It’s been a pretty rammed week – I’ve been “locked-in” (as they say) from like 8am to 11pm all day everyday working on curriculum content for our $1k Challenge starting in a few days. We’ve got nearly 1,000 people from all over the world joining, all aiming to build a business that makes at least $1,000 in the next 6 weeks while building independent income generation skills. Exciting and a little scary at the same time.
In this week’s email, I wanted to share a realisation that I had this week… I’ve had this realisation a few times in the past, but it’s something I clearly always need to remind myself of.
You know how everyone says: “consistency is more important than intensity” and “it’s better to do a little everyday than a lot in a single day” and all that stuff? That clearly applies to lots of things in life – working out regularly is far more useful than doing a mega workout once in a while. Doing 10 minutes of stretching per day is more useful than doing 1h of stretching once a week. Brushing your teeth everyday is… you get the idea.
But when it comes to major creative projects, I’ve often found that the opposite is true: doing it in a burst of intensity is more fun, and more generative, and leads to a better result, than trying to chip away at it a few hours each week over several months.
The most progress I made when working on Feel-Good Productivity was 1 week when I was with my team in Wales, where I set myself the challenge of drafting a whole chapter per day before I was allowed to do the fun stuff the team were doing. It worked. The second most progress I made was when I went on a writing retreat type thing to Bali and spent all day everyday sitting in a cafe locked-in, just working on the book. In those 2 weeks, I made more progress than I did in 2 years of trying to chip away at it 1-2 hours per day.
When we launched the Part-Time YouTuber Academy back in 2020, we built it from zero to launch within 2 weeks, doing nothing else other than focusing on that. That product has generated millions of dollars in revenue, and thousands of successful students, and it was created in a “sprint” rather than through slow, stable consistency.
It’s been the same with this $1k Challenge course content – I decided I wasn’t going to do anything else this week, and just focused on that all day everyday for 7 days in a row. And I’m pretty proud of the result.
There’s something about being fully immersed in a project, where it’s the only thing you’re thinking about and dreaming about, that (at least for me), seems to lead to interesting and novel insights.
The issue of course, is that you have to clear the decks, and do nothing else other than focus on the project. Even if you’re just counting work time, and the project isn’t invading your evenings and weekends, there’s often “business as usual” stuff that happens – meetings, reports, keeping up with a consistent cadence on publishing content, whatever it might be.
If your situation doesn’t give you the autonomy to be able to clear the decks whenever you want to go deep on a project, then of course, it’s sort of out of your hands… but at least in my case, I could always clear the decks whenever I want… I could always choose to cancel my meetings, not film any YouTube videos that week, and lock-in on a new project – whether it’s a course, or a book, or an app, or anything else really.
But for some reason… I very rarely do. I always think: “Yeah I’ve got this fun new project to work on that could really move the needle for the business and for our students…… but I’m sure THIS TIME I can make it happen working on it 1h per day, while I continue to do all the other things I’ve got in my calendar as well”.
And then weeks or months pass, I haven’t made much progress with the new thing, because I’m on the hamster wheel of keeping all the existing things going.
My friend and former team member, Tintin, mentioned this sort of thing casually in his newsletter one time a few weeks ago. It was something like: “You can only do one thing at a time. If you’ve got limited resources, it’s REALLY HARD to build (for example) an online course WHILE keeping up your 1-2 videos a week upload schedule on YouTube. If you want to make significant progress in your business, you have to be okay with sacrificing the video consistency for the sake of the new product”.
It’s the sacrifice that makes this hard. The short-term stuff of “but the content engine needs to keep ticking, we’ve got sponsor deadlines coming up, if I take a break from YouTube the channel will die forever…” – all that takes away from the important (and generally, more fun) aspects of working deeply on a new project to get it off the ground.
Actually, I see this exact same pattern with loads of aspiring creators and entrepreneurs I chat to. They’re trying to juggle their day job, maybe some side content creation, learning new skills, keeping up with social media, and then on top of all that, they want to launch their first business or YouTube channel or whatever. But here’s the thing – they imagine they can somehow fit it all in without sacrificing anything else. Like they’ll just squeeze in 30 minutes of building their business between their existing commitments, and somehow that’ll be enough to get something meaningful off the ground.
The maths just doesn’t work though. There are literally only so many hours in the week, and most of us are already overdrawn on our time and energy. If you’re already feeling stretched with your current commitments, adding “build a business from scratch” to the mix isn’t going to work by just doing it in tiny increments. And it’s not just about time either – it’s about headspace. Getting something new off the ground requires this weird kind of mental bandwidth where you’re constantly thinking about the problem, having random insights in the shower, making connections between different ideas. You can’t really get into that flow state if you’re context-switching between your new project and 15 other things every day.
So I reckon there’s a strong case for a sprint-based approach to making new stuff happen. If you’re trying to launch your first business, maybe block out a whole weekend where you’ve got no social plans, no other commitments, and you just lock-in and make some proper progress. Clear the mental space as well as the calendar.
Same thing if you’re learning a new skill that could level up your career, or trying to build your first online course, or whatever. Instead of spreading it out over 6 months doing 20 minutes here and there, see if you can carve out a week or two where that becomes your main thing.
I get that not everyone has the flexibility to just cancel everything and go into hermit mode whenever they want. But even if you can’t do it as often as you’d like, doing it occasionally – maybe once a quarter? Once every 6 months? – could be way more effective than the slow-and-steady approach that everyone talks about.
Something to think about anyway.
Have a great week!
Ali xx
