Work that nobody is waiting for

Take, as an example, a man who fits kitchens for a firm and wants to work for himself. He's good, and customers ask for him by name. To go it alone he needs a few things. He needs photographs of his best jobs, a simple website, a conversation with an accountant and a worked-out set of prices. None of it is hard. He's been meaning to do it for four years. In those four years he has never been late on a job for the firm, because there's always a customer waiting. For this, nobody is.

This is where the habit does its most expensive damage, and it does it quietly. Work with a deadline gets done, late and rushed. Work with no deadline doesn't get done at all, and the cost never arrives on a particular day. There's no Thursday night and no crisis, and nobody is disappointed. There's a slowly fading intention, and one day a birthday with a nought in it.

These are often the projects that matter most to you. The qualification, the portfolio, the application, the book, the move. They matter more than any proposal, which makes the judgement bigger and the swerve stronger. If you try and it's no good, that isn't one piece of work marked down. It can feel like a verdict on the life you hoped for. Against that, "I'll get to it when things calm down" is a very attractive sentence. It keeps the hope intact and asks nothing of you.

Things don't calm down. You already know that.

Everything in chapter 8 applies here with more force. The bad start matters more, because the first step is the one thing your current system will never produce unaided. So it's fifteen minutes tonight on a bad version of the whole thing. For the kitchen fitter, that's a page with four headings, photographs, website, accountant and prices, and one rough line under each. It isn't impressive. It exists, though, after four years of nothing, and it took a quarter of an hour.

After that, work like this needs three things the world isn't going to supply.

It needs appointments. That means standing time in the week, small and fixed, such as Tuesday and Thursday from seven till eight. Small and regular beats the occasional heroic weekend, for the reason in chapter 6. The work stays warm between sessions and your mind keeps turning it over.

It needs a person. Somebody should know what you're doing and expect to hear about it. I don't mean a taskmaster. A friend who gets a two-line update on Sundays will do, or someone with a project of their own, so that you report to each other. What they supply is what the office supplies, the mild social fact of being expected.

And it needs stages that someone sees. This kind of work has no natural deadlines, so you make some. Six photographs sent to your sister by the end of the month. A first page shown to the friend by the fifteenth. Each stage is a small deadline with a real person at the end of it, and you already know you respond well to those.

You might feel this is artificial, and that if you really wanted the thing you'd simply do it. I'd turn that round. You really wanted to keep your job, and you still needed deadlines to do the work. Wanting was never the missing piece. Very few people produce big self-directed work on desire alone. Those who seem to have usually got a structure you can't see from outside, such as an editor, a business partner, a class, or a spouse who asks.

There's one more honest possibility. The bad start may show you that you don't want the project after all. You spend fifteen minutes on the business plan and feel flat, and it dawns on you that the idea was nicer as an idea. That's worth knowing. It's a better outcome than carrying the thing around for another four years as something you ought to be doing. Let it go deliberately, and enjoy the room it leaves.

With no deadline, doing nothing still produces a decision. The answer is no, and it's delivered so slowly that you never notice being told.