The Potty-Training Chart that Tracks my Productive Creativity

This hasn’t been the best week for me to produce creative work. Lots of life going on, such as needing a plumber, spending time with friends, and dealing with post-surgery issues. And I have a day job. Of course, that’s all normal.

I’m not independently wealthy so I can’t simply work on creative projects and have other people deal with the problems. I’m not even sure I’d want that. If you aren’t struggling with the day-to-day bullshit of life, what will fuel your creativity?

That said, a little bit of day-to-day bullshit goes a long way. If it crosses a certain threshold, you get burned out and have trouble summoning effort to create.

I found an easy way to keep track of my productive creativity and it helps propel me forward each day to do a little more. Or when it’s a slog, inspires me to keep at it.

It’s really the easiest thing I’ve ever done since I learned how to use the potty.

I published two more productive creativity hacks, which gave me something to track:

When I do work like that, I keep track in my weekly planner. Then I update my monthly planner with little stars, as pictured below.

This method is the simplest thing to track effort and progress, requiring only a minute or so to update.

It’s basically a chore chart, or a potty training chart, where you have a visual presentation of the simplest metric. It’s a bit more complicated with my creative work because I’m tracking units of work from very different projects (novel, blogging, building an application, etc.) but it boils down to “did I do something or didn’t I?”

The first two weeks of the month were spare because it was the run-up-to surgery, and the week of surgery. But once that was out of the way, progress picked up.

It’s a silly game, but I play the game each day and it helps me celebrate the work I’ve done, and builds momentum toward doing more.

It’s not unlike the semi-famous unbroken chain calendar used by J. Seinfeld for writing jokes, and promoted by many others. I track multiple things and give myself a star for each one.

If you want to take some of your creative practices a little more seriously, and build a habit into your day, the combination of monthly, weekly, and daily planning is critical. But it doesn’t have to be difficult.

I put things like trips into a monthly calendar. I put known meeting into my weekly calendar. For each day of that week, I carve out time to work, and remind myself what I’m going to work on.

I also look back at the previous day and give myself a star (on the monthly calendar) for each of those things completed.

Don’t make the planning and tracking the most important thing in your creative life. Keep that stuff simple.

Put the real energy into your creative projects.