We've all been there. You have a great idea for a project then you immediately throw yourself headlong into it.
But slowly the initial inspiration wanes and you move on to something else.
Or your perfectionism kicks in. You keep starting over because it's just not good enough.
Or perhaps as you get into the project you get lost not knowing what action to take next.
In today's episode we'll do a deep dive into ADHD project completion.
Having been a creative professional for the bulk of my career I can let you in on some secrets that creative professionals use to ensure their projects get completed on time without compromising quality.
That can be applied to any of your personal or professional projects.
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Welcome everyone. Thanks for tuning in. I'm your host Michael Joseph Ferguson.
I hope you're all doing well.
In today's episode we will be talking about creative project completion.
How to complete a creative project when you have ADHD challenges.
This episode comes with a PDF slide deck. You can download that for free by going to drummerinthegreatmountain.com/episode124.
I'll leave the link in the description.
So I want to thank you all for joining us in our last live online gathering.
We will be doing another one. We'll be doing that in April.
And we will have some interesting announcements to report at that point.
And just one quick announcement. We will be holding our master class on ADHD time and task management on March 31st and April 7th.
This is an online workshop that is the compilation of best practices of my coaching experience since 2007.
That's almost 20 years. That is crazy.
So this workshop is focused on helping you create systems that support greater accomplishment, consistency and follow through.
And we'll cover both paper based and digital based time management and a hybrid approach to the two.
And I think what's most helpful in this workshop is the first session is all about the strategies, setting things up, getting things prepped.
But the second day is all about the emotional components of time management, the things that throw you off your system.
That second session really is the key piece of the puzzle because we can have the best ideas.
We've put together the time management system. We've bought the planner.
We downloaded the app and we stay with it for a little bit and we can't keep with it.
So we're going to be going through what are those hurdles that keep you from keeping with your time management system and dialing those in.
So this is an interactive online workshop and I would love to have you join us.
If you're interested, go to drummerinthegreatmountain.com/workshop.
And we've also included starting at the beginning of the year, sliding scale pricing for those of you who can't afford the full price of the workshop.
If you're interested, go to drummerinthegreatmountain.com/workshop.
Okay, so how do we complete creative projects when we have ADHD wiring?
What do we do? How do we do it? Let's zoom out for a second.
So creativity is one of the greatest gifts of being a human being.
Being creative is life itself flowing through you.
That's the way I look at it. And taking a creative project into form isn't always easy.
Expecting it to be easy does the entire process a disservice.
I think we live in a world where we try to make everything easy.
AI is going to fix everything. It's going to make everything easy.
We want to find the shortcut that's just going to make it really easy for us to complete this thing that we're wanting to do.
And I'm telling you, as someone who's worked in the creative fields for a long time,
I don't think that's a winning strategy.
It can be helpful to accept that for us, a certain amount of struggle will be part of the process.
We need to accept that struggle is going to be part of it.
And whether or not you're into music, photography, art, filmmaking,
filmmaking, entrepreneurship, woodworking, podcasts, culinary crafts, writing, web design, architecture, interior design,
graphic design, fashion, ceramics, whatever the thing that you're into,
these principles apply to all of them, especially in completing a project that involves more than just a day or two's work.
So if you're writing a song, and this is where I started with my creative process with, this songwriting,
I think I can probably track it back to that.
That's something that I at least personally got down to a process that could take a day or two.
It wasn't a long process from start to completion.
And I want to encourage you to start there.
We're going to talk about that in a second.
Building the habit of completion is so important when you're developing your creative skill set.
And especially if you're really struggling right now with a big creative project,
ask yourself, did you have some smaller completions under your belt first?
Because they teach you so much about the creative process, and you build that muscle of completion.
So common challenges that arise during a creative project, I think many of you can chime in and add yours to it,
but these are the ones that I've identified that seem to be universal.
So too many ideas.
Which one to pick?
I've got all these different ideas for projects.
Which one do I even choose to start with?
Getting lost, confused, and overwhelmed.
Maintaining consistency as you're completing the project.
The initial inspiration wanes.
Then what do you do?
There's the energy for completing it isn't there.
Getting distracted by other projects and ideas.
How many of you have done that?
You start the project, you're like, "Oh, it's the best project in the world."
You're telling people about it.
And then two weeks later or a month later, you're like, "I don't really want to do this."
