Mark Koester

What If Daily Progress Is the Real Motivator? Book Notes on The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile & Steven Kramer

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What actually motivates you to do your work and show up every day? Is it the paycheck? Accolades? Something else?

If you asked managers, the most common answers tend to be recognition, pay, or pressure. But what really keeps us going when we sit down at the studio or the keyboard? What if management and leadership have it wrong on what motivates their employees?

According to a landmark study, the answer was none of these and surprisingly simple:

“Of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.” (p. 72)

Published in 2011, The Progress Principle by Amabile and Kramer is one of my favorite and most recommended books. Whether you are a worker, manager, or leader, the book argues that our productive and creative lives should be built on the progress principle (making progress on meaningful work), and that we should prioritize removing the obstacles that cause the opposite of progress: setbacks at work.

There is a strong overlap between this lived experience of making progress and a wide range of my own work on self-tracking, quantified self experiments, and productivity practices. I’ve been quietly managing my goals, projects, and tasks based on this finding for more than a decade. Reading this book finally gave me the vocabulary to put it into words.

Here are the book’s key ideas that resonated most with me as well as my book notes and a few takeaways.

My Quick Take Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? Definitely. This is one of my most recommended books for anyone pursuing peak performance on their own or for their teams.
Would I read it again? Yes, this is a book I plan to pick up again, though I’d love to see a companion book looking at making progress in a wider range of scenarios like art or startups.
What was missing? The book is manager-centric and misses out on the more universal application (like flow) that is applicable to solo creators too.

What I Got Out of This Book

When I read this book in 2021, I was in the midst of several ongoing work and creative projects at the time, sadly most of which would fail. Emotionally, it can be hard to not see what you are pursuing in terms of a binary outcome: success or failure.

I had spent several months writing a book tentatively titled The Science of Goals, focusing on the operational side of goal pursuit. Rather than relegating goals to setting and final outcomes, I was arguing that it was essential to set mid-term goals, track your progress using self-tracking technology, and do regular reviews and reflection on your pursuit, progress, and setbacks. My argument was that by instrumenting and quantifying your goals and visualizing the data through dashboards, you could better sustain your effort, choose your next move, and eventually reach your goals.

As the first draft manuscript deadline loomed, Amabile’s book stuck particularly hard, because it gave an emotional and lived experience to back up the operational and practice-heavy approach I was advocating for. While I eventually got caught up with other projects and didn’t finish or publish the book (writing a book is hard!), a strong throughline remained with me in the years ahead. While we should construct our in-the-moment work lives on flow, we should also capture our progress and make it tangible in ways that remind us of the progress we are making, because it’s the lived experience of daily progress on meaningful work that motivates us.

Background: Teresa Amabile, the Diary Study and Our Inner Work Life

Teresa Amabile is an American academic at Harvard Business School. She is known for her research on creativity and motivation in organizations. With her co-author Steven Kramer, they collected, over several years, what would become one of the largest datasets of its kind on the lived, in-the-moment experience of workers: roughly 12,000 daily diary entries from 26 project teams. Unlike surveys or interviews, the diary method captures data on emotions, perceptions, and motivations as they happened, rather than self-reported memories or interpretations.

From this data, they discovered that our work and creative experience is not a static state but a dynamic system that shapes our performance. They call this our “inner work life” and define it as the confluence of perceptions, emotions, and motivations that we experience as we react to and make sense of the events of our workday.

Our Best Work Days Happen When We Make Progress

The most striking finding from the diary study was that workers’ best days had the most reported events where they were making progress. By contrast, their worst days were the reverse and more associated with setbacks at work.

The numbers showed an almost mirror-image pattern:

On best days, 76% of diary entries reported progress; only 13% reported setbacks
On worst days, only 25% reported progress; 67% reported setbacks
28% of small events triggered big emotional reactions, far more than participants expected

Creativity was also better. Workers in positive moods were 50% more likely to have a creative idea on those days.

While the data showed progress as the dominant factor on best vs worst days for employees, managers who were surveyed on what they thought motivated their employees picked recognition as the most important factor and ranked “supporting progress” as dead last among five candidate factors.

Progress in Meaningful Work as THE Daily Motivator

“Most people have strong intrinsic motivation to do their work, at least early in their careers. That motivation exists, and continues, until something gets in the way.” (Amabile & Kramer, p. 34)

Most workers are intrinsically motivated to work and naturally want to do good work. They don’t need external motivation or micromanagement. They need obstacles and blockers removed, because while setbacks tend to result in bad work days, it’s daily progress on work that matters to them that tends to result in their best work days, creativity, and peak performance.

Importantly, the bar for “meaningful work” is lower than most readers might assume:

“To be meaningful, your work doesn’t have to have profound importance to society… What matters is whether you perceive your work as contributing value to something or someone who matters (even your team, yourself, or your family).” (p. 88)

In our careers and work lives, we often emphasize the importance of finding purpose and deeper meaning. In our goals, we focus on achievements and the final outcome. But we can miss the journey itself, getting depressed by setbacks and the long middle along the way.

As I work on my startup app or finish my next album, I have to remind myself regularly about the progress I’m making, despite how much work is still ahead. The lived experience of making progress on meaningful work might be a healthier, more sustainable way to live as we work toward those goals. Each step matters and can ultimately help you get there in your own time and in your own way.

Self-Aware Progress Tracking Practice: My Lived Application of the Progress Principle

As someone who obsessed and wrote extensively about quantified self and self-tracking for many years, it’s remarkable to me to see how my tracking practices evolved over time in a way that aligns with the progress principle. This book gave me the vocabulary even though my practice came before. Re-reading this book and writing this review has sharpened how I see my own self-aware goal pursuit practices.

Interestingly, individual health and productivity experiments (like tracking my mood or poop) were one-offs because they didn’t empower me in my daily progress practices. By contrast, several areas have evolved in ways that are central to my own internal operating system.

Here are a few:

Morning Pages as Personal Diary Study: I journal at least 2-3 times per week. Besides being a brain dump for writing, it helps me record my inner work life events with clients and as a solo-creator. Reading them and orienting my day based on them helps me see invisible patterns, remove blockers, and navigate sense-making in the moment.
Weekly Reviews: Reviewing and Tracking Progress: David Allen’s Getting Things Done taught me a few simple organizational practices that I have applied in my life and that continue to fuel my approach to productivity, task tracking, and weekly reviews. My data-driven weekly review remains a cornerstone habit because of its usefulness and meaningfulness as an operating system. By tracking and pulling my most impactful data, I can look back on my week to see the progress I made, where I got stuck, and how to iterate and plan ahead.
Writing Sprint Campaigns and Session Tracker: Maintaining a writing habit is hard, especially since research-backed essays take a lot of time and often multiple sessions. So, as I described in a recent post, I started to carve out time in my calendar and record the small wins from each session. The end result is sustained progress and built-up momentum resulting in more published blog posts.
Producer Pipelines: Small Regular Moves That Move the Work Forward: As a music producer working on my next album, the principle shows up often. My recent Producer Pipelines post named what working producers do without realizing it: design their own systems for advancing tracks one decision at a time. At Playback Pilot, one of the product’s internal north star metrics is “making moves,” which is Karl Weick’s small wins applied to music. Having a track in a pipeline means that the move you make today gets you closer to a finished song.

This idea pairs naturally with flow, which I’ve written about. Flow happens IN the work while the Progress Principle lives BETWEEN our moments of work. Both make you feel good and are intrinsic motivators that emerge from doing meaningful work, not from external rewards or recognition.

Concluding Thought: How to Live the Progress Principle

“People are more creative when they are driven primarily by intrinsic motivators: the interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work itself.” (p. 52)

While the book itself tends to feel manager-centric, the core takeaways are universally applicable and can be integrated and lived by each of us every day.

Notice your daily progress, and write it down somewhere. We tend to forget what we did and remember what we didn’t. We overweigh setbacks and underweigh the wins. By tracking and writing something down, you make your progress visible and tangible.
Lower the bar on “meaningful.” The progress you make day to day doesn’t have to change the world. It just has to be meaningful to you. If you are making moves that get you closer to your album, your blog post, your side project, your whatever, that’s all that matters.
Engineer small wins into your day. Feeling stuck or having a bad day? Seek out a small opportunity that delivers a small win. It could be one sentence written, one drop in the bucket, one session logged. Just do it and call it a progress win.

At the end of the day, living a life centered on progress is about recognition of the meaningful steps rather than measurement of the whole. Frequency of showing up beats magnitude of impact.

As Amabile and Kramer put it:

“Progress lives in the everyday, not just in quarterly reports or milestone checkpoints.” (p. 184)

[Bonus] The Reflection Journey Template I Built From This Book

Check out the Reflection Journey I created based on this book.

Inspired by Teresa Amabile, the essence of the “Progress Principle” is finding joy and motivation in our daily achievements, no matter how small. Celebrating these moments and wins can dramatically improve your workday, motivation, and overall happiness. Small wins can lead us to big dreams. Let’s harness the power of progress by reflecting on our daily achievements and the steps we take towards our larger goals.

What progress did you make today or recently towards a goal or task that felt meaningful?
How did or does your progress make you feel?
What is one or two small yet achievable steps you can take next to continue this progress?

➡ Try it at StayReflective.com

More from me on goals, progress, and flow:

The Ostrich Problem: Why do we avoid checking our goal progress? — The flip side of the progress principle: if felt progress is the #1 motivator, then avoiding progress information is how we quietly starve our own inner work life.
Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal — The midpoint slump as a failure of felt progress, and design moves to restore small wins.
Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End? — Reading where you are in a long-arc pursuit when progress is ambiguous; no-regret moves as partial-credit progress. The daily-scale fuel here meets multi-year-scale uncertainty.
80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me — Live evidence of small daily wins compounding into shipped work.
Tracking Flow — The sibling intrinsic motivator that operates IN the work, where the Progress Principle lives BETWEEN work moments.

Companion book reviews:

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport — Natural pace and McPhee’s “drop in the bucket” as the Progress Principle in practice.
Finish by Jon Acuff — Perfectionism as the enemy of finishing; cutting the goal in half to restore momentum.
Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal — Feeling good as the fuel for productive work, not the reward; the emotional sibling to the Progress Principle.
The Courage to Be Disliked by Kishimi & Koga — Meaning through contribution to others; a sibling to “meaningful work” as motivator.

The original idea:

Karl Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems” (1984) — The conceptual ancestor of the progress principle.

References

Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Press.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with quote organization, smart note extraction, and structural editing. Images were generated by Google’s NotebookLM.

Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End? What Greely's Arctic Expedition Teaches Us about the Uncertainty of Goal Pursuit

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

October 1883. Cape Sabine. The Greely Expedition has just reached land after fifty days adrift on the ice. Twenty-five men, still believing rescue is possible, build a makeshift shelter when a two-man scout crew returns with a letter: their relief ship, the Proteus, crushed by ice, has sunk. The scouts find three small food caches — enough for only a few weeks. Lieutenant Greely halves the rations. Winter closes in. Sergeant Brainard later writes of this period: “This constant expectancy of death, at first a sharp, dreadful trial, gradually passed into a vague and deadening feeling.”

Sergeant William Cross dies first, succumbing to scurvy and malnutrition. They shrimp the bay for scraps and eat moldy dog biscuits. They continue to weaken. More die. By the final weeks, what little remaining food they have starts disappearing; one man is accused of theft and executed. Twenty-five men left Newfoundland in the summer of 1881, and up to this point, they had not just survived but thrived. They peer south, watching for rescue. None of them know yet which phase they’re in. The long middle? Or the desperate end?

Stuck in the Middle assumes you know it’s the middle. For any long-arc project or goal — an Arctic expedition, an album, a startup — the harder question asks: Is this the middle, or is this the end? Greely’s crew faced that question for three years. So does any founder or creative deep in the heart of their goal pursuit.

The hardest part of a long-arc project isn’t the middle. It’s not knowing whether you’re in the middle or already at the end. The answer can’t be found through introspection, felt sense, or even data. Because you’re inside the pursuit, the same evidence fits both stories. You might be in a middle phase rising toward a peak. You might be in a middle phase collapsing toward an end. From inside, they look identical. Only time tells them apart.

The Greely Expedition: What We Know Now

As Buddy Levy retells in Labyrinth of Ice, the Greely Expedition was a multi-year scientific mission to take continual measurements from the Arctic and explore.

In July 1881, Lieutenant Greely and his crew of 24 set out aboard the Proteus for Lady Franklin Bay. They arrived in August, unloaded 350 tons of supplies, and built Fort Conger — their base for a two-year scientific mission.

The first year was a kind of Arctic flourishing. The men took continual measurements with the most advanced instruments of the age. They celebrated holidays, ran a short-lived newspaper, hosted lectures, made sledge explorations. The hunters led by local Greenlander Jens Edward kept them in a healthy supply of fresh meat too. Capping what had been one of the most ambitious Arctic expeditions to date, in May 1882, a small party under Lockwood and including Greenlander Fred Christiansen reached a new Farthest North — extending the known coast of Greenland by a hundred miles.

The men of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, photographed before departure in 1881. (U.S. Army Signal Corps; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

In the summer of 1882, the crew hit their first patch of bad luck. The expected resupply boat Neptune left late from St. John’s, and ice prevented her from reaching the bay. As planned, supplies were dropped 250 miles south at Cape Sabine. As the days shortened, the men continued their measurements as the monotony wore on and tensions grew. Their eyes drifted south, watching for sails that didn’t come.

By the summer of 1883, the relief ship Proteus still hadn’t arrived. Greely ordered Fort Conger abandoned — along with the dogs and most of their supplies. The crew had to venture south across the frozen seas if they hoped to escape. Using boats, sledges, and manpower, they inched south, often at the mercy of the ice floes. Seven weeks later, they reached land.

The relief ship Proteus on the morning of July 23, 1883 — crushed by the ice that same evening. (NOAA; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

And then came Camp Clay, the eight months already seen at the start of this post.

On June 22, 1884, Commander Schley’s Navy rescue mission reached Cape Sabine. Seven men were still alive. Six survived the voyage home — Corporal Ellison succumbed to frostbite during the return. Of the twenty-five men who left Newfoundland three years earlier, six came home.

Seas of Ambiguity: Three Moments of Navigating Phase Identification

From time to time, Greely’s crew must have asked themselves some version of this question: Where am I at in this story? Is this the long middle or have I arrived at the desperate end? Iced-in and lacking a means of long-distance communication, three times across three years Greely had to read their phase with incomplete information. Each time, the wrong read could have killed them.

August 1882.

As their first full year at Fort Conger in the Arctic ended and the likelihood decreased of the resupply boat’s arrival, the crew knew they needed to stay the course with plenty of supplies, steady leadership and no major mishaps or fatalities so far. They continued to take measurements, explore and hunt.

The missing ship was a setback, not a verdict on their fate. They had a year of contingency built into the original plan, and supplies for two more years. Greely navigated social unrest, required daily physical exercise even during the long winter, and encouraged hobbies. The next summer’s resupply would surely come. They rightly read 1882 as the middle of an expedition, not the end. Another boat would attempt to reach them the following year.

Should they have worried more? Adjusted their planning sooner? Or stayed the course?

From inside, with the same evidence, they could just as easily have read it as the beginning of the end. They didn’t. Looking back, we know they were right.

August 1883.

By August, Greely had to choose. The Proteus had not come. No signal, no message. The season was ending, and ice was forming. Their contingency plan called for retreat south to the supply caches at Cape Sabine. The plan dictated abandoning Fort Conger.

They could have stayed, as a few of the men wanted. They had supplies for another year, a fortified shelter, routines that had carried them through two winters. They could hunt. In the moment, both readings in these seas of phase ambiguity held weight.

Sergeant Brainard captured the deliberation in his journal:

“We have little to do except observe the channel, either for a boat or for the opportune moment when our little band must strike out independently to the south. If no vessel arrives, it is our only alternative.”

They were a military crew, and, in spite of some quiet dissent, Greely ordered them to leave. The decision was irreversible. Once the ice closed behind them, Fort Conger was gone and they were trapped on the icy sea.

Had they chosen right or wrong? Was this another long middle or a fatal choice that would be their end?

Looking back, we still don’t know which read was right. Historians have argued for a century whether Greely’s retreat saved his men or doomed them. Both sides chose with the same evidence. Neither could be sure.

Winter 1883-84.

By their third sunless winter in the Arctic, the crew was holed up at Camp Clay (where this post started). Supplies dwindled. Health declined. Morale thinned. They peered south each day for sails that didn’t come. Men were dying.

What the opening scene didn’t show was Greely’s choices. He halved the rations again. He sent supply parties out into the bleak wastes for caches he couldn’t be sure existed. He held the command structure together, though he loosened it slightly to consider more perspectives. Fewer and fewer men were physically capable of leaving their camp.

Were they still in a long middle, waiting for a rescue that might yet come? Or had they arrived at the desperate end as most of the men must have now believed?

Even then, the few men with the energy still found moments of companionship, caring and sometimes beauty as they looked out at the raw nature of the north they were living in.

In the moment, both readings on their future fit. The situation’s deterioration likely meant less and less optimism. Looking back at Greely’s expedition doesn’t resolve the question. In fact, it splits it. For six men, Camp Clay turned out to have been a long middle that ended in rescue. For nineteen others, it was the desperate end. Which phase you were in only becomes clear once the story has unfolded.

Living the Question: Long Middle or Desperate End?

