjust or prune them from season to season. This is the primary reason for the Quarterly Checkpoint. It is a check-in to help you evaluate how things are going and to establish the practices you think you will need in the next quarter in order to meet the demands of your life. It’s like climbing a really tall tree to get your bearing and take a look at the upcoming terrain. It may seem like a temporary diversion, but this can make you much more effective as you continue your journey.
The Quarterly Checkpoint is the longest horizon planning you will do. While many productivity experts recommend annual retreats to examine goals and objectives, I (Todd Henry) find that these are often too long term to provide an accurate analysis of upcoming work. Ideally you will be able to take an entire day for this quarterly session, but, understandably, you may not be able to break away from your life in order to do so. If this is the case, the Quarterly Checkpoint can take place an hour at a time in the mornings or evenings over the course of a week.
There are two main priorities for the Quarterly Checkpoint: establish your focus for the upcoming three months and set general rails around your practices.
The one constant in the life of a creative is change, which means that you must regularly ensure that the plans you’ve made and the practices you’ve established are still relevant. The Monthly Checkpoint is about reviewing how the past month went, and recommitting to, or changing rails, around practices for the upcoming month. It’s a way to gain a more clear perspective on your current priorities and workload.
The Monthly Checkpoint is an hour per month, preferably at the very end of a month (to plan for the upcoming one). The goal is to recognize trends in your work and to do some strategic thinking about which types of practices will help you most in the coming weeks.
Challenges: What are the biggest projects you’ll be working on in the coming month? Do each of them have Challenges? If not, create them.
Big 3: What are your Big 3 for the month? Write Challenges for each of the Big 3 if they don’t already exist.
Clustering: As you examine the upcoming month, are there days or weeks where you can cluster project work in order to focus more deeply? If so, plan ahead by marking those days on your calendar.
The Weekly Checkpoint is where many tactical decisions will be made regarding the practices. As your schedule is shaping up for the upcoming week, you’ll have a much better sense of how and where the practices will fit most effectively into your life. I (Todd Henry) like to schedule my Weekly Checkpoint on Friday afternoon because it gives me a cliff-top perch from which to view my upcoming week and plot my course. Others I’ve worked with prefer to wait until first thing on Monday morning, or even to do this checkpoint over the weekend. If you have an organizational system that you’re already comfortable with, you can also find ways of working your weekly checkpoint into your existing systems. For example, I’ve used David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology for years, and I like to lump my weekly checkpoint in with the weekly review suggested by David’s system. Whatever works for you is fine, but be consistent.
During your Weekly Checkpoint you will think about how to implement the practices into your upcoming week. Here is a complete list of the practices we discussed in the book:
Focus: Challenges, the Big 3, Clustering
Relationships: Circles, Head-to-Heads, Core Team
Energy: Whole-Life Planning, Pruning
Stimuli: Study Plan, Notation, Purposeful Experience
Hours: Idea Time, Unnecessary Creating
Block off twenty minutes on your schedule for the Checkpoint, then work through each of the practices and where appropriate schedule them in your calendar.
Remember that the objective of the methods described in this book is to establish a supporting infrastructure—a rhythm—that will provide stability and increased creative capacity. It will work only if you are diligent and consistent about incorporating the practices into your life. In order to do so effectively, you need to occasionally take a few steps back and think about your current needs.
The purpose of road signs is to keep drivers on the right course. If they appear too frequently, they simply become noise and are ignored. If they appear too infrequently, they are useless, because drivers are always unsure of whether they’re headed in the right direction. In a similar way, you need to plan checkpoints at specific intervals in your life to ensure that you are still on the right course but not so frequently that so little has changed that you might be tempted to ignore them. These checkpoints help you establish and cultivate the practices discussed in this book in a way that they will facilitate meaningful engagement in your work.
To stay on course, this kind of rhythm analysis must be both long- and short-term. This is no different from what you probably already do in many areas of your life, though you may never have thought to apply this kind of strategic thinking to your creative process. A little bit of thought and planning time go a long way toward ensuring that you’re not falling into the efficiency trap but are instead focusing on effectiveness.
When we spend much of our time in on-demand creating, we can quickly lose touch with the passions that fuel our best work. We grow used to leveraging our abilities for the sole purpose of meeting others’ expectations, and much of it is driven by hitting our marks rather than by exploring new possibilities. The ironic part is that this personal creative passion is the most critical thing we bring to the work we do. Creating on demand often causes us to lose the edge that fuels our best work and sometimes causes us to shrink from risk because of the potential consequences of failure.
When we create unnecessarily, we are setting our own agenda. We have permission to try new things, develop new skills, and make things solely for ourselves. If we fail, it’s no big deal because we’re the client. We can take as much or as little time as we need to get it right. The main purpose is to put our ideas into fixed form and to attempt things that we might not get to try in our day job. We can stretch ourselves, explore fringe ideas that intimidate us, and make things that no one but us will ever see. Without this practice in our life, we can become creatively stuck. We may experience a backup of ideas and thoughts, and the weight of all that we’re not doing becomes a source of resentment and even guilt. We may feel like we’re subverting our own life and passions for the sake of everyone else.
As the old saying goes, if you want to know what’s really important to you, take a look at your bank statement and your calendar. No matter what you say about your priorities, where you spend money and your time will prove them out. If you really believe that ideas are important to you, start putting your resources behind it. Begin by setting aside time for the sole purpose of generating ideas.
How much time? I (Todd Henry) recommend beginning with an hour a week. One hour, predictably scheduled, no exceptions and no violations. It’s an appointment with yourself, a commitment to spend uninterrupted time on generating new ideas, not working on old ones. If you’re like many creatives, you probably spend much of your week in execution mode. This time is not about execution or pragmatics; it is purely about new possibilities.
This is not time to strategize, write copy, design, or in any other way execute an idea you’ve already had. This is not time to do work; this is time to think about work. You are generating new ideas, not developing old ones. You are tilling the soil and planting seeds. While you may not always reap a harvest during these times, you are investing in future insights.
