Honor your projects

Shoghi Effendi, Guardian of the Bahá’í Faith, laid out the design for the gardens and buildings on Mount Carmel. They were completed in the decades after his passing. (Image by Ekaterina Vysotina)

For years — literally years! — I wrote each blog post on the day it was to be published.

I wanted to “get ahead” and have more posts in the queue, but I just didn’t quite have the capacity.

The downside to this approach was that I was always in emergency mode. That gets stressful.

The upside is that I learned a lot about prioritization and the value of creating urgency. I learned to write when I didn’t have anything to write, to focus in unfamiliar or uncomfortable circumstances, and to ship my work no matter what.

These days, the additional urgency of having to write and publish an entire article by 9:00 AM every weekday is more than I can handle. I have a commute that can last anywhere from 30 to 90 minutes, and that’s only if nothing goes wrong. I got rear-ended in January and popped a tire in March, so things do indeed go wrong.

Therefore, I make sure that I have all of my blog posts for the week ready to go before the week begins.

However, I’m observing that, because the urgency has disappeared, the buffer of ready-to-be-published pieces disappears quickly, too. For years, I was able to fit the writing in without fail. Now, the writing doesn’t get done in a given day because I’m allowing other obligations to interfere. I don’t have to squeeze it in today, so I don’t.

On the one hand, I could find this mildly amusing. I’m already planning do some extra writing on the weekend, so it will be fine.

But what of the other projects that have never been given sufficient time or attention? With no urgency to bring them to the forefront, they will always be buried by other things (especially the things that I’m supposed to do for other people).

This is a challenge that I know is shared by many of us. The thing we really want to do never makes it onto the to-do list. It never gets scheduled on the calendar. It languishes in the “someday maybe” pile until that magical day when we complete all of our tasks, meetings, chores, and communications by noon and have the rest of the day to dedicate to this special project.

My experience of blogging has shown me that we have to honor our projects if we want them to see the light of day. We have to put them in the “no matter what” position in our days, ahead of email and Slack. Otherwise, the time allotted to everything else will expand to fill the space we hoped to give to the work we are longing to do.

If you want to honor your projects, dedicate yourself to doing them during the time of day when you tend to think most clearly. Make sure the important people in your life know what you are intending to do and how they can support you. Consider what you are willing to give up or postpone, for an hour or a day, so that you don’t have to postpone your special project.

The scary part is that you might have no idea whether your special project is going to be “worth it.” Probably, no one is asking for it and no one will notice if it doesn’t get done.

My assertion is that if it matters to you, that’s enough to justify honoring your project. And the outcome is not just some far-off dream. I have found that there are immediate benefits to doing this. When you’re finally pursuing your quarry, you will have a new sense of peace in your life. You won’t lie awake at night wondering when or if you’re ever going to follow your dream. You’ll smile, knowing that you’re doing it. You did it today, and you’ll do it tomorrow. That is one of the best feelings there is.

When you honor your projects, you are living your life in accordance with your most deeply-held desires. That well outweighs the inconvenience of missing a few emails or lagging behind on some routine tasks.

There will always be forms to fill out and floors to vacuum. It’s up to you whether there will also be creative work and new adventures. It may seem like there’s nowhere to fit them in. That’s the challenge, and overcoming it is the way we create the legacy we are longing for.