"Oh, wait, wait, that project. I think I really should be working on that project."
And then on it goes to the next thing, and to the next thing, and to the next thing.
And that feels good for a time, but over after a while, your need for accomplishment starts to really kick in.
And you start to feel like, "God, can I not finish a project?"
And finally, things keep changing.
You're always changing something in the project, then you have to start over.
And you're like, "No, no, no, I changed my idea."
Then you start over again.
And always restarting becomes one of the big challenges that many of us face.
So let's take these one at a time.
So too many ideas. Where do I start? I've got all these ideas. Where do I even start?
So it's important to remember that our brain is an idea-generating machine.
And I'm talking about people like us, people who are wired with ADHD.
We have hyper-creative brains that are constantly generating new ideas.
That's what you got. That's what you came in with. That's what you got to work with.
And so the way to think about this, this is where I kind of got some peace with it myself, was
if you think about a tree, the tree puts out thousands of blossoms.
So those blossoms then become fruits that become seeds that create new trees.
But the reality is maybe one or two trees actually come from all of those blossoms.
So if you think about it, you have all these ideas, right?
But maybe only one or two of those are the ones that you actually need to follow through on.
And so only a few ideas are worth pursuing. Be selective.
It's not about, it's not a race to figure out how many projects you can complete.
It's about completing the ones that feel most connected to you.
They're going to move you forward in some meaningful way, either with your craft
or something that you're going to create that's going to really inspire someone else.
But if it's just another good idea, I mean, you can hop on chat, GPT or Gemini
and you can type in, you can get a thousand ideas.
So like no longer are humans the ones actually generating ideas, which is scary.
And I have major issues with AI.
But just keep in mind, just because it's a good idea doesn't necessarily mean you should pursue it.
There should be a deeper connection with the idea, especially if it's a longer term project.
And many of us get caught here.
We think of it's a great idea and we just start working on it instead of taking deliberation time
to ask yourself some deeper questions about that project.
So once you've fleshed out, okay, this is the idea I'm going to follow through on
or maybe you've got a project that's already going highly recommended for me personally.
If it was a game changer, create a mind map, start with the mind map,
put the name of the project in the center, and I want to give you some suggestions on the main branches of the map
that you may want to put in every project.
Because when I think about all the projects I do, these are the ones that keep showing up as branches
that just naturally I need to have on the map.
So to start with, start with goals.
Like why are you doing this in the first place?
If you feel like that's a waste of time, you shouldn't be working on the project.
You should be able to sit down for five minutes and discuss with yourself,
here's why I'm doing this project in the first place.
What do you want to achieve by this project?
Where is it going?
What is it at the end of it?
What do you want to feel like?
What is the product?
What is it specifically that you've created?
Just defining that really helps set the trajectory.
Especially if you need to define what the deliverables are for yourself or for someone else.
That's so important because it really then takes all of those different ideas that are floating around in your head
and distills them down into, it's going to be a this.
And you can point to it and say, I'm moving towards that.
Otherwise our brain tends to stay in that kind of mercurial, floaty creative space
and it doesn't bring it down into form.
Okay, it's a script, it's going to be 50 pages long
and it's going to focus on this particular topic.
And I'll know when I'm done, when the script is done.
So just having that clarity is so important when you're mapping out a project.
And then two, another branch, so goals is one branch of the mind map.
Another main branch could be milestones.
What are the milestones you need to hit along the way?
And you don't have to map them all out in the beginning, but try to get at least the first two or three
where you know if I get to this place, I've completed a certain chunk of the project.
So a milestone could be with a script, the milestone could be complete three pages.
Third branch would be notes, which is as you go through life, you're going to compile ideas and thoughts about this project.
What I do is I send emails to myself with the name of the project in the subject
and I will throw the notes in the base in the body of the email.
And then I will just copy and paste those into the map.
So I have this sort of junk drawer of ideas that I can go through and then I have to sift through
and then move them around in the map so I can see where they may fit.
Or a lot of times I just let some of the ideas go.
We're going to generate a lot of ideas, not all of them you're going to actually implement into the project.
So a notes branch is really helpful for a mind map.
Project flow may be another branch where you start to map out, okay, the project starts here and then it's going to be here
and then it's going to be here and those might be your milestones as well.
You might just project flow and milestones may be interconnected.
But some way for you to see like, here's the map, here's the direction.