Whether you’re in the middle of a long arc or at the desperate end is hard to face and harder to live with. From inside the maze, you can’t tell if you’re on a route that exits or one that doesn’t. The clues are few. The question itself, from inside, is unanswerable. It all feels and looks the same. But whether it’s a middle or an end changes how you should act. Should you assume you’re nearly there and persist? Or accept failure and pivot?

I’ve lived through this question at many moments of my life, including the present one. As a music producer, I’ve spent over 200 hours spanning 8+ months working on my next album and it’s still not done. As a startup founder and product builder, I’ve spent over 6 months building a product and growing a business that has only gotten 100 or so installs and a dozen or so active users. The glacial pace of progress, the constant pressure of the middle phase, and the uncertainty of reaching the end are hard to live with. The tension of these moments can be agonizing. Many weeks I struggle, hardly act, doubt, and want to give up. We must live the question by recognizing the unanswerable nature of the situation we are in AND act anyway.

As humans we tend toward optimism and assume we’ll succeed in the challenges we take on. And yet we also build contingency plans, exit strategies, excuses, and optionality for when things don’t work out, just like Greely and his crew did.

The science of goal pursuit offers mental models for navigating any long arc.

You don’t just set goals but rather pursue them through decision points, multiple stages and emotions. Model of Action Phases vividly labels the transition from deliberation to action as crossing the Rubicon.
Rarely is a goal pursuit linear. An action crisis describes the lulls where doubt spins and motivation falters, which can happen because we aren’t making progress, aren’t feeling aligned with our goal anymore, or because we are stuck in the middle.
Ostrich instinct labels when and why we avoid checking progress and data that might tell us where we are.
There are strategies for setting goals and a body of work on navigating the long arc once you’ve named it.

But what most of this literature misses is the diagnostic itself: How do you know what phase you’re in? These typical goal techniques assume we know or can figure out what phase we are in. They don’t offer a way to live the question and make no-regret moves when we are in the midst of phase ambiguity.

Principle 1: You usually can’t tell from inside which phase you’re in. Data from inside doesn’t tell you which situation you’re facing. Only the future disambiguates. Even quitting doesn’t tell you if you should have persisted, because quitting gives you no knowledge of the phase you were in or the contours of the maze you were inside. You simply stopped pursuing or exploring. Greely held the same structured, optimistic posture through Year 1 and Year 3. He had to assume they’d be rescued. Both situations presented the same face. The posture happened to align and fit one but not the other. The verdict only exists now, looking back. It was never available to them in the moment.

Principle 2: Wrong-phase strategy actively harms. Startup founder culture prescribes two confident, opposite phase-reads: never give up and kill it fast. When things are hard, grind culture says push through. The lean-startup version says kill it off, pivot fast, move fast and break things. Both are high-confidence phase-reads dressed up as best practices and virtues. Both ignore the diagnostic problem that from the inside, you can’t tell which phase you’re in. Humility and sitting with the uncertainty are the actual moves.

Principle 3: Do the things that pay off in both phases — the no-regret moves. Sometimes we have to stop trying to resolve the unresolvable or answer the unanswerable. We must resolve to act in ways that are useful and meaningful in either situation. Seek out and embrace no-regret moves.

We saw Greely’s no-regret moves at Camp Clay — the halved rations, the supply parties, the held command, the moments of companionship and beauty. None of them resolved his diagnostic question. They earned their keep regardless.

For a founder, you should talk to your users, ship small, iterate in a way that gives you more data and signals, protect your runway, maintain a family and social life, and protect your health.

At the meta level, the pursuit itself can be no-regret. As a product builder, I embrace the craft of building. My latest product, Playback Pilot has taught me Flutter on a local-first stack, designing tools for human empowerment, and the craft of navigating the arc of creative finishing. Whether or not it works as a venture thesis and business, the skills, the craft, the building, and the philosophy compound regardless of whether it succeeds or fails. Furthermore, as a music producer, building this app has made me more self-aware of my creative process and how to support my middle and finishing phases. Most of our goals should be worthy of doing as an activity regardless of the outcome.

At the Farthest North

Greely’s crew reached their Farthest North in May 1882. Lockwood and his small party extended the known coast of Greenland by a hundred miles. Along with their continued measurements and photo record, they achieved and celebrated one of their stated mission goals. As they lamented the non-arrival of their resupply and later rescue, they continued to take measurements, explore, map and make more discoveries, including new fjords and ice passages. They were having the kind of year an expedition lives for. None of them knew this was the peak of the whole arc. None of them knew or assumed that two years later, nineteen of them would be dead.

The six survivors aboard USS Thetis at Cape Sabine, shortly after the rescue in 1884. (U.S. Navy; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

The diagnostic problem is that you can recognize an achievement when you reach it, but what you can’t see is its context — where it sits in the longer arc. You can’t see your peak as the peak when you’re at it. You can’t see your middle as the middle when you’re in it. You can’t know it’s your end until it’s already behind you. This is the universal truth of any long-arc pursuit.

The hardest part of a long-arc project isn’t the middle. It’s not knowing whether you’re in the middle or already at the end.

The goal-pursuit literature assumes that you can answer that question, that you can know what phase or situation you are in, and that you can match your strategy and actions to your phase. Greely’s expedition and crew teach us that diagnosis and goal phase identification are nearly impossible from the inside. As goal pursuers, creatives and startup founders, we often seek reassuring signals or comforting platitudes to navigate similarly unanswerable questions.

Is this the long middle or the desperate end? From inside, the same evidence fits both stories. You can’t predict. Only the future disambiguates. Until then, we need to pace ourselves, take a stance that accepts uncertainty and doesn’t depend on the answer, and act in a way that works for either.

In a long-arc pursuit, rarely do we know when we’ve reached our farthest north, at least not from inside and especially when we are in the middle of the journey. Floating situationally and emotionally in these seas of uncertainty, our best and often only moves are the ones that pay off either way, while we let time do the rest.

Goal Pursuit Series (my posts):

Multi-Stage Goal Pursuits — my post — the Rubicon model of goal phases (deliberate → plan → act → evaluate)
Stuck in the Middle — my post — midpoint motivation collapse and how to design for it
The Ostrich Problem — my post — why we avoid checking progress on goals we care about
The Science of Goals — overview — the broader literature on setting and pursuing long-arc goals
Producer Pipelines — on the Playback Pilot blog — the music producer’s version of phase identification; tracking projects across uncertain creative phases

Books on finishing, long arcs, and Arctic ambition:

Finish by Jon Acuff — my review — perfectionism as the enemy of finishing; cut the goal in half
Labyrinth of Ice by Buddy Levy — the narrative source for this post; a gripping retelling of the Greely Expedition
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk by Ben Montgomery — Emma Gatewood’s solo Appalachian Trail hike at 67; another long-arc story of uncertain outcome and quiet endurance
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport — my review — natural pace, doing fewer things, and McPhee’s discipline of putting a drop in the bucket each day; the marathon-pacing register for sustainable creative work over long horizons

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with structural scaffolding, editing prose, surfacing source material from prior notes, and proof reading. The historical photographs are public-domain reference images of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (U.S. Army Signal Corps, NOAA, and U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons). The cover image was generated with Gemini. The “long middle or desperate end” coin-toss illustration was AI-generated based on the author’s handwritten drawing.

What if I Had to Only Choose One Thing? Book Notes and Reflections on Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How do you sustain creative output without burning out? How do you create high quality work and art at a sustainable pace?

It’s mid-May, my activity level has been running hot on multiple fronts for months, and I recently finished Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, a book on how to do less and still have meaningful, high-impact output. There is a certain personal irony in reflecting on this book’s core concepts when I spent 212 hours of computer time in a single month and have 4-5 active projects in the queue.

Newport’s earlier books, Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, are obvious arguments — most knowledge workers will nod and agree. Slow Productivity is doing something harder: making a case for the productive artist working in a crowded space of competing interests, and pushing back against the grind as the only path to meaningful output.

My Quick Take Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? — Yes, definitely would recommend this book since it offers meaningful ways to reframe how you pursue goals over the long haul.
Would I read it again? — I don’t plan to re-read this, since I feel like the big ideas were obvious and intuitive in a single read and there weren’t a ton of templates or reflection activities worth revisiting.
What was missing? I felt like Newport could have been a bit more vulnerable and shared a bit more of his own journey with burnout, pseudo-productivity and even what he struggles with as a writer and professor.

What I Got Out of This Book

In April 2026, I logged 212 hours of computer time or 7h per day including the weekend. Was I being productive or just busy?

Diagnosis: The Pseudo-Productivity Trap

Historically, it has been straightforward to quantify productive output with input, especially when output is defined by a tangible outcome and obvious step-by-step process. In manufacturing, Ford’s Model T production line defined a process, iterated on each step, and oriented around the measurable goal of units produced per hour. Agriculture requires the visible activity involving tilling, planting, weeding, etc., which results in the visible material output defined by bushels per acre.

By contrast, the productivity of knowledge work is difficult to objectively quantify. The work product itself is variable. The creation process rarely is repeatable nor definable in any step-by-step manner. So, how do you measure and signal you are productive when your input and output are no longer intuitive and obvious?

The visible-activity heuristic has become the proxy for perceived productivity by both managers and workers alike. When you can’t measure output cleanly nor define what it takes in terms of steps and time input, looking busy becomes the proxy for being viewed as valuable and productive. The rise of communication and project management tools, like email, Slack, etc, has made it possible to “visibly signal your busyness with minimal effort” (Newport, p. 18), which has further entrenched this tendency.

The central issue or villain in Newport’s book is Pseudo-Productivity which he defines as: the “use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort.” (p. 18).

Pseudo-Productivity becomes a trap on multiple levels. Performing work and doing the actual work gets decoupled. Companies end up in an “always on” urgency-based, performative work culture that assumes more hours lead to better results. Talking about work in endless chat threads, meetings and email chains seems to matter more than the work itself or what we produce. Over time, companies and their employees end up with exhausting overload and burnout, partially attributed to the need to be seen as present and busy, while we become misaligned from our actual priorities and what’s most important in our jobs. We become burdened by more maintenance overhead, make less meaningful progress, and ship less impactful work.

In my own work and creative life, I’m fortunate to have very little busy work or time spent in meetings, chat or email. In fact, of April’s 212h, a mere 5% was on Communication & Scheduling while a remarkable 38% was on Software Development and 33% on Design & Composition (including music). 71% of my computer time was actual building and making.

By the standard measure, I have avoided the pseudo-productivity trap. I’m productive and focused. I’m not burned out by the busyness but instead I’m an entrepreneur and builder running close to the ceiling of my actual productive cognitive capacity, both in terms of time input and potential creative output. So why am I still feeling overloaded, facing borderline burnout, and increasingly misaligned and cluttered? Because I’m trying to work on too many things.

Newport’s Prescription: Slow Productivity in a Nutshell

Newport’s definition of Slow Productivity is a “philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner.”

Against the backdrop of pseudo-productivity and even my own productive overload, he offers three principles as the prescription:

Do fewer things
Work at a natural pace
Obsess over quality

Each is load-bearing by itself while together they form a coherent answer to the trap of pseudo-productivity and can aid us in navigating a meaningfully productive life at a sustainable pace and load.

The Four Words I’m Carrying Out

But here are the four words I’m actually carrying out of this book:

Do Fewer Things. Higher Quality. Finish. Don’t Overthink.

Two of these are Newport’s specific wording, while the other two are what he’s pointing at without quite saying.

Do Fewer Things

“Working on fewer things can paradoxically produce more value in the long term: overload generates an untenable quantity of nonproductive overhead.” (p. 73)

For Newport, doing fewer things entails a principle of structural reduction. He argues that we should be limiting at three different scales — missions, projects and daily goals. We should also reduce our expectations and load to the point where you can imagine accomplishing your work with time and energy to spare.

His cited example is Andrew Wiles, a professor and academic who installed specific rules, like no conferences, work from home, and trickling out of completed work to maintain perceived academic cadence, while at the same time he maximized his attention, effort and time towards his mission of solving the mathematical puzzle of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

My pseudo-productivity problem isn’t about busyness nor chat, email or meeting overload. It was largely about having too many projects. In April, 38% of my project time was spent on Playback Pilot (my startup product), 33% on writing and music, plus client work layered underneath. Each area was genuinely productive and important to me. But the total allostatic load has become nearly unsustainable.

A few days ago I sat with the question in my morning journaling, What if I had to only choose just one thing to focus on?. Here was my response:

Pursuing all of these equally is not totally working… If I try to do one thing more than another, time gets squeezed and an area gets neglected. I was really happy with my recent writing campaign and what it unlocked, but it cost me on the music finishing side and app development too…if I had to pick one thing it would be finishing that piece of software [Playback Pilot]

This connects to Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks, where he argues that time itself is the existential limiter — “We must make profound and possibility-limiting choices with our time.” Importantly, Newport’s do fewer things isn’t offering resolutions we must follow, but rules that might guide us forward and help us navigate.

Admittedly, doing fewer things can feel hard for me. It’s challenging to say “no” when the core things I’m doing are in the “hell yeah” category. In the past my response might have been to grind and work long hours. But recognizing the longer time horizon needed on certain projects and striving to pursue a more natural pace for entrepreneurship and creativity means enacting several moves here:

Themed days > scattered tasking. Rather than trying to work a little bit each day on all of these areas, I actively prioritize and block out certain mornings or even days. This allows me to be fully focused, find momentum, and make tangible progress.
One meaningful piece advances each week. Tracking my focus hours, while important, is not as important as achieving a concrete output that moves the mission forward.
Trust the cadence. “Gotta just keep going” is the mantra. The pace IS the mindset, the strategy, the process.

The forcing function of recognizing and accepting my one thing for this current season means I’m moving a meaningful piece forward each week and pushing back against asking myself, “Why am I not there yet?” Cut the goal in half and slow output are fine, because I just gotta keep going.

Higher Quality

Obsessing over quality is a cornerstone of Newport’s approach. As he puts it, “Once you commit to doing something very well, busyness becomes intolerable.” (p. 135)

As an expert in any field can tell you (and likely something each of us has experienced), learning and improved technical skills can make it hard to look at our previous art or work. Once a perceptual capacity is built, our old work stops sounding the same. Some artists describe this recognition as a form of grief. For example, in building critical listening skills as a musician and audio engineer, I now can no longer unhear certain issues in my songs in progress and the songs I’ve already released.

This is the working artist’s bind that Ira Glass, via Newport, names: “Your taste can guide you toward the best work you’re capable of producing at the moment, but it can also fuel a sense of disappointment in your final result.” (p. 140) Pursuing higher quality has costs — missing short-term opportunities, a slower pace, a form of perfectionism that can look like procrastination. Newport points to Jewel, the musician, who accepted a lower record advance to keep her artistic control intact. Her motto: “Hardwood grows slowly.” (p. 129)

I’m feeling the live version of this right now, finishing my seventh album. Even though a week or so ago I had declared that I was nearing the end with tracked hours at 151.2/160.0 (94%) and had set my pencils-down date at May 17, several changes are forcing me to reevaluate. Both of my core collaborators have contributed fresh recordings (vocals and trumpet). While working with a pro mixer, leveling up my mixing skills and doing reference track analysis, I’ve started to hear what I want the album as a whole to sound like.

The pursuit of higher quality as an artist and music professional means I’m no longer “done” and there is still work to do. The finish line has to be moved. It’s the kind of moment I’ve written about before — finding myself back in the messy middle, where the project isn’t quite where I thought it was.

Finish (at a natural pace)

The book’s central character is John McPhee, an American author whose examples bookend the book. McPhee spent his career at The New Yorker producing meticulous long-form journalism, sometimes spending years on a single piece. Newport opens with him lying on his back, thinking hard about how to make something wonderful, and returns to him at the close with the line:

“Put a drop in the bucket each day. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.” — John McPhee, via Newport (p. 166)

McPhee’s discipline of small daily effort over very long timelines is the practical heart of slow productivity and dovetails with Newport’s middle principle, work at a natural pace. Newport’s point is that “Working with unceasing intensity is artificial and unsustainable. A more natural, slower, varied pace to work is the foundation of true productivity in the long term.” (p. 94)

I’d argue that natural pace and finishing are the same discipline from different angles. During my 7-week writing sprint, my pace wasn’t frantic or running hot every day. My effort and focus varied over the period, but it still produced steady drops in the bucket. The drops accumulated, and I delivered 9 posts.

As Newport puts it:

“Grand achievement is built on the steady accumulation of modest results over time. This path is long. Pace yourself.” (p. 100)

Seasonality Reframe: A closing thought

How do I say “no” to things that are good for me and I care about, but just don’t fit this season?

The core conflict I often face as an artist and goal pursuer is that I feel like I have too many things I want to do and achieve in this life and never enough time to fit it all in. I resonate with Newport’s philosophy and framing, especially his mantra to “Do Fewer Things.” Newport himself and many of the examples he cites work on fewer epic projects and obsess over quality at a slower pace over long periods of time — but with one humanizing nuance: seasonality. Seasonality includes both dedicated pause periods and “temporary periods of maximum intensity.” Slow and intense alternate.

My productivity satisfaction hasn’t been failing because I’m doing the wrong things, but because of existential time limits. I can’t do everything right now — for this season. This season is FOR pushing on Playback Pilot (software to help music producers make progress on music) as my main target, finishing Album 7 on a longer timeline, and accepting writing on a lighter cadence. This is just a moment of self-awareness and personal alignment I have to accept — for now. Eventually I’ll finish one of these things, my priorities will shift, and other goals can slot in.

