Make Progress with the Toolbox Method
How do you build habits? I used to be very strict: I’d commit to doing a thing every day (like writing a certain amount of words or exercising) for a couple weeks, and then would evaluate how I felt about it. My belief was that I could only develop a habit if I was very consistent about it, and if I wasn’t strict, disciplined, and consistent, I was either:
a) Not trying hard enough
b) A moral failure
Welp. It’s safe to say I’ve always been really hard on myself. I pride myself on having my sh*t together most of the time, so when I struggle to develop a new, healthy habit, I internalize it as a failure and beat myself up about it. Which, as you can imagine, turns into an unproductive, unhelpful guilt cycle. That doesn’t do me any good, nor does it help me actually build the habits I want to build, especially when it comes to long-term, sustainable creativity.
During the annual review I completed earlier this year with my work team, my colleague brought up the idea of a habit-building “toolbox.” Essentially, what this means is that instead of having one specific avenue for building a habit — like writing 1,000 words every day for your novel — you pull from a toolbox. For example, if my goal is to finish writing a novel, my toolbox consists of the following “tools”:
Making a moodboard for a character/location
Talking to a friend about a chapter
And, of course, actually writing
The purpose is to make progress without being so rigid about how you make that progress. This is the goal for your creative process — to make creativity an organic part of your life so that you can see projects to fruition. But to make it an organic part, you do have to be consistent. However, that consistency can take many forms, and that’s where your toolbox comes in!
You can apply this to all aspects of your life. For example, if your goal is to exercise more or be healthier in some way, your toolbox may include the following tools:
Drink lots of water
Stretch every hour
Walk 10K steps every day
Do an intense workout
Eat a healthy snack
And so on. In the event that you aren’t up for an intense workout, which is totally OK and will happen, you can pull from the toolbox and do something else that day, knowing that you made an effort.
To help myself take this approach to building habits, I created a page in my Notion setup called my Toolbox. It has each of my current goals and a checklist below each one that consists of my “tools.” Here’s another example:
Goal: Get better sleep
Tools:
Wear eye mask at night to block out light/stimuli
Read before bed
Drink Lights Out tea before going to bed
Listen to calm music
Stretch an hour before bed
Now, every day, I try to pull at least one tool from the toolbox to help me with my goal.
Why does this method work? It comes down to a few reasons:
It eliminates the guilt around “failure.”
When we stick to processes that are too rigid, and then inevitably break those processes, we feel… guilty. Bad. Incapable of doing what we know we should do. All of that is antithetical to creativity. It builds up every project as a “make-or-break” moment when, in reality, creativity doesn’t work that way. It’s a muscle we must strengthen with practice, so we need to approach practicing our craft with enjoyment rather than dread.
It works with our lives and schedules, rather than against them.
Have you ever carefully planned out your day, only to get thrown a curveball and end up doing none of the things you planned to do? About six months into the pandemic lockdown, I realized that this was my reality every. single. day. I’d plan out my day down to the hour, but then would have a meeting or a project that would upend the whole thing. At the end of every day, I felt discouraged. Why wasn’t I managing my time better?
I had to stop thinking of my schedule so strictly. Just because I missed a window to work out in the morning doesn’t mean I couldn’t find time for it later in the day; if I felt more creative in the evening instead of in the afternoon, why not just move my writing block to that time instead? I can equip my tools throughout the day instead of forcing them into specific time blocks, because each tool has a different measurement of time, energy, and creativity.
Incremental progress leads to long-term achievement over time
Your toolbox allows you to make progress, and that’s the most important aspect of creative work. You likely don’t want your ideas to remain ideas forever, so your toolbox helps you make sustainable progress on these projects without burning out. For me, action is the enemy of anxiety — I always feel immediately better just starting something that I’ve been putting off.
Assembling your toolbox
To try out this approach, start first by writing down 1 to 5 high-level goals. Then, make a checklist underneath each goal with 1 to 5 “tools” that would help you make progress toward this goal. Let’s use an example… one of my current goals is to spend more time outside.
So, my tools underneath would be:
Eat lunch in the backyard
Go for an afternoon walk around the pond
Drive to Tahoe on the weekends
Go snowshoeing when weather permits
Not all of these are tasks I would do every day, because that would be unrealistic. Some are “easy” wins that I can pull from again and again (like going in my backyard) whereas others take a bit more effort. It’s important that your tools truly vary in the time, energy, and creative output they require from you. When possible, you should be naturally reaching for the most intensive tools, but the purpose of this is to have a safety net for the days you don’t feel like doing that, or your schedule just won’t allow.
Over time, using your tools builds up to something substantial. If I ate lunch in my backyard every day during the work week, that would be a significant amount of time I’ve spent outside, and would likely incentivize me to continue that on the weekends, too.
Is the Toolbox Method an approach you’d try for your own creative pursuits? Let me know what you think by commenting below!