The first thing we're going to do is pre-project development and then we're going to finish the script
and then we're going to cast whatever the form of your creative project is, having some kind of linear project flow.
The two more that I would suggest are your team.
Have a branch called team and even if you're working on this by yourself,
I want to encourage you to always have a team just for encouragement and support.
Maybe you're working with other people and so it's going to be really important for you to have that as a branch.
So you can put their names down or put the roles down that you can start then filling in.
And then finally schedule, which is actually the specific next steps that you might change that to action items.
It's the branch where you really get down to the specifics.
It's like, this needs to happen by this time.
This needs to happen by this time.
Or you just have the next chunk of your project and you're going to say, these are the actions I need to do.
So often in that branch for me, I will just put the date and I'll write out, okay, these are the things I need to get done by that particular date.
So the branches could be goals, milestones, notes, project flow, support team or just team and schedule or action items.
Both of those are interchangeable.
Now moving on to source material.
So I am a huge proponent of having source material going into any type of creative project.
So I've written books.
I've created new albums of music.
I have produced other people's albums.
I have worked on web design projects.
I've worked on entrepreneurial projects.
Within all of those, there's a thread of finding something that has already been taken into form that you are inspired by.
So for example, when I wrote the book, The Drum and the Great Mountain, I had already been a creative professional for a long time.
So I knew this going into it.
So I looked around and I said, well, what is the form?
What is the source material that I can pull from that will inspire me to get to the place I want to get to with this book?
And the book I chose was Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.
It's a book that's been around for a long time.
It has a long shelf life.
It has inspired a whole community around it.
So much of actually what happened with The Drum and the Great Mountain, I can credit to having a really good source material.
There's nothing.
If you read my book and you read The Artist's Way, they're nothing like each other.
They're completely different.
But it is a book that I saw.
It's something that has been taken all the way to completion and someone who has already done what you want to do.
And so just by having that physically around you or if it's digital, you can take a look at it.
It's like a movie or something.
You can pull from it that sense of completion.
There's something about the power of that.
It's almost energetic.
It's like this thing is done and it's in a form.
Someone took it all the way to completion.
So I want to encourage you to pick your source material for the project that you're working on early on.
Don't just start from zero.
And some people think, well, if I just start with some source material, then I'm not going to be tuning into my natural creative expression.
I'm going to be copying.
But that's not what happens.
Most of the time, what you're going to do is you're going to take it in your own direction, but it's going to give you insights into completion.
And that's what you need.
There's going to be things that you're going to hear or you're going to study that she's going to go, oh, they had already figured that piece out.
I don't have to reinvent the wheel.
The other side of this is you can go to a thousand classes on creativity and just keep learning about the process and never start.
And that is not recommended either.
So choose good source material.
Pick one or two things.
Don't pick 20.
That's a strong suggestion.
Otherwise, and I've been there before we have too many ideas and too many pieces of source material.
And then it just becomes a jumbled mess.
Okay.
Moving on, getting lost, confused and overwhelmed.
How do you stay on track?
So in terms of staying on track, have your map start out with your mind map.
That's going to help recreate it multiple times if necessary.
Ensure you haven't made the project too big.
That is so essential.
When you start, ask yourself, can I make this smaller?
Can you can press it down into something that's more manageable, especially if you've not tackled larger projects?
Start with smaller ones first and set doable milestones.
Know what the next milestone is at least in the project and make sure you can hit it so that early on you can build some momentum and always have at least one supports person.
Don't do it alone.
If you're starting on a creative project and you are not very good at completing them, get at least one person that your support person that you can check in with.
They can ask you how you're doing.
They don't have to know every single thing about the project, but they can keep asking you, are you on track?
Maybe schedule a meeting with them once a month so you can just tell them, here's what's going on with it.
When you try to do it all by yourself, it is a lot of work.
It's not necessary.
Share the process with another person at least.
And on low days, when you're having a day when you sit down and you want to work on your project and you just don't have much energy, pick the easiest item on the list.
This is from personal experience.
I know that it's going to feel better to get something done than to have a session where you do nothing.
Try to get at least one little thing done that day on those days when you're not feeling inspired, you're feeling pretty flat.
If you already have the map, you'll probably already be able to figure out, okay, well, I can do this one little thing on it today.
And then I can at least feel like you've kept some continuity so that when you come back, when you're really inspired again, you're not going to feel like, oh, I'm starting from scratch again.