Each season has its core activities and fruits to be harvested. Parking the goals that don’t fit isn’t quitting them. It’s recognizing that one thing wins for now, and the others wait their turn. Seasons change. Priorities can shift.

Unfortunately, there is no perfect or tidy answer to the question I started with: how do I say no to things I care about but just don’t fit this season? For now, naming the season — and what fits within it — is the best answer I have. Neither Newport nor any other writer on productivity, even one with a philosophical bent, can give you the framework to answer life’s compass questions.

What’s the one thing you’ll pick to prioritize for your current season?

Cut Your Goal in Half: Book Notes on Finish by Jon Acuff — Acuff’s argument is that perfectionism, not laziness, is what kills finishing; cutting the goal in half is the move that lets you actually ship. A practical companion to Newport’s do fewer things at the individual-project scale.
Time Management as Life Philosophy: Book Notes on Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman — Burkeman’s case that you get ~4,000 weeks in a human life, and any meaningful work requires making “profound and possibility-limiting choices” with that finite time. The existential frame underneath Newport’s first principle.
I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work: Book Notes on Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal — Abdaal flips the usual logic: feeling good isn’t the reward for productive work, it’s the fuel. A useful counter-read to Newport, who is largely silent on the emotional side of sustainable output.
Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal — Behavioral research on the predictable midpoint slump on long goals, and design moves to climb out of the valley. The hidden tax on natural pace once a project runs long.
The Ostrich Problem: Why do we avoid checking our goal progress? — The research-backed habit of avoiding progress information on goals we care about. The personal mirror of pseudo-productivity: visible busyness can quietly mask whether real work is moving.
80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me — Debrief from my own 7-week sprint. Live evidence for McPhee’s “drop in the bucket” principle — varied, sustained effort accumulating into real shipped work.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with processing some of the quotes, proofreading and clarity. The four-panel graphic was generated using Google’s Gemini.

80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What kind of writer am I? Am I a product builder who writes or a writer who builds products?

I started my personal blog over 18 years ago and have published over 350 posts. But my writing and publishing cadence had become inconsistent over the last couple of years — long gaps between posts, half-finished drafts piling up, and the familiar guilt of knowing I should be writing more but struggling to start and not showing up to write consistently.

So I designed a 7-week sprint to change that. The rules were simple: write consistently across two blogs — markwk.com for personal essays and book reviews, and playbackpilot.com for my music production startup. Track everything. Publish as I go. The core theme tying it together was one I’d been circling for years but had surfaced most acutely in recent months: the psychology and practice of finishing.

I’m currently building an app for music producers, who struggle to finish and stay organized, called Playback Pilot. Our initial survey completed by nearly 500 producers showed that 79% of creators share the same finishing problem and many blamed it on internal factors. In order to explore my own finishing problem across multiple domains and write articles on these interconnected topics, I decided to write it out.

The writing wasn’t easy — most creative work rarely is — but the results were encouraging: in 7 weeks, I logged 80 hours of creation time, published 9 posts across two blogs, and typed 69,000 words. Every target I set was exceeded.

Here’s what I learned, what the data revealed, and discoveries that surprised me.

The Experiment: Campaign-based Goal Tracker for Writing

My long-term intention is to develop a weekly writing cadence (an article per week) and eventually publish a full-length book on goals and tracking progress. Rather than start with that overly ambitious goal, I cut the goal in half and took a short-term experimental approach. I framed it as a campaign or sprint. The benefit of a sprint is that it is specific and explicitly time-bound. A sprint has obvious start points, mid-point check-ins and an end. This gave the goal pursuit a shape and directionality and offered me a chance to reflect at the start, mid-way through and now at the end through this blog post.

From March 12 to April 25, 2026, I set out to write at least 40 hours and publish 9 posts over 7 weeks. I write primarily using plaintext markdown files. I tracked my input (time, typed words) and my output (wordcount, blog), and I used some python code to glue together a simple goal tracker so I can monitor the campaign and see progress week to week during my weekly review. Arguably, the most important component was a simple tracker doc where I logged my intentions, writing principles, what I’d published, what was next, and what I’d cut or deferred. It served as a planning tool, running journal and made my progress visible.

Admittedly, this can feel like a lot of technology pieces to an outsider. But most of these passive tracking tools can be setup in an hour or two, and the immediate and long-term value is a continuous stream of passively tracked data on your writing behavior. You can track your progress day to day and over time. The specific code I wrote for the goal tracker was additive glue that help me automate and monitor. Goals aren’t linear. Nothing replaces the act of checking in on your progress, noting what is working, being honest and open-minded and iterating.

So, how did it go?

The Numbers

Goal	Target	Actual	%
Creation Hours	40h	81.0h	202%
Published Posts	9	9	100%
Words Typed	45,000	69,220	154%

Here is a week-by-week breakdown:

This chart shows the ups and downs of my writing journey. Interestingly, there were strong peaks at the start and end, which are typical of most goals and reminds me of my quick starts when I do a marathon race or the acceleration as I near the finish line. As a working professional, it was impossible to carve out a perfect schedule to write and publish. These ebbs and flows reveal my natural pace and the constraints I faced certain weeks or days.

The timeline above shows the rhythm — the ups and downs of each week. This chart shows the trajectory: despite the messy week-to-week variation, every metric climbed steadily and crossed its target. Hours and words are leading indicators; published posts are the lagging outcome. Consistent, imperfect effort compounds into result.

What I Published

While I largely stayed true to my intention of writing about finishing problem for creatives, my actual output varied as did the time needed to research, write and publish each post:

Post	Blog	Type	Hours	Words
The Ostrich Problem	markwk	Research	9.1h	7,045
Why I’m Building PlaybackPilot	PBP	Founder	3.7h	1,443
Is What I Am Doing Useful?	markwk	Book review	3.1h*	4,500
Unfinished Symphony	PBP	Data-driven	4.3h	3,350
Stuck in the Middle	markwk	Research	10.0h	3,184
Album Management Walkthrough	PBP	Video + blog	4.3h	206
Cut Your Goal in Half	markwk	Book review	2.3h	2,094
Quiet Workarounds	PBP	Research	12.0h	4,055
I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work	markwk	Book review	4.7h	2,881
		Published total	53.5h	28,758

*Sprint hours only. The Courage to Be Disliked review also had 2.5 hours of prior review work logged in late 2024 and early 2025, bringing the true total to 5.5 hours across 16 months.

Not all of the sprint’s hours went to published posts. I also spent 11.9 hours on drafts that didn’t get finished during the sprint — posts on health and exercise, the data-driven writer’s life, the visibility problem, and the Progress Principle book review. Another 9.4 hours went to journaling and 6.2 hours to planning. In a sprint about finishing, it’s worth noting honestly: some things didn’t get finished. Those drafts aren’t dead — they’re parked, and several are near the top of Sprint 2’s queue.

What Worked and What I learned

The benefit of a short goal pursuit cycle is that it offers a chance to try some things and see what works and what doesn’t. Overall, I’d say structuring this as just a few week sprint took a lot of the pressure off. By picking a few specific posts that were my must-win’s meant those got prioritized but didn’t have to happen all at once. Also, by leaving gaps and managing based on energy level and what pulled by interest, several unexpected blog posts emerged organically.

1. The ultradian sweet spot

There is a tempo or pace to our daily productivity and cognitive focus. While circadian rhythms describe the well-known phenomenon of our sleep and wake patterns, it was interesting to see in my own data the lesser known pattern called ultradian rhythms. As discovered by the same scientist who co-discovered REM sleep, humans possess a roughly 90 minute window during the daytime of peak executive function, before cognitive resources deplete and we lose focus. Driven by a host of biological mechanisms, ultradian rhythms describe these shorter rest-activity cycles.

When I looked at my data, my individual writing sessions clustered around 1.1 hours — comfortably inside the 60–90 minute ultradian focus window. My body had been self-organizing into hour-long focus blocks without me consciously designing for it. But the real finding was at the day level: peak writing efficiency came on days where I wrote 1-2 hours total (1,254 words/hour). By 4+ hours of total daily writing, my words-per-hour had dropped to 605 — less than half the peak rate.

We often metaphorically describe our focus like an energy reservoir that decreases as we put in more and more work over time. The practical reality is that our creative energy is more like a wave, not a reservoir. Biologically, we can sustain focus for roughly 60-90 minutes. During peak immersion, our brain state changes and we can enter flow, a state of cognitive peak performance.

After this period of peak focus, we enter what is called the ultradian trough. This is the natural and automatic downswing of the ultradian wave. Our nervous system switches from sympathetic (alert, focused, high-Beta) to parasympathetic (recovery, rest, Alpha/Theta). We feel a bit groggy, our attention wanders and we struggle to concentrate. Culturally, we sometimes feel guilty for our inability to focus, and we are tempted to try and power through. Most folks, like me, often crave caffeine, a snack or an urge to switch tasks, check their email or phone.

The practical reality is that you aren’t lazy. Post-focus trough is normal. You are merely a surfer coming down on a natural peak focus period, after the wave crested. Your body and mind are telling you to pause and take a break for recovery and creative incubation. We often don’t heed this signal or call to pause. If you don’t take a break, you incur a recovery penalty, inhibiting your focus and creativity later in the day and increasing your daytime chronic stress. By contrast, a 20-30 min break clears mental fatigue, resets your prefrontal cortex, and enables you to ride the next wave and peak.

For me personally, the biggest shift going forward is giving myself permission to take creative recovery breaks and recognizing when I’ve hit the point of diminishing returns for the day. My sessions are already well-timed — about one ultradian cycle each. What I need to stop doing is chaining too many of them together, filling every available hour with writing and expecting the fourth hour to be as productive as the first. Instead of asking “how many hours can I write today?” I should start asking, “How do I make the most of my one or two peak sessions?” This question led me to my next lesson.

2. Protect the morning block

Intuitively, I’ve long identified that my most productive block of time each weekday falls between about 9:30 and noon. My best mornings follow a natural rhythm: coffee and news by 8:30, some journaling or research notes as a warmup start at 9, then focused writing by 10, and somewhere in that first concentrated hour, I reach focus and flow. This is where I can and should tackle my biggest cognitive challenges of the day, and when do, I get into deep work and flow and produce my best work. Unfortunately, I haven’t protected or honored this block. Even though I can largely do my client and product work later in the day with similar efficiency and output, I don’t. I’ve allowed my mornings to get sucked into “other people’s problems” over the years. My writing output over the last 3-4 years is probably most tied to the loss of consistent morning writing blocks.

For this writing sprint, the main structural change I put in place was scheduling two or three dedicated mornings each week exclusively for writing. No meetings, no quick check-in’s on a client project, no morning review of my growth marketing, and no email. I blocked out 9:30-noon on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as non-negotiable writing sessions in my weekly plan. This was my primary creative constraint. I’d argue that this single move mattered more than any other writing technique I could have tried.

Even though I didn’t know the technical term for it then, this focused morning block aligns well with science of ultradian rhythms and my data showed it too.

My morning sessions averaged 1.2 hours at 874 words/hour across 35 sessions. Afternoon sessions were shorter (1.0 hours average) and slightly less productive (794 words/hour across 31 sessions). Mornings accounted for half my total hours but a disproportionate share of my best output. When I deferred writing to the afternoon, I still wrote, but the difference in depth and quality was visible.

It also seems that starting my day with writing resulted in a habit shift. All parts of my day tended to be centered on writing to think and thinking through writing. In short, writing became not just a scheduled event but a pervasive and habitual cognitive activity.

Protecting the morning block isn’t about discipline; it’s about alignment. You’re scheduling your hardest creative work during the core windows where your biology is designed to support it.

3. One post, one day

I have a tendency to let my curiosity get the best of me and end up getting pulled down rabbit holes into topics that seem related to what I’m writing or researching but in actuality are forms of procrastination. This can result in a multiple day forays into new areas rather than finishing an article. My drafts folder is a graveyard of many, many half-finished posts, some of them hundreds or even thousands of words long.

The fix was simple: pick one post and work only on that post for the day.

The clearest evidence for the efficacy of this practice came at the end of the sprint. On Monday, I drafted and published the Quiet Workarounds post in 4.8 hours in one day. On Tuesday, on a low energy day, I did the same with the Feel-Good Productivity review, which start to finish took me 4.7 hours. It worked because I wasn’t half-engaged on several ideas. Each day had exactly one focus and each one got a single post completed.

If you are looking for a guiding framework, I’d suggest following what I recommended for music producers and called Active-List Rule: name the one active thing, park everything else.

Split attention kills momentum. Focused attention means your best energy is directed at your most significant target and what’s closest to done. The key takeaway: committing to a single post per writing day. The two-posts-in-two-days was my proof.

4. Two blogs created natural variety

The main output I wanted to move and unlock was publishing blog posts, articles and a youtube video for my music finishing app, PlaybackPilot.com. I’ve spent months marketing and building it, but I was struggling to tell the story. I hadn’t put enough words down for my audience and for my early users. Frankly, after months of research and building, I had a lot of big and small ideas to process and share about what it takes to help music producers finish more music.

Early on, I elected to write a few posts for markwk.com too. Even though this breaks from the previously stated focus rule of one topic or goal at a time, I knew that I had to harness my creativity and curiosity and leave myself more than one outlet and format to express my thinking. There was also a lot of natural overlaps too. This gave me a space to write more organically on the finishing psychology and how it fits and applies outside of music.

Here is what happened: 5 posts on markwk.com (personal essays + book reviews) and 4 on playbackpilot.com (product research + founder story). I could switch to different types and formats depending on my energy level. On a low energy day or when I needed a quick win, I could write a book review post. On a high energy day, I could work on a research-based post. By having a space for both, I could avoid monotony and could cross pollinate key concepts between the two blogs.

5. Book reviews are the fastest format

Writing is a time consuming and creatively messy affair. One of the data surprises I stumbled into was how dramatically the format or type of post affected the writing time and time-to-publish.

On average, book reviews took ~3.4 hours (~3.2k words). Deep research posts — the Ostrich Problem, Stuck in the Middle, and Quiet Workarounds — averaged ~10.4 hours (~4.8k words). The data-driven survey post (Unfinished Symphony) clocked closer to 4.3 hours, behaving more like a shorter analysis piece. The founder story took 3.7 hours (1,443 words), and the album walkthrough was primarily a video — 4.3 hours of production for 206 words of accompanying text.

Generally speaking, I am not a writer of the mundane. In-depth, data-driven and research-backed posts are where I feel most pulled as an author and thinker. While I can still write decent material in shorter formats (like newsletters and emails), I thrive and grow the most developing and drafting these research posts. I like doing research and synthesizing learnings into my own philosophical essays and science-backed insights. I just need to recognize that these articles and chapters take days or even weeks to produce.

I also need to recognize my available time and energy limits and leave space for shorter forms of writing. For me, book review posts allow me to process key ideas from the books I read — and the data revealed how much prior engagement shapes the speed.

The two fastest book reviews drew on prior thinking, but in different forms. Courage to Be Disliked actually had 2.5 hours of earlier review work logged in late 2024 and early 2025 — the sprint just added the final 3 hours of editing and publishing. Cut Your Goal in Half had clippings from my reading and a single thesis simple enough to draft in one morning (2.3 hours, start to finish). Feel-Good Productivity, despite a stub note from a year earlier, required processing the book’s ideas largely from scratch during the sprint — and took nearly twice as long (4.7 hours) as a result.

The efficiency unlock isn’t the format alone — it’s the depth of prior engagement the review draws on. Notes you’ve wrestled with, clippings you’ve actually highlighted, an earlier essay attempt you can mine from. Reading without engagement leaves you starting from scratch when it’s time to write. Some books are also inherently faster to review than others — a book with one clear thesis (like Acuff’s “cut the goal in half”) writes up faster than one with a dozen interlocking frameworks.

Book reviews offer a palette cleanser, and in the context of a writing sprint, they gave me quick wins, improved my momentum, and blog post numbers in less time than longer research posts.

6. Smart notes are fuel, especially for low-energy days

Whether it’s writing, music or some other creative project, sometimes we just don’t feel like doing our craft or core artistic activity. Sometimes I didn’t feel like writing for one reason or another during this sprint. I might have been feeling low energy, creative uncertainty or something else. Recognizing this feeling and labeling was important, because it meant I could get over my guilt and procrastination and avoid abandoning my craft for the session and instead I could ask myself the question: If instead of drafting a post, what is something else I could do before or instead of writing?

This allowed me to shrink down my expectations for the session and give myself a few options for next moves. I could journal about my feelings, ideas cluttering my mind or just stream of consciousness. On days when I didn’t know what to write, struggled with the throughline, or my energy was low, the shrink move was simple: draft a smart note instead. Review some highlights from a book I’d read. Process a concept I’d been circling. Connect two ideas that hadn’t been linked yet. A smart note was still progress.

Over the course of 7 weeks, I journaled across 12 dedicated sessions and wrote in my notes app on 37 of 49 days, accumulating roughly 51,000 words — most of which never became blog posts but regularly became the seeds for them. I created 29 new smart notes on topics like constraints, away moves, self-forgiveness, producer workarounds, and the psychology of finishing. I’ve written before about the power of systematic notes, an idea borrowed from Sönke Ahrens that describes smart notes as a preparatory thinking practice that can be reused in whatever you create or write. It’s a practice that was somewhat dormant for me but reemerged organically and proved useful again.

