“There is always more work to do, you know?”

I’m 90 words off hitting my fiction target for the day, and getting to tick the left-hand box on my monthly streak tracker. It’s occurring late today, but my partner is asleep and there’s an evening of work before me…and I’ll be stopping once those 90 words are written. As I mentioned in my last post, the upper limit is as important to me as the minimum I need to get done.

I bang on about having hard edges on your creative practice because I’ve seen the results of not having limits on my work–to whit, I spend all my time trying to get things done and end up doing less.

So it was interesting to see Austin Kleon talking about the same thing on his blog today, courtesy of a question he was asked about always feeling like you can and should be doing more creative work:

“Yeah, always. If you get into that productivity trap, there’s always going to be more work to do, you know?”

Working with Time, AustinKleon.com

He goes on to talk about his own practice, which largely involves working regular hours like he’s a banker, showing up at the office and checking in.

I’ve always been a time-based worker. You know, like, ‘did I sit here for 3 hours and try?’ I don’t have a word count when I sit down to write. It’s all about sitting down and trying to make something happen in that time period — and letting those hours stack up.

Working with Time, AustinKleon.com

Admittedly, I’m a word-count writer rather than time-based, but it’s serving the same purpose. Focusing in making a little chunk of work happen, letting the words stack up.