You already got something done. You can build upon that.
So how do we stay consistent?
So the first point is aim for relative consistency.
You will slip up. It's inevitable. Get good at getting back up again.
I can't stress that piece enough. Your resiliency is how you complete a project.
So get back up again.
Aim for relative consistency.
If you have a good flow going and then you fall off for a little bit, okay, no problem.
You get back up again.
You don't start from scratch.
You don't just beat yourself up and then move on to another project.
You come back and you try to get that momentum going again.
Lean on your accountability person.
When you're having a challenge staying consistent, if you have some regular meeting set up with someone who's maybe neurotypical, who's really good at just being on time and showing up, that's to your advantage.
You can just tell them, here's what's going on.
Or you may be able to discuss with them a challenge that you're trying to figure out on the project that's keeping you from moving forward.
And often if you just tell them, listen, I need to just talk.
I don't need any advice. I need to just talk this through.
Can you just listen to me for five minutes?
Often we can talk ourselves through what we need to do to get going and figure out what the challenge was and get back on track again.
In terms of staying consistent, do not schedule your creative projects after a long day's work.
Don't do it.
I talk to so many coaching clients that do this and then they feel miserable that nothing is moving forward.
Schedule those projects when you can give them your full attention.
That may mean it's on the weekend or you're scheduling days off where you can work on them.
If you find yourself doing this where you're scheduling your creative projects that you really care about at the end of the day when you're really tired and you're not making progress, stop doing it.
Pick days that you can focus on it because one good day is going to give you the inspiration that may last you for a whole month.
But if you're constantly just tired and you're just not feeling good and you're not making progress on it, the whole thing is going to collapse.
So one or two good creativity days are what you're aiming for.
If it's something really important, take the day off, schedule a day off, do what you need to do.
I know many of you have families and you have busy schedules, but if you care about your creative project, give it the time and energy it needs.
Set some boundaries around it so you can make them happen.
Okay, so how do we stay inspired?
What to do when the inspiration wanes?
Okay, so first is you lean on your source material.
That's what it's there for.
If you picked one or two things that are your source material, keep coming back to that and just reviewing that.
If it was inspiring to you when you first looked at it or listened to it or experienced it, that's going to help you at this time when you're feeling flat.
So come back to your source material, see what that can give you.
You may need to find some new sources of inspiration.
That's fine.
Go out, go to a gallery.
If you're an artist, go to a gallery.
If you're a filmmaker, go to the movies.
Do what you need to do to get the spark back because after a while we do need that spark to keep us going.
Otherwise, it does become monotonous.
It does become overwhelming.
So come back to what inspiration do you need?
What do you need to bring into your field to keep you going on that particular project?
And then pick one aspect of what you've done that feels right and expand upon it.
And this is something that I really keep coming back to in my creative life, is that you may have worked on something and you've created one piece of it that's really good.
And then a lot of the other stuff is kind of like, "It's okay. It's not great."
So then come back to that core thing and see if you can just build around that because that's sort of the creative hub that you can work from.
That's the seed. That's the kernel that's going to maybe suggest other things in terms of the project.
And again, go on an art date, visit museums, go to concerts, attend talks, go to movies, take a class, attend a seminar, reach out to a mentor.
Do what you need to do to get the inspiration back.
Most of it, what I can tell you though is showing up, you can summon inspiration.
It is something that can be called in.
You learn that if you're making a living in the creative arts, many of you know this, it will come.
You just have to show, showing up is half the battle.
And I know for me, finishing the book I'm working on now, there's days where I had zero inspiration.
I had no ideas and I'd sit down and I'm like, "Okay, this is the time I scheduled."
And boom, it just comes.
Like something will come, something that I'll start moving forward on something and that will, it'll start to build.
So much of it is showing up.
So, when in doubt, show up.
But if you need that extra inspiration, make it happen.
Don't just stay stuck.
What happens when we get distracted?
How do we stay in course when we're constantly bouncing around from one thing to the next?
So, one advice I can give you is keep capturing your ideas.
Often we think, "Well, I'm not working on that project so I can't even think about it."
So, what you want to do is be able to, you're going to go through life and your ideas will come to you for other projects.
Always capture them.
Write them down.
It's okay to capture those ideas because often that will quiet them down and then you can move back to your project.
So, because you may come back to it later or there may be something from another project that you're thinking about that may be able to be fed back into the project you're working on.