Not every dedicated writing session during the sprint produced publishable prose. Some of my best sessions were spent journaling, reviewing book highlights, or drafting smart notes on concepts I was circling. At the time, these felt like detours and pseudoproductivity. In retrospect, I realize that these were building blocks and stepping stones.

My best writing blog posts and sessions pulled from existing material — journal entries, book clippings, archived notes, previously published posts — rather than starting from a blank page. I have years of notes and hundreds of book highlights. The sprint taught me to treat that archive as raw material and smart notes as fuel to assemble from. For example, when I sat down to draft the Quiet Workarounds post, the hardest conceptual work was already done in the notes. I was assembling, not inventing. It meant a lot of what I wrote about and published came from a related principle: adapt, don’t rewrite.

What I’d Do Differently

Here are a few things I’d change:

Just type — Some days I spent a lot of time spinning thoughts. This can be a necessary step towards figuring out what I want to write, the throughline or key novel points, but many times it’s glorified procrastination. Depending on the state of the draft and assuming I have an outline, the best recipe is often just writing stuff down — good, bad or otherwise. Once I got a crappy first draft, a lot of the subsequent writing followed on and came out of that. Most writing is rewriting, as they say.
Budget 2x the time — We are terrible at predicting how long knowledge work takes. Unlike a step-by-step process for producing material objects, creative and intellectual work is extremely difficult to pinpoint in advance. I realized this early on and tried multiple ways to cut down what I was trying to achieve. But I still underestimated. If I can’t cut the scope, then I need to budget more time — and not feel guilty about it.
Score the sessions, not just the output — For Sprint 2, I’d like to track not just hours and word counts but session quality: what I intended, what I actually did, what stage the draft was in, and whether the session felt productive. Understanding which sessions produce flow and which don’t would help me design better ones.

And perhaps the most important lesson of all: forgive yourself for the sessions that don’t go as planned. Not every day is a peak day. Some sessions produce a smart note instead of a blog post, some produce a rough paragraph instead of a finished section, and some don’t produce much at all. That’s not failure — that’s the rhythm. The sprint taught me that self-compassion isn’t the opposite of productivity; it’s what makes sustained productivity possible. If you guilt yourself about yesterday, it’s hard to show up today.

What’s Next

This sprint has rebuilt my writing habit and given me renewed confidence as a writer again. I haven’t fully tamed my wildly exaggerated expectations. But at least I have evidence for more realistic goal setting and a writing practice to continue to grow.

For my next sprint, I adjusted my targets (50h, 6 posts, 2-3 videos). The new theme is focused on data for finishing. This post is the first act. My new question: Can I add video creation into my creative cadence? And the lingering question: Does my writing habit last?

If you’re thinking about your own writing sprint: pick a duration (6-8 weeks), set modest targets, track your hours, protect your mornings, start with the easiest post, and take notes, reflect and iterate.

Concluding Thoughts

When I started this sprint, I wasn’t sure whether I was a product builder who writes or a writer who builds products. After 80 hours of creation time and 9 published articles — writing on 40 of 49 days — the answer is clearer: I’m both — and neither label matters as much as showing up, putting in the work, and pushing to the finish line.

Through the act of writing itself — and through learning about the psychology of finishing — I discovered a deeper lesson. Finishing anything comes down to a simple loop: notice where you’re stuck, shrink your next move until it’s hard not to start, and forgive yourself when progress looks different than you expected. Track it. Reflect on it. Iterate. Keep going. That’s the whole practice.

The Ostrich Problem — why we avoid checking progress on goals we care about
Cut Your Goal in Half — perfectionism as the enemy of finishing
I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work — feeling good as productivity fuel
Stuck in the Middle — midpoint motivation collapse
30 Days, 30 Songs — an earlier creative sprint in music

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author based on personal tracking data. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with data work (analysis, organization and charting), structural editing, and clarity.

I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work: Book Notes on Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll admit that I sometimes feel guilty when I struggle to be productive. A few days ago, after a rough night of sleep and a productive-but-not-particularly-demanding morning, I struggled to get back to work after lunch. I knew what I wanted to accomplish. But something was off. I elected to take a break, but even after the break I still wasn’t feeling it. What was going on? Just the day before I’d put in nearly 6 hours of focused writing and published one of my strongest pieces in weeks. What was wrong? Why was I struggling to gut it out and push through?

As a tech entrepreneur and software engineer, it can often feel like the path to productive output is constantly grinding. “Do More Faster” was one of the mantras while I worked at Techstars in China, and it seems like the path to greatness, success, and investment requires a life of nearly constant effort and perpetual forward motion. But what do you do when you feel off, burned out, lonely, and frankly not motivated to continue?

On this particular day, instead of continuing to struggle through and feel bad, I realized I needed a break. Maybe I should take the rest of the day off entirely. I had been sprinting on several fronts for weeks. I’d made incredible progress on a host of challenges, and on top of client work, I was also spending most of my weekends working on my next album. My batteries were drained.

It was in that moment that I picked up Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal, which I had read a few years ago. As I started re-reading my notes and highlights, I realized I needed to forgive myself. My body and mind were signaling something, and instead of ignoring the signal, I should change course for the day.

What if our productivity and output wasn’t about simply grinding and pushing but truly a function of feeling good and having fun? What if feeling good was the fuel for deep, meaningful work?

Abdaal’s argument is simple and counterintuitive: feeling good isn’t the reward for productive work; it is in fact the prerequisite.

My Quick Take Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5.
Would I recommend it? Yes, I’d definitely recommend this book since it offers a lot of “bang for your buck” in terms of key science and thinkers on productivity and well-being in one place. It’s an important counterthesis to willpower and grind as the primary path to reaching your goals. I appreciated that it offered various reflection journeys (like the odyssey plan) for thinking about high-level purpose questions and tactical tools (alignment experiment) for implementing in small changes.
Would I read it again? No, while this book offers a lot of great material, it felt like a book I would read once.

What I Got Out of This Book

“Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.”

At the start of the book, Abdaal shares his personal story that after multiple years grinding towards becoming a medical doctor, he realized that “Working harder wasn’t going to bring me happiness” (p. 4). We often believe that happiness is the result of hard work and comes after reaching success, but what if we’ve had things reversed? What if feel-good emotions are actually the fuel towards becoming successful?

The central thesis of Feel-Good Productivity can be summarized with the quote, “Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.” (p. 10). Abdaal’s reversal thesis is grounded in positive psychology and in particular Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research on emotions and how we think and act.

Evolutionarily, emotions shape how we act and focus. Negative emotions (fear, anxiety, stress) narrow our attention and trigger tunnel vision. This is useful and necessary when we need to escape danger: cortisol spikes, focus tightens, enabling us to act fast. But this narrowing comes at a cost. When the threat isn’t a life-or-death predator but a deadline, a half-finished track, or our inbox, the same stress backfires. These negative emotions shrink our thinking when we need it to expand.

Fredrickson’s insight, which Abdaal develops, is that positive emotions do the opposite. According to the Broaden-and-Build Theory, when we experience feel-good emotions and situations, like joy, curiosity, interest, play, our awareness broadens. As Abdaal puts it, “When we’re feeling good, our minds open up, we take in more information, and we see more possibilities around us.” (p. 6). Over time, these broadening moments build up key resources: resilience, creativity, problem-solving skills, social connections, and even improved mental and physical health. And when the positive emotions fade, your resources remain, giving you a key capacity to leverage both now and in the future.

Researcher Teresa Amabile found a similar loop in organizational settings — what she calls the Progress Principle: small wins fuel positive inner work life, which fuels better performance, which produces more small wins. Different research tradition, same virtuous cycle.

I often make music or work on my startup in the evenings, which can be tricky after a day of work when I might feel stressed, tired, annoyed or anxious. Rather than immediately try and force myself to work when I’m not feeling good, I’ll do something active and outdoors, like go for a run, play pickleball, or take a walk. If I’m particularly tired out, I take a rest by watching some YouTube videos or just read a book for fun. By taking a break and doing something fun, energizing and joy-inducing, I’m able to decrease my stress and replace these negative emotions. Once I’m in a better mood, I am able to broaden my thinking, engage with a fresh batch of creative challenges, get into deep work mode.

Fredrickson calls this the Undoing Hypothesis: positive emotions actively undo the physiological and cardiovascular effects of negative emotions.

So if positive emotions are the fuel, what happens when that fuel runs out and we experience burnout from weeks or months of working on something that doesn’t feel right?

“Burnout can happen to anyone when work stops feeling meaningful”

“Burnout isn’t just a thing that happens to overworked people in stressful jobs. It can happen to anyone when work stops feeling meaningful, enjoyable or manageable.” (p. 134)

We commonly think about burnout as simply overwork, typically stemming from doing too much or trying to do too much without time off. The WHO defines burnout as an “occupational phenomenon” characterised by “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy” (2019).

While technically accurate, Abdaal argues this is an oversimplification and deprives us of recognizing the causes and knowing possible fixes. For him, there are three types of burnout with differing causes and fixes:

Overexertion: Doing too much, too fast. Classic form of burnout.
- Cause? You are working all the time and sprinting constantly without an end or boundaries. You are constantly saying yes, instead of no to dozens of things you don’t have time or resources to do now.
- Fix? Take a break and get some rest. Say “No.” Better energy management.
- Tactical Antidote? The Energy Investment Portfolio [See Below]
Depletion: Insufficient deep recovery.
- Cause? This isn’t just doing too much but instead not giving yourself proper room to sleep, relax and recharge. You might be getting breaks but they are shallow and you aren’t really recovering.
- Fix? Real time off, Reitoff Principle (permission to write off a day without guilt).
Misalignment: Feeling like you are doing the wrong stuff.
- Cause? This is the most subtle and counterintuitive form of burnout because you can be productive AND burned out if the work doesn’t align with your values. It can also stem from the social environment and work with the wrong kinds or styles of people and support.
- Fix? Unlike the first two types, misalignment burnout requires a deeper look at yourself and what you’re doing. It calls for personal reflection on what you care about and aligning your life and work accordingly.
- Tactical Antidote? Alignment Experiments [See Below]
Let’s look at two antidotes for two of these forms of burnout.

Energy Investment Portfolio: Fix for Overexertion

How much can you actually do at one time? Is your energy portfolio overloaded and preventing you from focusing and meaningfully moving forward on what matters?

Abdaal’s tactical antidote to the classic form of burnout — overexertion — is having Energy Investment Portfolio and limiting how many active projects you are doing. He recommends having two lists. List A holds your dreams and is basically everything you’d like to do eventually. List B holds your active investments and he suggests having just 3-5 projects that you’re investing energy into in a given week.

How to decide where to put your energy? Abdaal recommends using Derek Sivers’ pithy “Hell yeah, or no” as your filter to decide what goes in or out. If it’s not a hell yeah, it stays on List A. If it’s a hell yeah, then it’s in.

As a music producer, I use a similar move that I call the “parking lot” and wrote about in my Quiet Workarounds post. The problem is that, like most music makers, I have lots of unfinished tracks and it can be hard to focus and make progress on my pile of unsorted demos. In order to deal with this, I dump tracks that aren’t being actively worked on into my parking lot. The tracks or album project isn’t abandoned or dead; they’re just parked for later and can be moved to active when I finish something or have an open slot.

By determining what your priorities are and trimming back your active projects list to 3-5 areas, you’ll feel more relaxed, less stressed by the pile, and more able to act — whether you’re dealing with overexertion, stuck in the middle, or something else entirely. Shrink down what you are focused on and you can often intuitively know what your next move is.

But what if the problem isn’t overexertion? What if you’re putting in the right amount of time and energy on things but it’s actually the wrong stuff for you?

Alignment Experiments: How to navigate when you feel misaligned

What do you do when your form of burnout doesn’t stem from overexertion or lack of recovery but because you are no longer aligned with what you are doing?

It’s easy and obvious to advocate for leading a work and creative life centered on fun and play, but it’s much harder to offer a simple principle or solution when you feel off, uncertain and misaligned. It’s here where I’d argue Abdaal offers his most original and impactful contribution. His response centers on the pursuit of authenticity and navigating the modern challenge of value and purpose alignment.

The research backs how important alignment is to our sense of well-being. Psychologist Anna Sutton trawled through 51 studies with over 36,000 participants and found that when people make decisions aligned with their personal values, they aren’t just happier — they’re more engaged with the tasks before them. (p. 186) Having a job, hobby or life situation aligned with your purpose or identity can feel like a luxury or nice-to-have, but the research would say otherwise. Value alignment and living with authenticity is actually a performance enhancer.

Abdaal offers a two-horizon approach to finding alignment:

The longer horizon: Abdaal suggests several reflection exercises for exploring bigger purpose questions: the eulogy method (“What would I feel good about someone saying in my eulogy?”), the odyssey plan (write out three 5-year paths: your current trajectory, a completely different path, and a radical path where money and social expectations don’t matter), and the 12-month celebration (imagine telling your best friend about your progress a year from now).
The shorter horizon: Alignment experiments are essentially small tweaks and iterative changes you undertake to get to the life you want to lead. Abdaal suggests identifying one area of your life where things feel unfulfilling and then change just one independent variable. After, journal about its effects and your learnings, explore alternatives and keep tweaking without committing long-term until it works for you.

Abdaal wonderfully captures the essence of this in the following two questions:

“If you were to change one — just one — independent variable in your life, what would it be? And what effect do you think it would have on your situation?” (p. 191)

As a data-driven self-improver and self-experimenting biohacker, I resonate a lot with Abdaal’s overall thinking and approach here. Over the last year I’ve shifted from working on client work towards my own value-aligned startup and product, Playback Pilot. In my on-going “track everything” experimental blog series, I’ve tried dozens of quantified self and self-tracking methods and small interventions to see what works to improve my productive creative life, my health and longevity. I recently started an experiment to see the impact structured endurance training has on my health (sleep, VO2 Max, biomarkers) using a Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM) and a wearable. Even this blog post is part of an alignment experiment: “what happens if I write consistently for 7 weeks?”

“The best antidote to doing nothing is simply to do something. You can take action by first defining your next step and then tracking your progress.” (p. 133)

The key idea is that you don’t need to change everything to learn and grow into the person you want to be; just change one thing, pay attention, reflect and let what you discover guide and lead you to your next move. One step at a time with intention and self-awareness.

Concluding Thought: “I forgive myself, now I can study”

One of the most powerful and simplest techniques Abdaal suggests is simply forgiving yourself and moving on. He cites a procrastination study by psychologist Michael Wohl: students who practiced self-forgiveness after procrastinating on an exam not only reported fewer negative emotions but were measurably more productive on the next one. Self-forgiveness allowed them to “move past their maladaptive behaviour and focus on the upcoming examination without the burden of past acts.” (p. 131) The title of Wohl’s paper says it all: “I forgive myself, now I can study.”

That’s what finally clicked on that rough afternoon after lunch. The move wasn’t to push through. It was to stop punishing myself for not wanting to. I set aside my primary task and my client work, pulled up my notes and highlights on this book, and just followed the thread. One simple session with just a step or two to get started. I spun out a few smart notes into my backlog, jotted down fresh thoughts on Abdaal’s ideas, and summarized a handful of his quotes in my own words. Without meaning to, I ended up with the rough start of the draft that became this post. No sprint, no deadline, no guilt over the stalled rest of my day. Just a few steps forward without trying to finish the whole thing. I had forgiven myself, and now I was able to work.

Which is exactly Abdaal’s bigger point: feeling good isn’t the reward for productive work, it’s the fuel. It sounds like a platitude until you’ve spent an afternoon proving the opposite case to yourself. If the whole book compresses into nine words, it’s this one question:

“What would this look like if it were fun?” (p. 24)

Finish by Jon Acuff — my review — perfectionism as the enemy of finishing; cut the goal in half
The Courage to Be Disliked by Kishimi & Koga — my review — Adlerian psychology on self-acceptance and contribution
The Progress Principle by Amabile & Kramer — [review in progress] — small wins as the most powerful motivator; same causal loop as broaden-and-build
The Ostrich Problem — my post — why we avoid checking progress
Stuck in the Middle — my post — midpoint motivation collapse

References

Abdaal, A. (2023). Feel-Good Productivity: How to Do More of What Matters to You. Celadon Books.
Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist 56(3): 218-226.
Fredrickson, B. L., et al. (2000). The undoing effect of positive emotions. Motivation and Emotion 24(4): 237-258.
Wohl, M. J. A., Pychyl, T. A., & Bennett, S. H. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(7), 803-808. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.01.029
Sutton, A. (2020). Living the good life: A meta-analysis of authenticity, well-being, and engagement. Personality and Individual Differences, 153, 109645.
Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119.
Amabile, T., & Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Press.

Cut Your Goal in Half: Book Notes on Finish by Jon Acuff

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I often treat my blog writing and even simple book review posts like they need to be 2000+ word opuses involving research, sophisticated arguments and deep philosophical engagement. The end result is that I have read hundreds of books and amassed 35,000+ Kindle highlights, but only 7 book reviews have graduated to published posts on my blog. That’s a humbling conversion rate of roughly 2%.

What if I cut in half my goal and expectation on what a book review should entail? How might this impact my ability to actually finish?

