Breaking the Ceiling

Writing morning pages (3 pages of stream of consciousness handwriting) before getting down to work is one of the best ways for me to clear my mind and let what’s important for the day surface. Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way and mother of the morning pages practice, advises against reading back your morning pages. And I agree it’s good to let those thoughts go. But when to-dos come up, I still want to collect them from those pages.

So, as soon as a task comes up, even before I’ve written it, I put a dot in the left margin of the line in the exercise book I’m about to write on (inspired by Ryder Carroll’s bullet journal method). I phrase the to-do in a way that I can cross it off right after completing my morning pages. This morning, for example, I wrote “add drawing to scale to renovation project note”, instead of “draw rooms to scale for interior design”. This way, all I had to do was add a bullet to a could-do list I keep in Apple Notes, and I could cross off the dot in the margins as a completed task.

Basically free dopamine ✨

If I forget to phrase my task so cunningly, I still migrate the task to Apple Reminders (if it’s a must-do I want to be reminded of by a visual cue through the iCal widget on my phone), or a relevant could-do list, and simply change the dot into a <, so I can tell it’s been migrated. This practice is also based on Carroll’s rapid logging method.

Tiny tasks, like “check if there’s a status update of Lidl shipment” get completed immediately, following David Allen’s two-minute rule from Getting Things Done.

Together, this practice gets me started on my ramp-up to more difficult tasks.