Having a good internal dialogue in terms of you're sitting and you're working on the project and you're feeling like, "Okay, this project might be more interesting."
Having that kind of talk to yourself where you say, "Let's wrap up on this project first. Then we can schedule the next one."
So, having internal dialogue is really healthy because these aspects of us are always like bouncing around doing this or that.
And we need to have, we have to cultivate the part of us that steps in and goes, "No, we're going to do this right now."
And exercise can really help with that.
Meditation can really help with that to build that strong inner dialogue.
So, I want to encourage those practices as those directly relate to the habit of completion.
And keep asking yourself, "What's the next step?"
When you're lost, when you're off course, just ask yourself, "What's the very next step?"
We often get three or four steps away from where we're at right in this moment and we need to come back to, "What is the very next thing I need to do?"
I'm constantly doing that and it really helps grounds you and it gives you like, so you don't have to figure out this thing that's out in the future.
You can just say, "What's my very next step?" And focus on that.
And then what we'll talk about here is building a habit of completion. Is the muscle you need to build?
It is a muscle. It is a mental muscle that you can build over time.
So, remind yourself how good it will feel to have this project completed when you're veering off course and you're losing momentum.
Just remind yourself, all future projects are weighing on this project getting done.
When you complete this project, you're building that muscle that can be used for the next project.
If you abandon this project, the next project is going to be that much harder because you never took this one to completion.
And that's why going back to the beginning, making sure you don't take on too big of a project so that you are not giving yourself that wonderful gift of completion.
And also just be okay with it taking longer than expected.
It's most likely going to take longer than you expect. You can almost guarantee it.
The way our brain works, it's going to trick you into thinking, "Oh, it's just going to take it."
Maybe two months, three months. And the reality is it may take a year, two years.
But just remind yourself that it will most likely take longer than you expect.
And from that place, then you can come back and go, "Okay, I knew it was probably going to take longer than expected.
I really am losing momentum, but I'm going to get back and I'm going to set the next milestone and I'm going to try to hit it."
So I want to come back to a point I made earlier, which is it's all too common for us to think we can take on a huge project right away.
When we're emotionally not prepared for it, we don't have the systems yet and we've not completed smaller projects.
Don't make that mistake because it leads to disappointment and low self-esteem.
Build that muscle up over time.
And when you're sitting down and working on a project, set a realistic goal for each session.
When you sit down and say, "Okay, I'm scheduling this time to work on the project," before you start, set your end point.
What do you want to hit at the end of that session?
And do your best to hit that particular goal by the end of the session.
And maybe about 90% of the time you do, 10% you don't.
But you'll start to learn, "Oh, I just set too high a bar. I need the next session. I need to set even smaller bar."
And you may think, "Well, I'm never going to get this project done if I do this."
But that accumulation of completion, again, building up the habit of completion, it's taking a session, setting a goal and hitting the goal.
That's what you're looking for.
And that's part of how you build that muscle, especially on bigger projects.
You need to be able to do that if you want to complete that bigger project.
And then finally, working on projects with others is not the same thing as working on your own project.
And I made that mistake early on.
I thought, "Okay, I've worked with all these other people and I've worked on other projects, so my project should be easy.
I've already done all these other projects."
It's not the same thing.
You need to give the challenge the respect it deserves because it is hard for us to have an idea and take it all the way to completion.
It's not always easy.
Maybe you have a few of those that happened where you've had an idea and you did it and it was really easy.
Good for you because you are in the minority.
Most of us struggle.
And we want to bring in as much love and joy and inspiration into the process as possible.
And you also need to respect that there is a certain level of grit that you need to develop if you're really interested in completing creative projects.
Okay, so that's my list.
That's my how to complete a creative project.
I hope that was helpful.
I wanted to do that while I was in the midst of completing the new book.
Very excited about it coming out very soon.
And for those of you who would like to join us, our next ADHD time and task management online workshop happens on March 31st and April 7th.
We will be talking all about this.
How do we build our systems?
How do we build our time management systems so that we can get things done in a way that feels comfortable to us so we can keep those systems that we start for ourselves?
We get the planner, we get the apps, we get things set up so that we can keep with them instead of starting with the time management system and then falling off again.
So if you're interested, go to drummerinthegreatmountain.com/workshop.
And until next time, be well.
Thanks for joining us.
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