I recently read Jon Acuff’s Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done, and the irony is not lost on me. This is a book about finishing things, reviewed by someone who chronically doesn’t finish book reviews. Acuff’s core argument is that perfectionism is the principal enemy of finishing. My 2% graduation rate is a call out that something isn’t quite working.

I could argue that the book reviews I do finish and publish are of the highest quality and tend to be books that move me or matter in deeply personal and important ways. All the same, not all books merit that degree of engagement. Many make one or two strong points and likely only deserve a 300-500 word take, not a 2,000 word treatise. My perfectionism on format has been its own noble obstacle.

So this review is my attempt to practice what Acuff preaches: cut the goal in half, write the thing, and be okay with letting go.

My Quick Take Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐½ I rated this book a 4.5 out of 5.
Would I recommend it? Yes, I’d recommend this to anyone who starts more things than they finish (which is basically everyone I know, including me). Especially useful for creators, writers and entrepreneurs who struggle with the messy middle.
Would I read it again? Probably not. The principles are simple enough to incorporate and remember. The hard part is remembering to apply them.
What was missing? I felt like the author should have recognized the researcher who helped process his survey responses and incorporated more studies and science on behavior change.

What I Got Out of This Book

“Perfectionism magnifies your mistakes and minimizes your progress.”

Acuff correctly points out that perfectionism is disguised as high standards but operates as a saboteur and blocker to action. He breaks out several forms of perfectionism:

Your goal should be bigger
I can’t until…
You can do it all

The result is that we set goals that are too large, feel embarrassed when we fall short and end up abandoning rather than reframing and adjusting.

His own research backs it up by claiming that participants who cut their goal in half increased their performance on similar challenges by 63% and that 90% reported higher motivation because the goal felt attainable. Personally, I wish he spent more time explaining the background of this research and at least contextualizing it and sharing overall numbers. Regardless, the options, as he puts it, are stark: “Quit the goal because it was too big, or cut it in half and finish.” (p. 25)

I’ve struggled with these demons of perfectionism on several occasions. When I was working on my own goals and self-tracking book, I failed to realize and celebrate the milestones I was hitting, because the book as a whole wasn’t done and the end result was incomplete and awkward. Instead of celebrating the stage and then taking a small pause and adjusting towards writing for the next phase, I gave up.

In some ways, I could argue that tackling a book writing project as a few months effort was a terribly wrong-sized goal. It was a noble achievement that I delivered something, even though it was an incomplete overall mess of a first draft. The better approach would have been to frame and think of it as a book treatment project whose target aim was finishing a book pitch, an intro, one complete chapter and a general outline. Focusing on this step with the timeline I had would have given me something to realistically reach as the deadline loomed. Sometimes you have to aim at finishing something as a stepping stone towards finishing that eventual everything.

“A noble obstacle is a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish.”

Are you struggling to move forward because of an excuse or a fear?

Acuff distinguishes between what he calls a hiding place — “an activity you focus on instead of your goal” — and a noble obstacle — “a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish” (p. 75). Both serve the same function: they let you feel productive while avoiding the thing that actually matters.

These are concepts that struck home for me. My classic blocker is that I’ll often assign a precursor to actually doing the core creative activity or task. The “I should do X before I do Y” means I insert conditions to starting or finishing something.

I’ll talk about wishing I had a certain skill in order to actually finish my project or goal. These are all what I’d term an “endearing excuse” or “relatable emotion.” It’s endearing because it seems like it’s true and necessary but it’s a hiding place kind of procrastination. It’s relatable because they sound like solid excuses that artists or working professionals can relate to, nod their heads and allow myself to not do the thing. In any case, they are reasons we tell others or ourselves that hinder us from forward movement and positive momentum. And once the noble obstacle is in place, we often stop checking whether we’re making progress at all — what psychologists call the ostrich problem. The hiding place keeps us from doing the work; the ostrich problem keeps us from seeing that we aren’t.

The “I can’t until…” pattern is a classic noble obstacle: I can’t launch until the business model is perfect. I can’t publish until I’ve done more research. I can’t start until I learn X. We construct hurdles on our own path until the lane is so clogged we couldn’t possibly move or run today.

I’ve seen this pattern play out empirically. When I surveyed 400+ music producers for my app Playback Pilot, one of the top four bottlenecks was sound selection (auditioning presets, scrolling through sample packs, hunting for the perfect drum hit). It accounted for nearly 11% of all responses. It feels productive. It looks like creative work. But it’s a producer’s version of Acuff’s noble obstacle: a virtuous-sounding activity that keeps you from actually arranging, mixing and finishing.

In my own survey, the broader finding was even more striking: 73% of producers attributed their finishing struggles to internal factors — perfectionism, overthinking, self-doubt — not external ones like time or tools. The enemy of finishing, as Acuff might put it, is in our heads, not just out in the world.

Concluding Thought: “Goals you refuse to chase don’t disappear — they become ghosts that haunt you.”

Acuff’s Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done is an easy read with clear language and some striking, relatable examples. He offers great labels for our challenges with goal pursuit. But at times I think he misses the core emotional background that hinders us from finishing. He hints at this through a passage from Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

In Steinbeck’s novel, Henri the shipbuilder spends years building a boat but tears it apart before completion each and every time. A friend understands: “Henri loves boats but he’s afraid of the ocean… So you see, he never finishes the boat — so he doesn’t ever have to launch it.” (p. 172)

Goal pursuits are complex, multiheaded monsters. They can fire us up with excitement and pull at us in a highly engaging and motivating way, but not all goals matter to us in the same way. Some are actually goals we think we should have but don’t actually care for. Even goals we do align with and care about will face obstacles — the lull and swirl we experience when we get stuck in the middle phase.

I don’t think Acuff fully articulates the emotional landscape of goal pursuit, though he does find some early moorings for how complicated humans think and treat their goals. He briefly talks about why we sometimes secretly choose to stay unfinished, because it gives us control over the outcome. For example, we don’t want to finish and still fail or not get the emotional satisfaction we have been imagining (“if I never try, I at least know the outcome”).

Acuff’s counter is simple and hard to argue with: “You’ll never know the unbelievable joy of keeping a promise to yourself unless you finish.” (p. 185)

The producers I surveyed want to finish 7.9 tracks per month; they actually finish 3.7. Those unfinished 4.2 tracks per month are Acuff’s ghosts, accumulating in hard drives and project folders and weighing on us as creators. The data confirmed what I already sensed from my own music making: finishing isn’t a side problem. It’s the problem. And the ghosts don’t go away just because you start something new — they pile up.

Even though I started this review and post with the mantra and principle of cutting the goal in half and finishing faster, it still took me nearly two hours. I’ll take heart that it’s at least one unfinished book review I have finished.

But what about the dozens of other “ghost ships” haunting the harbor of my writing drafts and music catalog? So many ideas I cared enough to start but for one reason or another I haven’t finished piling up from months and even years ago. Reading Acuff, I had to ask myself his hardest question: “What am I getting out of not finishing?” (p. 182). Is it an excuse — I can’t do it until…? A wish for control that the reception will be all positive? Or simply trying to do too much all at once and not moving forward at all? Likely some combination. But unless I start aiming at smaller objectives and actually finishing them, I’ll never find out — because I’ll never finish.

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport — currently reading
The ONE Thing by Gary Keller — previously read
Two Awesome Hours by Josh Davis — on the list
Stuck in the Middle — my own published post on the psychology of midpoint motivation collapse, which pairs well with Acuff’s framework

Additional Book Notes, Quotes and Key Takeaways

On perfectionism as the enemy:

“The day after perfect is what separates finishers from starters.” (p. 12)
“Perfectionism magnifies your mistakes and minimizes your progress.” (p. 14)
“Perfectionism believes that the harder something is, the more miserable something is, the better it is.” (p. 47)

On right-sizing your goals:

“Those who cut their goal in half increased their performance on past similar challenges by over 63 percent.” (p. 23)
“The only way to accomplish a new goal is to feed it your most valuable resource: time. And what we never like to admit is that you don’t just give time to something, you take it from something else.” (p. 33)
“If you’re unhappy with your progress, you have three different dials you can adjust. The goal. The timeline. The actions.” (p. 163)

On avoidance and noble obstacles:

“A hiding place is an activity you focus on instead of your goal. A noble obstacle is a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish.” (p. 75)
“‘What’s next’ will always look more interesting than ‘what’s now.’” (p. 82)
“If we don’t examine ourselves mindfully and gently, we may think that our failures to meet our goals are due to our laziness or bad strategy, when in reality they are caused by the secret rules that make our finishes impossible.” (p. 120)

On the fear of finishing — and the joy on the other side:

“The day before done is terrifying.” (p. 170)
“What am I getting out of not finishing?” (p. 182)
“Goals you refuse to chase don’t disappear — they become ghosts that haunt you.” (p. 189)
“You’ll never know the unbelievable joy of keeping a promise to yourself unless you finish.” (p. 185)

Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I had finished dozens of songs and released 6 albums, I dreaded working on my latest music album. I didn’t even want to open Ableton, my music production software. I couldn’t get myself to do even the simplest acts to make progress — reviewing, diagnosing, or basic reworking of tracks. I was stuck.

I was 25 hours and ten weeks into my next album, averaging barely 90 minutes a week, with multiple weeks of nothing. The beginning had been exciting. I’d spent a fun first month jamming and creating new demos — 30+ tracks already. But somewhere around August, I stalled. My weekly music hours dropped to almost nothing. My album tracking spreadsheet hadn’t changed in months. Months had passed with little or no progress, and I found myself pulled into other interests. I stopped checking my spreadsheet, stopped reviewing my session logs, stopped looking at the data entirely. I’d later learn this is what psychologists call the ostrich problem — avoiding progress information on goals we care about.

Have you ever gotten stuck halfway through a goal you cared about?

If you’ve ever pursued a goal with real passion and energy and then hit a wall — not at the beginning, not at the end, but somewhere in the murky middle — you know the feeling. The thrill of starting is gone. The finish line is nowhere in sight. You doubt yourself. You wonder if it’s worth it. You stall.

It turns out there’s behavioral research that explains exactly why we lose motivation in this murky middle. The problem isn’t willpower, lack of skills, or fatigue. It’s something more fundamental — a predictable pattern in how our brains perceive progress. Researchers call it getting stuck in the middle.

In this post, I’ll explore why motivation collapses at the midpoint of our goals, the behavioral research behind it, and practical strategies for designing your way through the valley. This is the companion piece to my earlier post on the ostrich problem where we explored why we avoid checking our progress. This post is about that valley — why it exists, what it feels like, and how to climb out.

The Classic Theory (and Why It’s Incomplete)

Pursuing goals often seems like a straightforward process. We imagine the pursuit of goals as a linear pull toward the finish line: the closer we get, the more motivated we are to finish. In psychology, this idea is called the goal-gradient hypothesis and was first proposed by Clark Hull in 1932. Hull observed that rats in a maze ran faster as they approached the food. The closer the reward, the harder they pushed. It makes intuitive sense, and decades of research have confirmed the basic pattern in humans too.

But if this were the whole story, why do we seem to inevitably get stuck? Why does it seem like after making considerable progress and sticking to a habit, we stumble, reach a lull, and lose steam? Strangely, this doesn’t happen at the beginning or the end — but somewhere in the middle. If motivation simply increased as we approached our goal, this shouldn’t happen. Something else must be going on.

Think about training for a marathon. Getting started feels exciting — the first several training runs are really affirming. You’ve got a new routine and you’re making tangible gains. The last few weeks before race day bring a new level of focus, excitement, and even adrenaline. But somewhere around week 8 of 16, you’re just… running. The novelty has worn off and race day is still months away.

The U-Curve: Every Goal Has a Crux

We tend to think of goals like hiking up a mountain: just keep walking uphill until you reach the summit. But a better metaphor, especially for the middle, is rock climbing. You’re on the wall. You can’t see the top or the bottom clearly. The next handhold isn’t obvious. Your body is in between positions, uncomfortable, and you aren’t sure of your next move. You’re not lost. You’re stuck.

In climbing, the hardest move on a route is called “the crux.” It’s almost always in the middle, not at the top. Experienced climbers expect this and prepare for it. By contrast, most goal pursuers don’t anticipate or prepare for the middle. We underestimate the difficulty of the middle, because we assume that we’ve already figured out the basics and have some progress to show.

Behavioral research suggests every goal pursuit has a crux too.

Motivation during goal pursuit doesn’t follow a linear path. Instead, it follows a U-shaped curve. Motivation is highest at the beginning and end, lowest in the middle.

The motivation U-curve: highest at the start and end, lowest in the middle. (Based on Bonezzi et al., 2011)

Whether it was training for a marathon or working on an album, this parallels my own lived experience midway in pursuit of these goals. It’s at the midway point where I lose momentum, emotions shift, and my path ahead becomes cloudy. I just never could put my finger on what was going on or even why. In 2011, Bonezzi and colleagues discovered why.

Motivation comes down to how we measure progress and, in particular, which reference point we use for comparing how much progress we are making (or not making). We adopt one of two reference frames:

To-Date Frame (Looking Backward): This is our starting reference point when we’re early in a goal. Each step feels meaningful, because we are close to where we started and comparative progress is noticeable. If we just started training for a marathon, each day we run feels like significant improvement. Early in our goal pursuit, the to-date frame heightens our motivation, and we can say with confidence, “Look how far I’ve come!”
To-Go Frame (Looking Forward): This is the frame of reference when the finish line or end point of our goal is what is pulling at us. For marathon training or even during a race, each step feels like we are closing the gap of the remaining distance, and we say to ourselves, “I’m almost there!”

Imagine you’re reading a 500-page book. When you reach page 51, after reading 50 pages, it feels like real progress. It’s a 1:50 ratio. By contrast, when you read page 201, after 200 pages, this feels like nothing. And, in fact, it’s a meager 1:200 ratio. You are reading the same page in both cases. But the perceived value of a page read and your progress has shifted. It doesn’t feel like you are making quite the same amount of progress.

For the to-date frame, each unit of progress feels smaller and smaller compared to the pile. Your motivation slowly decays. For the to-go frame, each unit of progress dramatically reduces the percentage of the remaining distance, and motivation can surge as we near the target — much like the final sprint toward the finish line or the final pages of a book.

Humans naturally adopt the closest standard of reference. At the beginning of a goal, the starting line is closest, so we use a to-date frame. Near the end, the finish line is closest, so we switch to a to-go frame. It’s at the midpoint where we stall. We’re far from both reference points. Looking back, our progress feels tiny compared to what we’ve done. Looking forward, the finish line is still far away. Neither frame provides motivational fuel. This is the valley — the U-shaped motivation curve. It’s during this transition between frames of reference that we get “stuck in the middle.”

Getting stuck at the midpoint of a project or goal isn’t a failure of willpower, personality, or character. This is the crux — for climbers and for goal pursuers alike. You’ve reached a point of demotivation and uncertainty, equidistant between the start and the finish. It’s a natural progression where two reference frames on progress collide, and neither one works. It’s not that the work is hardest at the midpoint — it’s that our perception of progress is at its weakest. Both the push and the pull have gone quiet.

What the Middle Feels Like: Torn Between Continuing and Quitting

“Don’t turn left,” were the words I repeated to myself as I passed the midway point of my first marathon. I had only started running about a year before the event, and this first marathon took place in my hometown at the time. I was filled with emotions of gratitude, surprise and positivity as I met a small group of my neighbors with a banner and cheering me on at the midpoint, just a few blocks from my house. But as I turned the corner and headed slightly uphill, my heart sunk a bit and a wave of fatigue and uncertainty struck me. The finish line was still two hours away and I was tired.

Have you ever been halfway through something important — a project, a degree, a creative work, a relationship — and doubted yourself and felt the pull to quit and walk away? Not necessarily because you couldn’t do it but because the goal just felt… empty?

Psychologists call this an action crisis. An action crisis is the state of being torn between continuing to pursue a goal and giving up entirely. It’s a feeling of ambivalence. You aren’t fully quitting nor are you totally committed to pushing through either. It’s a limbo state that consumes energy and sucks at you emotionally.

An action crisis develops from two sources: decreased attainability (you’re not sure how to keep going) and decreased desirability (the goal doesn’t feel worth the remaining effort). Both hit hardest at the midpoint.

At my album 7 midpoint, I’d argue that I was less blocked by desirability since I still wanted to do it. Instead, I was stalled by attainability. I had over forty candidate tracks but no idea which to finish. I also doubted certain abilities (imposter syndrome) and doing another album felt more like another obligation in a period of too many obligations.

I was still vaguely saying that I was working on my next album but I really wasn’t. Besides not doing any form of meaningful reviewing or reworking, I had stopped checking my album tracking spreadsheet. The midpoint is also when monitoring goal progress feels least rewarding — which is exactly where I was, like an ostrich sticking my head in the sand.

Whether you experience an action crisis often comes down to why you’re pursuing the goal in the first place. Researchers distinguish between “want-to” goals — chosen freely because they reflect your authentic values — and “have-to” goals — pursued in response to external demands or internal pressure. Have-to goals are more prone to action crises and your uncertainty and lack of value-alignment typically makes them harder to overcome. By contrast, want-to goals resist action crises.

This isn’t just good explanation or theory. In controlled experiments, 75% of participants naturally switched their progress-monitoring frame right at the midpoint, confirming that the U-curve isn’t a choice but an automatic cognitive shift (Bonezzi et al., 2011). We adopt different reference points to monitor progress at different stages, and our motivation shifts as a function of the perceived marginal value of our progress.

