TJL #61: Build momentum (Daily productivity #36)

Productivity tips that work for me and might work for you

Jan 24, 2021

Daily productivity #36

Build momentum.

For me to get productive, one of the most important things I can do is build momentum. Do anything, and I mean anything to get that momentum going. Momentum is key.

Sometimes I even make a checkbox with the task “drink water” or “check this box” to get the momentum started. Momentum, momentum, momentum. Do whatever it takes to build up momentum for yourself.

Ask Adam Savage: "Do You Have a Bill Murray Story?" - YouTube

Adam Savage (pictured above) uses checkboxes (something I’ve written about here) for momentum as well:

The checkbox also resolves some of the tension inherent to my physics-related approach to creativity. In my mind, a list is how I describe and understand the mass of a project, its overall size and the weight that it displaces in the world, but the checkbox can also describe the project’s momentum. And momentum is key to finishing anything.
Momentum isn’t just physical, though. It’s mental, and for me it’s also emotional. I gain so much energy from staring at a bunch of colored-in checkboxes on the left side of a list, that I’ve been known to add things I’ve already done to a list, just to have more checkboxes that are dark than are empty.
That sense of forward progress keeps me enthusiastically plugging away at rudimentary, monotonous tasks as well as huge projects that seem like they might never end—and there were plenty of both during my time at Industrial Light & Magic. From the six-foot-tall, skyscraper-sized crane for a bank commercial that encompassed eighty hours of laser cutting and weeks of assembly to communicate its impossible scale, to building a Thermian docking station for Galaxy Quest composed of hundreds of backlit windows, each one with a tiny slide of Thermians behind it.
There’s something about not just capturing and riding momentum in a project, but building more of it, that keeps me racing back to my shop in the morning, day after day, with my feet planted firmly on the ground, and my mind and my project pointed in the right direction. It sounds funny to say, but I’ve trained myself to be my own momentum propaganda machine that way. It’s something every maker should learn how to activate for themselves, I think, because you can’t count on external sources of motivation to be there when you’ve hit a wall with a project, or you’re in the dead days halfway through. You will need to create your own motivation to keep going, and the momentum that springs from a checklist that is more filled in than not can be just the thing to fuel your fire.

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