Interestingly, researchers found this pattern is goal-specific, not personal. In a separate study tracking personal goals, 87.1% of the variance in whether someone experienced an action crisis depended on the specific goal, not the person (Holding et al., 2017). Regardless of your personality type, if you actually care and value a specific goal or project, then you have a higher probability of overcoming these obstacles and pushing through the feeling of being stuck in the middle. It’s the goal and your relationship to it that matter more than some character flaw or self-limiting belief about persistence or failure.

Which raises a practical question: if getting stuck in the middle is normal and even predictable, how can we prepare for it and navigate it the same way a climber prepares for the crux on the way up a wall?

Two Valleys, Two Solutions

Failure is obvious. Progress, or lack of, is quiet, subtle and often hard to detect. While I was examining my time logs and journal entries for my latest album, I discovered not just one valley but, in fact, two distinct valleys, and each required a different kind of intervention.

My first valley (Aug-Oct, 10→26h, 1.6h/wk) was characterized by low engagement, minimal reviews and a general lack of effort. It wasn’t fun either. You can’t move a goal forward without putting time and energy into it. And you rarely can use willpower alone to work on something you aren’t enjoying. Fortunately, this first valley was broken by returning to Los Angeles and the social energy of collaboration. My primary music collaborator Jacob showed up, and three Saturday sessions anchored November. While the burst was mostly jamming and song-writing, rather than reworking and revisions, it rebuilt momentum and excitement for the material and built up even better initial tracks for the album project overall. It wasn’t work; it was fun.

My second valley (Dec, 47→56h, 1.7h/wk) coincided with a December work push and end-of-year travels. I definitely needed a break and some time to reflect. As January and a new year started, this particular “stuck in the middle” valley was broken by a more explicit realization that I needed structure, a schedule, and time commitments. Instead of generic “Music Production,” I named my sessions (“Album 7 Reworking”). I did regular planning check-in’s and project reflections, so each week had clearer intentions. I also set weekly time goals and got more consistent on when and where each week I’d work on the album. I scheduled time with collaborators for recordings and solo time for music production. Using my tracking spreadsheet, I implemented revision sprints V0→V1→V2 where I reviewed tracks, made cuts, took notes and revised song by song.

Looking back, I’d distill what worked into a few principles:

Make it social. Feedback, collaboration and accountability can get you out of your head, break isolation, and make it fun again. When you are stuck, schedule time with a friend to share what you are going through and break the lull with community.
Shrink the middle. You are going to get stuck, but by breaking goals into sub-sprints, you’re never far from a fresh start or motivating finish. By breaking up the work, you’re effectively designing for natural cycles for planning, reflecting and doing.
Reframe early. Remember to switch to a to-go framing before any natural midpoints. This can help you overcome the emotional lull, avoid falling into a rut, and identify a better progress indicator. “3 tracks left” feels more motivating than “7 tracks done.”
Design monitoring for the midpoint. You should check in more frequently during the middle, not less. We often invest a lot of energy into goal setting and planning but forget to reflect later on, often resulting in burying our head in the sand and not seeking out information that can actively help us in our goal pursuits. Name your sessions. Add planning check-ins. Design unique ways to make the path your own. One’s ability to reflect on what you are feeling, reframe obstacles into opportunities and keep going is what separates endless starters from productive finishers.
Track your progress in visible and fun ways. Emotions are a big part of any goal pursuit or creative challenge. I rate my album tracks with hotdog emojis instead of five stars. I know it sounds silly, but it makes rating feel playful instead of judgmental. Check-in’s and progress tracking doesn’t have to be heavy or complex. Change the emotional frame from judgment to play. Make check-in’s simple and routine, and you’ll improve your chances at sustaining progress-enhancing efforts.

Read the wall before and as you climb. Good rock climbers don’t depend purely on strength and skill to survive the crux. Instead, they plan rest positions and pause and assess at these challenging midpoints, before committing to these critical moves. Like rock climbers, goal pursuers need to read the wall as they climb it and know that the middle is coming. By designing your monitoring, setting up your milestones, and positioning your support, you can navigate the crux instead of being stopped by it.

Hour 121: Reading the Wall

For my next album, I’m at hour 121 now. On average my past albums took around 160 hours, so I’m about 25% away from being finished. I’m producing 5+ hours a week of focused reworking, which was 0 hours/week during my stuck periods. The tracklist is nearly settled at 16 tracks (v4). v5 coming together: 7 songs are being mixed, 9 are in a final push in recording/production phases, and ~38 tasks remain.

The middle wasn’t one valley. It was two, and each demanded a different approach to break through. The first time, a friend showed up, renewing my confidence, carrying some of the creative load, and providing meaningful feedback and accountability. The second time, I restructured the work and the path ahead, so each week was contributing an impactful area and navigating the project through multiple revisions and multiple phases of “done.” Neither one was about willpower. It was about showing up and making progress.

The research calls this the motivation U-curve, a predictable collapse at the midpoint where neither looking back nor looking forward provides fuel. It’s compounded by action crises, where attainability and desirability both waver, and our goals feel empty and our passion decreases. This is made worse by the ostrich instinct — we stop monitoring progress exactly when monitoring matters most. But the data also show that this faltering middle is largely goal-specific, not a personality flaw. If you care deeply about your goal, you shouldn’t blame yourself, your willpower, or lament how impossible the goal appears. Instead, recognize it as a natural phenomenon and design your own solution and path forward.

Every goal pursuit will hit a valley, a stuck in the middle lull, a crux. You’ll get frustrated, you’ll doubt yourself and the meaning of your goal, and even consider retreating and quitting. The question isn’t if you’ll hit it, because you will; but whether you’ll recognize it, read the wall and keep climbing.

References

Bonezzi, A., Brendl, C. M., & De Angelis, M. (2011). Stuck in the middle: The psychophysics of goal pursuit. Psychological Science, 22(5), 607-612.
Holding, A. C., Hope, N. H., Harvey, B., Marion Jetten, A. S., & Koestner, R. (2017). Stuck in limbo: Motivational antecedents and consequences of experiencing action crises in personal goal pursuit. Journal of Personality, 85(6), 893-905.
Hull, C. L. (1932). The goal-gradient hypothesis and maze learning.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with editing, structural organization and clarity. Illustrations were generated with NotebookLM/Gemini. Cover image was generated with Gemini and edited by the author.

Is What I Am Doing Useful?: Book Notes on The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

“Think of life as a series of dots” - Alfred Adler

I read “The Courage to Be Disliked” in mid-2024, and it has quickly become one of the books I most often recommend, alongside Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. Both books and their underlying questions and human sense-making journeys are worth remembering, reflecting on and returning to, especially when feeling nihilistic, lacking purpose, or struggling with self-doubt.

Written by Japanese philosopher and psychologist Ichiro Kishimi (岸見一郎) and Fumitake Koga, the book format is a dialogue between a youth and an older philosopher and offers fresh take on psychology compared to more well-known Freud or Jung. Through a series of illustrative exchanges, the book’s characters examine many of Adler’s key concepts as well as laying out a philosophy of self-acceptance, courage to lead one’s own life and an ethical orientation based on contributing to others. One might even argue it fits in well with Charles Taylor’s Ethics of Authenticity.

While its final messages are simple ones like “living earnestly here and now” and having the “courage to change what we can change,” Adler does not want us to simply accept these ideas without critical inquiry or self-examination. In fact, he is quite skeptical of advice-giving as such and instead encourages each of us to attempt to work through these challenging ideas from our own point of view and personal experience and to strive to incorporate the key lessons authentically and fully.

Overall, the core ideas from Adler and this book highly resonated with me, and I quite enjoyed the way the ideas were told and unfolded. The book’s socratic dialogue format fits well with seeing ideas from multiple perspectives and forced me as a reader to struggle with hard concepts on my own terms. In spite of sparse references to their actual names, I found that the usage of Greek philosophy (namely Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) along with German Philosophy (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) provided a robust intellectual foundation too.

Here are my book notes and a few of my takeaways and lessons.

My Quick Take Book Review

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ I rated this book a 5 out of 5 on Goodreads.
Would I recommend it? Definitely, I’d recommend this book to anyone struggling to navigate life’s ambiguities and challenges.
Would I read it again? Totally. Along with “Man’s Search For Meaning” by Viktor E Frankl, I think this book and its underlying philosophy are worth remembering and returning to. I tend to periodically lose my sense of meaning (like everyone) and get a bit nihilistic and depressed. Recognizing our own ability to change and reminding myself that I am able to create my own self-determining meaning are key enablers during periods of self-doubt and sadness.

Background: Who was Alfred Adler?

“Understanding a human being is no easy matter. Of all the forms of psychology, individual psychology is probably the most difficult to learn and put into practice.” - Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler (7 February 1870 – 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and contemporary of Freud and Jung. Adler broke away to found Individual Psychology, and he emphasized a consideration of the human being as an individual whole, the importance of feelings of belonging, relationships within the family, and birth order, which set him apart from both Freud and Jung. While less famous than Freud, Adler’s ideas have influenced everything from modern therapy to self-help, especially around social interest, inferiority feelings, and the courage to change.

What I Got Out of This Book

“Life in general has no meaning…Whatever meaning life has must be assigned to it by the individual.” - Alfred Adler

The book is told over several chapters that span several nights. Multiple ideas resonated with me in this book, and I suspect I’d glean different lessons upon re-reading or further reflection.

Here are the ones I gathered during my first book reading:

“All Problems Are Interpersonal Relationship Problems”

Do I derive my self-worth from external validation?

Psychologist Alfred Adler makes a rather bold claim that “all problems are interpersonal relationship problems.” He is reframing the challenges we face in life as fundamentally relational.

Rejecting the ego-driven framework from Freud and the more individualistic claims of existentialists like Sartre, Adler insists that we cannot understand the self atomistically. Our sense of who we are is fundamentally relational — shaped not by internal drives alone but by our social connections and sense of belonging. Loneliness, for instance, isn’t just about physical isolation but a feeling of exclusion even when surrounded by people. To quote: ”Loneliness is having other people and society and community around you, and having a deep sense of being excluded from them.”

This sense of disconnection often stems from internal struggles, like self-dislike or fear of rejection, which can push us to withdraw or avoid meaningful relationships altogether. Adler’s insight encourages us to confront these internal barriers to better navigate the external world. As the title of the book aptly puts it, a courage to be disliked, an idea we will look at more directly below.

Interpersonal problems also emerge in how people use relationships to express or cope with their own vulnerabilities. Some individuals declare their misfortune or suffering as a way to garner attention, restrict others’ behavior, or control their environment. Adler draws a striking analogy: ”If we were to ask ourselves who is the strongest person in our culture, the logical answer would be, the baby. The baby rules and cannot be dominated.” The baby rules through weakness, and it’s precisely this weakness that gives it power. The comparison underscores how vulnerability, when unacknowledged or misused, can create imbalances in relationships. The challenge lies in transforming these dynamics into mutual support and equality.

Ultimately, Adler’s framework invites us to view our relational challenges as opportunities for self-awareness and growth. By addressing interpersonal struggles—whether they stem from internal fears, unbalanced dynamics, or unmet needs—we can cultivate healthier, more fulfilling connections. It also challenges us to recognize the role of contribution and belonging in overcoming relational problems. When we shift from seeking control or validation toward contributing to others and embracing mutual respect, we begin to resolve the root of these problems. This perspective aligns with the broader Adlerian principles of self-reliance, community harmony, and courage in relationships.

“Whose task is this?”

How do you deal with the reality that much of what causes us anguish comes from tackling other people’s tasks?

Adler’s principle of task separation offers a test: ”Who ultimately is going to receive the result brought about by the choice that is made?” To simplify this: Who bears the consequences of this choice?

If the consequence falls on someone else, it’s their task — not yours. What another person thinks of you, whether they like or dislike you, that is their task, not yours.

This clarity can be liberating. It frees us from the exhausting need for external validation and lets us focus on what is actually within our control. As Adler puts it: ”All interpersonal relationship troubles are caused by intruding on other people’s tasks, or having one’s own tasks intruded on.”

As a solo founder, I’ve had to learn this the hard way: I can build the best tool I can, but whether someone chooses to use it is their task, not mine. My belief that something is great or needed doesn’t change the reality that a person or market must choose it on their own, not because I think or want them to. The same dynamic plays out in relationships. I should be empathetic and supportive, but ultimately I can’t lead someone else’s life, make their choices or even do the actual work of navigating someone else’s feelings and struggles. The best I can do is suggest ways to reframe and alternative paths, since these tasks are theirs, not mine.

Asking “Whose task is this?” serves as a grounding question, helping us honor the balance between support and interference. It reminds us to respect the autonomy of others as well as our own. By focusing only on what is within our control, we can avoid the frustration that comes from trying to change what isn’t ours to change.

Put another way, Adlerian psychology is a psychology for changing oneself, not a psychology for changing others.

The Courage to Be Disliked

“The courage to be happy also includes the courage to be disliked. When you have gained that courage, your interpersonal relationships will all at once change into things of lightness.” (p116)

Adlerian psychology denies the need to seek recognition from others. By separating our tasks from those of others, we can take on the individual task of change. This is a profound existential turn: change is not the task of our therapist, educator, or even parents. It is the task of each of us as individuals.

“For a human being, the greatest unhappiness is not being able to like oneself.” The youth in the book struggles with this — his own sadness, his own evolving identity. He keeps seeking answers from the philosopher, who refuses to simply give them. There is no “just be happy” or “stay positive” way of framing our life’s journey. Without a journey of self-acceptance and personal sense-making, someone else’s answer wouldn’t really be yours — and it wouldn’t be free either.

The book’s sharpest formulation: “Freedom is being disliked by other people.” (p114) You can’t avoid the vulnerability of an uncertain self — that is a journey each of us must go on to actually be ourselves. One does not live as if rolling downhill, but instead climbs the slope that lies ahead. One moves forward without fearing the possibility of being disliked. That is freedom for a human being.

Contribution to Others

“If one really has a feeling of contribution, one will no longer have any need for recognition from others. Because one will already have the real awareness that ‘I am of use to someone,’ without needing to go out of one’s way to be acknowledged by others.” (p183)

What if happiness isn’t about achievement but about feeling useful? What if we can find meaning and purpose without needing to be recognized for it?

Rejecting meaning and purpose as purely egoistical or selfish, a chief limitation to Sartre’s existential ethics, Adler argues that the good life and the happy life are about contributing to others. Everything isn’t just about self-interests, because we are social beings who live in a social context and have social interests.

The tension of all of this is encapsulated in a somewhat counterintuitive but profound line:

“Contribution to others, rather than being about getting rid of the ‘I’ and being of service to someone, is actually something one does in order to be truly aware of the worth of the ‘I’.” (p170)

Contributing to others isn’t selfless nor is it the sublimation of self for other. In fact, it is the exact opposite. Adler’s individual psychology challenges us to pursue this journey of self-discovery and arguably self-creation so as to become aware of our own self worth and, in turn, contribute.

According to Adler, “In a word, happiness is the feeling of contribution.” For him, the essence of work goes beyond the job at a company, for clients or even getting paid; instead it confirms one’s sense of belonging and includes child-rearing, domestic/house work, hobbies, and contributing to local society. This idea of living beyond paid work or a core artistic identity seems really important, because it offers a more holistic way of living where “horizontal” doing and relationships meaningfully matter and contributions create purpose.

As a software engineer, tool builder, musician and artist, Adler’s framing of “work as contribution” offers me a path out from the issues I often encounter with certain self-help principles, psychological frameworks like Freud’s, and especially existential philosophy, namely their inability to offer a meaningful universe beyond the self, a solution to solipsistic absolutism, or even just a world beyond my head with and for others.

Contribution to and for others matters deeply to me. It’s something I enact through my open source code work and through reflection and goal pursuit tech products, like Stay Reflective and Playback Pilot. While blogging and making music give me flow and are important paths for learning and growth, they also help me recognize a certain form of self-worth through useful doings and lived contributions. In a world where meaning and ultimate purpose are in my opinion impossible to find, I instead ask myself a simpler question: Is what I am doing useful?

If I had to summarize the arc of the book and Adler’s thinking therein, it is realizing and recognizing our freedom from the need for approval and accepting and embracing the courage to be disliked. This, in turn, allows us to lean in and live our deeply human capacity to contribute freely and, by extension, to be happy.

Book Notes, Quotes and Key Takeaways

[Emphasis is mine]

Subjectivity and Reality: “None of us live in an objective world, but instead in a subjective world that we ourselves have given meaning to. The world you see is different from the one I see, and it’s impossible to share your world with anyone else.”
Meaning-Making and Personal Agency: Our self is ”determined not by our experiences themselves, but by the meaning we give them. We determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those past experiences.”
Adler: “No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.” Put bluntly, people can change.
All Problems Are Interpersonal Relationship Problems: Adler says, “To get rid of one’s problems, all one can do is live in the universe all alone.” Unfortunately, we can’t do such a thing. We must recognize our need to live in a world with others and find the courage to accept who we are or wish to be, even if it entails being disliked by some.
Self-Dislike as Avoidance: “You’ve avoided interpersonal relationships by disliking yourself.” (p46)
We don’t owe others our lives: “We are not living to satisfy other people’s expectations.” (p93)
The paradox of self-consciousness: “A way of living in which one is constantly troubled by how one is seen by others is a self-centered lifestyle in which one’s sole concern is with the ‘I’.” (p129)
Distance in relationships: “Forming good interpersonal relationships requires a certain degree of distance.” (p123)
You are the only one who can assign meaning to your life.
Lifestyle as a Choice: “People are constantly selecting their lifestyles…It is because you are making the persistent decision not to change your lifestyle…But if you change your lifestyle—the way of giving meaning to the world and yourself—then both your way of interacting with the world and your behavior will have to change as well.” (p33) - MK: This idea of Adlerian teleology is profound and something I circle around regularly. I recently was reflecting on the need to park Stay Reflective for Playback Pilot which I put in my own words as: “sometimes you have to let go of things that aren’t working and pursue things that are.”
Courage to Respect Your Self-Worth: In Adler’s view, “It is only when a person is able to feel that he has worth that he can possess courage.”
We are limited but can have an impact with what we have: Adler says, “The important thing is not what one is born with but what use one makes of that equipment.”
Two objectives of behavior: Adler: “The two objectives for behavior: to be self-reliant and to live in harmony with society. The two objectives for the psychology that supports these behaviors: the consciousness that I have the ability and the consciousness that people are my comrades.”
A blank page: “The life that lies ahead of you is a completely blank page, and there are no tracks that have been laid for you to follow.” (p196)
The guiding star: “No matter what moments you are living, or if there are people who dislike you, as long as you do not lose sight of the guiding star of ‘I contribute to others,’ you will not lose your way, and you can do whatever you like. Whether you’re disliked or not, you pay it no mind and live free.” (p201)
I can change. If I can change, the world can change. “If ‘I’ change, the world will change. This means that the world can be changed only by me and no one else will change it for me.”
Self-Determining Beings: Adler states, “No experience is in itself a cause of our success or failure. We do not suffer from the shock of our experiences—the so-called trauma—but instead, we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We are not determined by our experiences, but the meaning we give them is self-determining.”

Concluding Thoughts: Living Earnestly in the Here and Now

The arc of the book is deceptively simple: freedom from the need for approval, the courage to be disliked, and through that, the capacity to contribute freely and be happy. But Adler doesn’t stop there and pushes forward asking: when and how we live this way?

While we as humans have a tendency to look for causes for who we are in the past and dream about some “end” state in the future, the truth is we start each day and each moment anew. All we have is now. All we can do is get started.

Adler rejects viewing life as a line and argues that life is just a “series of moments” or “a series of dots.” This here-and-now orientation isn’t selfish egoism but instead centered on cultivating self-acceptance. It’s about finding a “self-centered” capacity to feel one has worth. Strikingly this isn’t just worth in our acts but on the level of our being.

“The greatest life-lie of all is to not live here and now.”

This formulation of living for yourself in the now combined with a social context and ethical ideal towards contributing to others aligns well with ideas found in one of my favorite philosophers, Charles Taylor, and his book Ethics of Authenticity. Authenticity, in Taylor’s view, isn’t a purely ego or self quest but carries a social responsibility and ethical dimension. Basically, we are always in a lived world, a subjective experience of a self in a caring and intersubjective society. Authenticity isn’t about just finding yourself but about finding what is significant in your difference from others. As Taylor puts it: “I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter.” You can’t have a self without the other, and to live as if others don’t matter is ethically and meaningfully void.

But is there even a self to find? In The Mind Is Flat, another favorite book of mine, Nick Chater rejects the very notion of hidden inner depth. He argues that the self is an illusion and fabrication of our mind, an often fluid, fragmented and evolving one that should be to some extent mistrusted. In this context, one could argue that Adler’s concept of life as “series of dots” lands even harder because there is no deep self to discover. We are only the self we live day to day.

Alongside Frankl, “The Courage to Be Disliked” and its underlying concepts and quotes are ideas I often return to, especially in a world of change, depressing news and uncertainty for me and my work. Life can feel hard. The universe can feel cold and meaningless. As one of the characters in the book fittingly puts it:

“Someone has to start. Other people might not be cooperative, but that is not connected to you. My advice is this: You should start. With no regard to whether others are cooperative or not.” (p203)

When I feel stuck or nihilistic, Adler’s ideas give me a reliable and non-self-deluding form of sense-making as I grow, change, self-doubt, deal with changes, cultivate resilience, and move forward each day. Yet, Adler’s core concepts of personal responsibility, rejecting external validation, seeking self-worth without needing approval, living life in the now and contributing to others continue to resonate and offer me realistic and lived hope.

Along with the importance of starting, the quote we started with of life as a “series of dots” gets extended later in the book in a beautiful kinetic metaphor of dancing and is worth quoting in full:

Think of it this way: Life is a series of moments, which one lives as if one were dancing, right now, around and around each passing instant. With dance, it is the dancing itself that is the goal, and no one is concerned with arriving somewhere by doing it. The kind of life that you speak of, which tries to reach a destination, may be termed a “kinetic (dynamic) life.” By contrast, the kind of dancing life I am talking about could be called an “energeial (actual-active-state) life.” (p 192)

Life is a dance. The dancing itself is the goal. Start dancing.

References:

Kishimi, I., Koga, F. (2018). The Courage To Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change Your Life and Achieve Real Happiness. United Kingdom: Allen & Unwin.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude Code) were used to assist with research, editing, structural organization and clarity.

The Ostrich Problem: Why do we avoid checking our goal progress?

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What metric are you currently hiding from?

I knew going into my marathon race that I wasn’t really ready. A knee injury had disrupted my training for weeks. The course for the Xichang Marathon in southern Sichuan, China, was at 5000 feet / 1500 meters of altitude, and the terrain turned out to be much hillier than I’d assumed too. Despite that data screaming at me to adjust my expectations, I just didn’t. I was so attached to this idea of myself as a sub-fourhour marathon runner, I ignored every single warning sign, and the results were an absolute disaster.

The first half went fine. I hit 21 kilometers in about two hours, right on pace. Then the cramps came. Severe calf cramps made the second half nearly un-runnable. Those last 21 kilometers took me three hours. And I finished in 5:09, over an hour off my goal, humbled and hobbling.

Why do we avoid the information that could help us succeed?

In my post-race notes I wrote: “the training and conditions of my body matter more than any false sense of my deserved expectations.” In my training logs and pre-race journaling, the information had been there all along. All those warning signs, the hilly course, the injury, the missed training runs, they were all there before the race even started. I just had chosen not to look or ignore what the information should have been telling me. Why did I bury my head in the sand? Why didn’t I want to check in-on or own up to my lack of preparedness and progress? Why didn’t I want to adjust my race day goal?

Tracking your progress towards your goals is essential for achieving them. In fact, psychologists believe that monitoring goal progress is one of the most effective behavior change techniques we have. In fact, tracking goal progress is believed to have just as much impact on goal achievement as setting goals themselves. Unfortunately, many people — including myself, as that marathon made painfully clear — both avoid checking how we are doing in pursuit of our goals and adjusting based on that data.

There are a lot of ways to get information about the status of a goal or project, like checking your phone’s screentime or looking at your wearable’s step count. Unfortunately, we often ignore and steer clear of these check-ins that might accurately tell us how close or far away we are from our intended goal or outcome. Behavioral researchers and psychologists have labeled this as the “ostrich problem.” Named after the myth that ostriches bury their heads in the sand to avoid danger, this phenomenon describes the tendency to avoid monitoring one’s goal progress.

But not all avoidance is the same. Sometimes you’re hiding from data that scares you — your ego protecting itself from uncomfortable truths. Other times, the avoidance is a signal that the goal itself has gone stale. Understanding which kind of avoidance you’re dealing with is the key to knowing whether to fix your monitoring or fix your goals.

In this post, I’ll examine the research and psychology behind the “ostrich problem” — why our self-motives conspire against progress monitoring and what the consequences are when we look away. Drawing on my own confessional examples from marathon running, music production, and a book project that became its own ostrich problem, I’ll explore how avoidance can sometimes be a useful signal rather than just a failure of discipline. Finally, I’ll share strategies to overcome the ostrich problem and get better at goal monitoring through self-tracking, structured reflections, and regular check-ins.

What is the Ostrich Problem?

Examples of Self-Tracking Avoidance. Image: NotebookLM.

Ostrich Problem (definition): The tendency to avoid monitoring one’s goal progress.

There are two critical challenges we all typically face when it comes to pursuing our goals:

How to translate goals into actions?
How to close the gap between where we are and where we are hoping to get to in our goal pursuits?

Beyond just setting a goal, many factors go into the pursuit of one’s goals. According to the Self-Regulatory View of Goals, goals are better explained and framed as multi-stage goal pursuits. From goal setting comes goal striving and goal pursuit. It’s easy to have a dream or set a goal, but often our planning and actions are lacking.

Fundamentally, our goal behaviors end up displaying a number of cognitive, behavioral and emotional processes that can prevent us from goal-aligned behavior, often termed the intention-behavior gap. These cognitive processes can vary over time and differ according to the situation and our larger life and goal context. They can result in missing our targets and failing at our goals in large and small ways. And they can make us feel lousy too.

Difficulties with progress monitoring are an important explanation for the issues many people experience when translating goals into action. Related to the larger issues in the science of goals connected to self-regulation, understanding why we often stop seeking information on our goal progress and figuring out strategies to maintain goal tracking can provide a helpful approach to improve our goal pursuits, including how we feel about our goals.

Monitoring goal progress describes the periodically noting and checking-in on our goal-related behavior or its outcomes, including comparing these perceptions with where we want to be (Carver & Scheier, 1990). Checking goal progress is one of the more effective behavior change techniques available. As one group of researchers put it, “the real ‘work’ of goal striving involves monitoring goal progress and acting on discrepancies” (Harkin et al., 2016). Put simply, you reach goals through daily check-ins and following through on where we see gaps and opportunities to act to close those gaps.

The evidence for the power of tracking your progress is strong. In the largest meta-analysis on the topic, Harkin et al. (2016) found that progress monitoring had a small-to-medium effect on goal attainment (d+ = 0.40), which is comparable to the effect of setting goal intentions themselves (d+ = 0.36, per Webb & Sheeran, 2006). This suggests that effective goal striving requires not only deciding on an appropriate goal (“What do I want to achieve?”) but also regularly comparing ongoing behavior to that goal (“Where do I currently stand?”). When self-monitoring is combined with other techniques like intention formation, specific goal setting, feedback on performance, and review of behavioral goals, the effects are even stronger (Michie et al., 2009).

In practical terms, a person who monitors their progress has about a 61% chance of outperforming someone who doesn’t — versus the 50/50 you’d expect by chance. The simple act of tracking is nearly as powerful as the act of deciding what you want to achieve.

Figure: A framework showing how monitoring may lead to changes in behavior. Source: Webb & De Bruin (2020).

And yet, despite knowing this, many of us simply don’t do it. We don’t want to check in or monitor our goal progress — and we often reject the information even when we do encounter it. Webb, Chang, and Benn (2013) coined the term “ostrich problem” to describe this tendency: in many instances, people “bury their head in the sand” and intentionally avoid or reject information that would help them monitor their goal progress.

The evidence is striking:

Linde et al. (2005) found that 20% of people enrolled in a weight loss program reported having never self-weighed prior to the program. You enroll in a program dedicated to changing a specific metric, but you refuse to step on the scale to establish the baseline for that exact metric.
Regular self-monitoring among people with diabetes is uncommon despite its medical importance (Evans et al., 1999; Harris et al., 1993). People with diabetes know that blood glucose monitoring is medically necessary but they still avoid it because checking the numbers forces them to repeatedly confront the painful reality of their condition.
A National Savings and Investment Survey (2012) revealed that of Britons who worry about their finances daily, only 10% monitor their finances at least once a month. You worry about money every day but can’t bring yourself to look at the numbers once a month.
Similarly, despite rating relevant goals as important, few people keep track of how much they have eaten (Polivy, 1976), how many alcoholic drinks they have consumed (Hull, 1981), or the environmental impact of their behaviors (Shepherd & Kay, 2012).

This avoidance on checking our progress feels universal. Whether it’s social media or money matters, how many of us avoid checking our screen time or repeatedly ignore warnings that we are over our screen time limits? How many folks don’t want to check their credit card balances after Christmas or following a trip?

So, even though we have ways to check and likely know it would be good to check, why do we not check our progress? Why does this happen? Why do we avoid the very information that could help us succeed?

Why Do We Avoid Checking Progress? The Four Self-Motives

We choose to feel good now over actually being good later.

We don’t avoid tracking because we don’t care. We avoid it because we care too much.

According to Webb et al.’s (2013) framework, the ostrich problem stems from a conflict between four different self-motives that influence whether and how we monitor our goal progress:

Self-Assessment: The desire to obtain accurate knowledge about our current goal progress. This is the most obvious motive — the urge to ask “How am I doing?” to inform both our self-understanding and our goal pursuit.
Self-Improvement: The motivation to grow and better ourselves, which can trigger the desire to seek out information that reveals where we need to develop.
Self-Enhancement: The drive to maintain a favorable view of ourselves. This is where the conflict begins — we want to see ourselves positively and avoid information that might reflect poorly on us.
Self-Verification: The need to confirm and validate our existing beliefs and self-concept. We may avoid progress information when we believe it will be inconsistent with our view of ourselves (Swann, 1983).

The first two motives — the inner auditor and the inner coach — both want us to look at the data. They’re the voices in our heads saying “Check the spreadsheet”, “Step on the scale” or “Review your latest draft.” But then the conflict arises. Self-verification is our deep need to confirm our existing beliefs about ourselves. If I think of myself as a great runner — a sub-four-hour marathoner — I really don’t want to look at data that contradicts that identity. Anything against it feels like a threat to my ego. And self-enhancement takes this even further: it doesn’t just avoid the bad news, it actively protects a favorable self-image. Even an idealized version of myself feels authentic and true, which makes it harder to see the cracks and contradictions. My ego shields me from emotional discomfort — and from reality.

Figure 1. The ostrich problem within a model of self-regulation. Source: Webb, Chang, & Benn (2013).

As one researcher put it regarding diabetes self-monitoring: “self-monitoring of blood glucose throws it in your face … you must admit again and again that you have diabetes” (Candib, 2008, p. 1263). When we expect that we’ve performed poorly, we simply don’t want that information confirmed.

The ostrich problem isn’t about apathy. It’s an active, defensive move executed by our own ego. Our self-enhancement motive swoops in to protect our self-esteem from the reality of our poor progress. I wanted to see myself as a sub-four-hour marathoner. Looking honestly at those training logs would have destroyed that self-image before the race even began.

I see the same pattern in myself as a music producer. Even though I have already written, produced and released 6 albums and nearly 4 hours of music, I struggle to finish, and I’ve been stuck for months on my seventh album project. Jamming and making new demos is the fun part. Making new songs feels easy, creative and collaborative. It’s tempting to look at my accumulation of 48 demo candidates and partially completed tracks as a sign of success and progress. I’m a do-er and the raw material is there. But tackling my next album is hard and requires a different level of engagement and cognitive effort which I avoid.

Here’s what makes this avoidance so telling: I know the monitoring system works. On my previous album, Forwards & Towards, I used a tracking spreadsheet, logged my time, and tracked revisions through 158 hours and 8-9 revision phases to completion. The spreadsheet was central to finishing. But for Album 7 I wasn’t updating it or even looking at it. We will look at this pattern in more detail in the next section, but the short answer was that Album 7 wasn’t a goal I was committed to yet and I was in a period of goal dissolution.

When I finally forced myself to do a creative audit in February 2026, the numbers were humbling. I’d logged 81 hours across 31 weeks. This was a solid amount of time but I was only at the halfway mark compared to the ~145 hours my finished albums typically take. My activity breakdown told an even more revealing story: 65% of my time was still in jamming and songwriting and only 18% of my time was on reworking and finishing. On my completed albums, the reworking phase accounts for 30-45%. The median song had just 4 Ableton project saves, compared to 11-19 on my finished albums. I hadn’t really entered the finishing phase. In fact, the big push hadn’t started yet. Knowing that, I realized that I wasn’t as close to the finish line as I thought. I was actually at the mid-point — stuck in the middle, a goal phenomenon I’ll explore later in this post.

But here’s the thing about my music audit: even though the data was humbling, it was also clarifying. Once I finally looked, I could see exactly where I stood and what the path forward required. The avoidance hadn’t protected me from anything — it had just delayed the reckoning and kept me stuck. I suspect we avoid monitoring precisely because we know, on some level, what the comparison will reveal. Psychologists call this self-deception: being motivated to consciously disavow something that we know unconsciously (Greenwald, 1997).

This gets even harder when your self-identity is tied to the goal. You see yourself as an athlete, a writer, a musician — and the data threatens that identity. But not all avoidance comes from the same place. Sometimes you’re hiding from data that scares you. And sometimes, as I discovered with my own music, you’ve stopped looking because the goal itself has quietly changed. For example, after finishing a complete album, I wasn’t feeling called to tackle another finishing phase; I wanted to play and explore. I wasn’t avoiding it; I was disengaging in a creatively healthy and necessary way.

Not all goal tracking avoidance is a problem. Sometimes it’s a signal to reflect and change your goal’s parameters and update your goal pursuit journey. Knowing the type of avoidance matters, and that’s what I want to explore next.

Is the Ostrich Problem Always a Problem?: When Avoidance is a Signal

Ego protection vs. stale goal: two different kinds of avoidance. Image: NotebookLM.

Are you really afraid of what the numbers will say, or have you, on some subconscious level, maybe stopped caring about the finish line altogether?

The four self-motives framework explains why we avoid monitoring — but I’d argue it doesn’t tell the whole story. Sometimes a total avoidance of checking on our goal progress stems not primarily from self-deception or ego protection, but from a goal target that is no longer meaningful, timely, or situationally coherent.

According to Control Theory (Carver & Scheier, 1982), the self-regulation feedback loop depends on a comparator that measures the gap between your current state and a reference value (your goal). But this only works when the reference value itself is appropriate and you actually care about it. Information is only meaningful and useful to check-on when compared to a relevant standard. When the goal has gone stale, the act of monitoring feels pointless or even painful.

A goal could be stale because your life circumstances have changed, your priorities have shifted, or you’ve simply outgrown it. This isn’t goal failure but a call for goal disengagement and reprioritizing your goals. You stop monitoring your goals, not because you are afraid of the bad news, but because deep down you probably already know the goal isn’t achievable or meaningful to you. When your reference target or goal goes stale or no longer relates, the measuring stick is quite literally broken.

Thinking back on my Xichang Marathon, this was a classic ostrich problem. I still desperately wanted to run under four hours. The goal was alive. I just didn’t want to see what my training logs and injury history were telling me about my readiness. As I wrote in my post-race notes: “I probably aimed for an incorrect time and pace target” and “I didn’t plan well for the altitude or set a realistic goal.” The data was there. I avoided it because I was afraid of what it would say about me and my fitness. That was ego protection — the self-enhancement motive at work.

But my music tells a different and more nuanced story — one where avoidance wasn’t a single moment but an arc. Goals aren’t static. They ebb and flow. Interest surges, recedes, and sometimes comes back transformed. And the type of avoidance changes with each phase.

The ebb. After spending months finishing my sixth album “Forwards & Towards” — writing most of the songs, doing all the production, navigating tedious mastering and last-minute modifications — I was more relieved to be done than excited about what came next. As I wrote in my journal that July: “I’m definitely feeling the need to take a few steps away from album or finishing phase.” And that’s exactly what I did. There was no Album 7 goal. I didn’t set one up, didn’t create a tracking spreadsheet for it, didn’t even think about it. My summer was spent on a road trip from LA to Washington — hiking, camping, exploring — and my music time dropped to two and a half hours for the entire month. I wasn’t avoiding that number. I wasn’t hiding from it. I just didn’t care. I wanted to jam, explore new tools, and think about live performance. I’d naturally shifted from “finish albums” mode to “make music for fun” mode, and my time logs reflected this shift.

This ebb felt natural and appropriate — not like failure but like creative rest after a big push. By September I was writing in my journal: “Music is less important to me at the moment.” By October, my music time had settled into what one monthly review called a “restorative hobby-level rhythm.” Imagining a finished Album 7 felt flat. Not scary. Not impossible. Just irrelevant. The absence of tracking wasn’t avoidance. It was the absence of a goal worth tracking.

The flow back. But the interest didn’t stay gone. Once I was back in my home studio in Venice Beach and no longer living out of a suitcase, the creative energy gradually returned too. Jam sessions with my collaborator Jacob picked up. By December I was thinking about curation — “I should focus on picking 5-10 top projects, take some review notes, and rework them.” By January the momentum was building. Album 7 was reforming as a real goal, not because I forced it, but because the pull came back on its own. Even if I wasn’t sure I had the time to fully commit, it felt good to care about finishing again and working to release more music.

The end of November also ironically coincided with an app idea I started building called Playback Pilot, designed to help music producers organize their projects and track their progress toward finishing albums. It was a problem I was facing myself. So what better way to procrastinate productively — instead of finishing my own album, I built a tool to solve the ostrich problem for myself and other producers struggling to finish.

The avoidance returns. But unfortunately once Album 7 became a real goal again, so did the avoidance. I had 48 track candidates and a spreadsheet I wasn’t opening. That’s the classic ostrich problem from the previous section: goal alive, data avoided, ego protected. The same goal had moved through an entire arc — from active pursuit to honest dissolution to creative rest to gradual re-engagement — and the type of avoidance shifted with each phase. During the ebb, there was nothing to avoid. During the flow back, there was plenty to avoid — and I did. I wasn’t putting in the hours. I wasn’t finishing.

Not every lull in monitoring is the ostrich problem. Sometimes the interest genuinely recedes, and that’s not failure — it’s honest self-awareness. In the multi-stage model of goal pursuits, this is the evaluation phase — and one valid outcome of evaluation is letting a goal go. But our dreams and goals have a way of coming back, and when they do, we are often excited and energized by possibilities, but we can end up back in the same pattern and temptation to bury our heads in the sand. The question is whether you can recognize which phase you’re in or what type of avoidance you are manifesting.

So how does one tell the difference?

If imagining yourself achieving the goal still excites you but checking your progress fills you with dread — that’s the ostrich problem. You care about the goal but you likely aren’t actually making progress. This is a call to arms to fix how you monitor your goals and likely adjust ways to use your self-tracking as a tool to set shorter-term targets and monitor those.
But if even imagining a certain achievement feels flat or irrelevant — the goal may need updating. If you are setting a goal but don’t really care about it, and it’s just getting kicked forward week to week, month to month with nothing really to show for it, it’s time to fix your goals.

There’s another useful distinction from the research worth noting. Webb distinguishes between two forms of the ostrich problem: (1) avoiding monitoring entirely and (2) seeing the data but rejecting or dismissing it. These are not the same thing, and I think they map to different underlying issues. When you avoid checking in altogether — when you don’t open the spreadsheet, don’t step on the scale, don’t look at your training log — that might be a signal that the goal has gone stale. You’re not afraid of the data; you’ve just stopped caring enough to look. But when you do check in and then dismiss what you see — “that was a bad week,” “those numbers don’t count,” “I’ll make it up next month” — that’s more likely ego protection. You still want the goal. You just can’t face where you actually stand.

Before jumping to the strategies ahead, it’s worth pausing to ask which kind of avoidance you’re dealing with. The strategies that follow are designed for the classic ostrich problem — when the goal is still alive but you’re hiding from the data. If your avoidance is telling you the goal itself needs updating, the first step isn’t better monitoring. It’s an honest conversation with yourself about what you actually want.

I recommend you try a couple weeks of data-driven weekly review where you explicitly set aside time to track some metrics, review the data, and reflect on the past week and week ahead. This is one of my most empowering practices, and it has helped me consider my goals, purpose, and evolving priorities. Additionally, even a single reflection or journaling session might help you navigate and figure out which situation you’re in. For example, check out the guided reflection journey “Manifesting My Future Self” from the Stay Reflective app.

Cases and Consequences of the Ostrich Problem

The chocolate wrapper effect: visibility changes behavior. Image: NotebookLM.

The consequences of avoiding progress monitoring are significant. At its core, monitoring goal progress helps people identify discrepancies between their current and desired states that warrant action (Carver & Scheier, 1982; Fishbach et al., 2012). When we avoid monitoring, we lose the ability to identify both the need to act and the most appropriate way to do so.

Research provides some vivid illustrations of how monitoring (or its absence) shapes behavior:

The chocolate wrapper study. Polivy et al. (1986) found that female dieters ate fewer chocolates during a taste test when they were asked to leave their wrappers on the table (making it easy to see how many they’d eaten) compared to those asked to put wrappers in a wastebasket. Simply making progress visible changed behavior.

The progress bias. Huang et al. (2012) found that people who are far from achieving a goal tend to exaggerate their progress, while people close to achieving a goal downplay it. Interestingly, these biased views of progress actually serve to maintain motivation, but they also illustrate how our minds actively distort the feedback we do receive. You could argue that this kind of self-deception is actually adaptive and helpful. Is the ostrich problem sometimes a feature, not just a bug?

The monitoring tax. Self-tracking takes effort and attention. Active forms of progress monitoring, like keeping a food diary, consume regulatory resources that may be needed for other tasks (Muraven et al., 1999). While passive tracking tools might be easier, for it to be beneficial you need to be reviewing and looking at the data and progress. The monitoring part itself can feel effortful and draining, giving us yet another reason to avoid it or lose the habit.

Getting stuck in the middle. Bonezzi, Brendl, and De Angelis (2011) found that motivation doesn’t simply increase as we approach our goal. Instead, people tend to be most motivated when they are either far from or close to their goal — and least motivated in the middle. This “stuck in the middle” effect occurs because we shift how we frame progress: early on we look at how far we’ve come (“to-date”), but later we switch to how far we have left (“to-go”). At the midpoint, neither frame provides much motivational fuel. This is likely exactly when the ostrich problem hits hardest — when progress feels ambiguous and checking in feels least rewarding. I explore the ‘stuck in the middle’ phenomenon in more depth in my companion post, Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal.

Figure: How frame of reference influences perceived value of progress and motivation. Note the combined U-shaped curve when you switch frames. Source: Bonezzi, Brendl, & De Angelis (2011).

Beyond avoiding monitoring altogether, people also tend to reject progress information even when they do encounter it (Sweeny et al., 2010):

We dismiss data that contradicts how we see ourselves. For example, I saw myself as a sub-four-hour marathoner, so I ignored every training log that said otherwise.
We look away from information that would demand unwanted action. Specifically, checking my Album 7 spreadsheet meant confronting over 60 hours of finishing work that I wasn’t ready to commit to.
We downplay data that suggests poor progress. In my own case, it’s easier to count demos than to count revisions.
We avoid information we expect will make us feel bad — which is why 20% of people in a weight loss program never stepped on a scale.

In other words, we have no shortage of psychological reasons to look away, even when the data is right in front of us.

This is why Harkin et al. (2016) found that recorded monitoring — actually writing down or logging your progress — had larger effects on goal attainment than unrecorded monitoring. It is not enough merely to glance at the data; you have to face up to what it shows. The act of recording forces a confrontation that passive awareness doesn’t. A number in your head is easy to dismiss. A number in a spreadsheet stares back at you.

So how can we get better at navigating and dealing with the ostrich problem?

Strategies to Overcome the Ostrich Problem

The good news is that understanding why we avoid monitoring makes it possible to design strategies that work with our psychology rather than against it. As a self-tracker and data-driven goal pursuer, I’ve tried many experiments to better know myself and use that data to overcome where I get stuck. Here’s what has actually worked for me — and why the research supports it.

1. Lower the bar to look. The monitoring tax is real — checking in takes effort, and effort is a reason to avoid. The antidote is to make monitoring as frictionless as possible. Break larger goals into smaller, measurable milestones so that each check-in is more likely to show progress than failure. And wherever you can, let technology do the tracking for you. Passive tracking — step counters, wearables, time trackers, automated word counts — collects data without draining your willpower. A meta-analysis of pedometer studies found that pedometer users increased their physical activity by 26.9% over baseline, and having a specific step goal was a key predictor of success (Bravata et al., 2007). The less effort it takes to see where you stand, the harder it is to justify not looking.

For several years, I’ve kept a “goal scoring” tracker where each week I set 2-3 priority objectives and a host of smaller ones. Limiting myself to a few must-win’s is a forcing function. At the end of each week I score them and calculate a weekly goals score, giving me a simple way to measure progress and overall goal vitality. The act of scoring can be quick — maybe just five minutes — but it leads me to confront what I actually did versus what I said I’d do. It also means each week I’m holding myself accountable primarily to these “big win” targets, the weeks where I see lack of progress and failures on my big targets are often where my deepest reflections come from, since it’s either my approach, my caring or some combination that are falling apart.

2. Make checking in a habit, not a decision. The biggest enemy of monitoring is making it optional. If progress checks require a conscious decision each time — “Should I look at my spreadsheet today?” — the answer will often be no, especially when you suspect the news is bad. The solution is to build monitoring into your routine so it happens automatically.

A data-driven weekly review is the single most effective practice I’ve found for this. Every week, I set aside 20-40 minutes to review my time tracking data, check my goal scores, and reflect on what happened and what’s ahead. There’s no perfect way to do this — my process has evolved over years. But the core questions stay the same: Did I follow through on my intentions? If not, what got in the way? What do I want to focus on next week? When checking in is just “what I do” on Sunday evening, the psychological barrier drops considerably. Weekly Reviews are often where I explicitly notice the ebb and flow patterns. If I notice that a blog post or album project hasn’t been touched in several weeks or pushed forward as a goal without progress, it is a good time to diagnose and ask whether that’s avoidance or honest deprioritization?

3. Make progress visible and recorded. Visibility changes our behavior. In the chocolate wrapper study, participants who saw the wrappers changed their behavior. I strongly believe that the same principle applies to goals and tracking progress. Create progress charts, dashboards, or trackers that make your trajectory concrete and tangible. Like the wrappers on the table, visible evidence of progress (or its absence) can shape our behavior.

This is why I do year-in-data reviews — annual posts where I visualize my reading, time usage, running, and other tracked data. It’s also why my music producer spreadsheet uses color coding and revision counts: a row of red cells is harder to ignore than a vague sense that “I should probably work on that track.” And it’s why journaling and structured reflection prompts matter, because they force me to process progress information in writing rather than letting the self-enhancement motive filter it out. As the research showed, recorded monitoring outperforms unrecorded monitoring. A number in your head is easy to dismiss. A number on a page stares back at you.

4. Make it social. Pursuing goals alone makes avoidance easy, because there’s no one to notice when you stop checking in. Harkin et al. (2016) found that progress monitoring had larger effects on goal attainment when information was reported or made public than when kept private. When someone else is expecting an update, avoidance becomes harder. The social support can buffer the emotional sting of disappointing results too. This can be a formal accountability partner, a friend, a collaborator, or even a public commitment like a blog post. Regardless of how you do it, you are trying to link a goal pursuit with a social relationship and even a regular interaction with that person.

As I struggled to push forward with finishing my seventh album, I came to realize that I could and should use collaborators as an engine to help me make more progress and to act as an accountability mechanism too. Each week as I push to make my own progress, I also try to schedule at least one session with a collaborator to make it social, fun and a shared venture. This very blog post is also a form of public accountability, since it represents me facing up to the ostrich problem in the many ways it manifests in my own goal pursuits and life.

5. Reframe your relationship with the data and progress. This might be the hardest strategy to admit, but it’s the most important one. The ostrich problem is ultimately driven by our ego’s need to protect a favorable self-image. The antidote is learning to see feedback not as a verdict on your worth or value, but as simply useful information.

When I finally did my Album 7 creative audit, the numbers were humbling. I had a lot of demos but fewer tracks were close to done than I had thought. It was also clarifying. I could see what was needed more concretely for where I was stuck: an end-to-end review and note-taking session on all of my tracks, and several focused sessions with collaborators to record their parts. The data and my reflections on the state of the album showed me exactly where I stood and what the path forward required. I could move out from being stuck in the middle and start moving towards a series of finish lines. The data wasn’t a judgment. It was a map.

Conclusion

I need to make a little confession: this blog post started as a chapter in a book I was writing about goal tracking and the science of goals. I haven’t finished the book. That book has become its own ostrich problem.

Here’s the arc: In the spring of 2021, I took my brother’s book writing class. I researched hard — interviews, academic papers and personal stories — and I managed to submit a ~24k word manuscript in June. It was a very rough draft but it had the bones and many key ideas. Then I got a concussion, struggled with motivation and mood swings, and lost my self-esteem. A new job enveloped the bulk of my days, and music took over as my creative outlet. For years I avoided even opening the manuscript. The meta-irony writes itself: I wrote a book about tracking goal progress that I stopped tracking progress on. Was it ego protection, goal misalignment, or both at different times?

Book avoidance has taught me that rarely is a hard project or goal pursued or achieved in a straight, linear path. I thought I’d write the book in one push, but five years later I’m still circling back to it. How you feel about your goal pursuits will evolve, forcing you to rethink your approach, your strategies and even your self-identity. Once I pulled my head out of the sand, I still had to decide if that goal still mattered to me. The fact that I keep coming back (“I shouldn’t avoid my old manuscript” — Nov 2024, “I should simply try again” — Aug 2024) tells me the goal isn’t dead. It’s alive but scary. That’s a classic ostrich problem, not goal dissolution or abandonment. I still care. I still want to move forward with writing about goals, tracking progress and the nuanced reality of the pursuit. I’ve named it, and it’s now time to start writing again.

The ostrich problem is universal. Even someone who studies goal tracking, builds self-tracking tools, and writes about the science of goals isn’t immune. I’ve struggled with my goals for years. It’s precisely why we need systems, habits, and more clear-eyed self-reflection. The self-regulation feedback loop only works if you feed it data — and our egos will find every reason not to. The underlying principle across all of the strategies above is the same: don’t rely on willpower to overcome the ostrich problem. Design systems and habits that make monitoring so easy and automatic that when your ego tries to look away, the data is already in front of you.

Following my disastrous Xichang marathon, I wrote: “I have weaknesses that I need to work on the process of learning and improving BEFORE I should start thinking about certain performance and outcome goals.” That failure sent me into the academic literature on goal psychology — which is partly how this post and others on goals exist. While I’m no longer training for marathons, I’ve continued to run and completed several more races, mostly for fun and just to stay healthy, active and alive. But my approach to monitoring has fundamentally changed. Before each race, I review my training logs, level of fitness, and race conditions to set a realistic pace and plan an adaptive race strategy. During the race, I listen to my body, check my heart rate, and adjust accordingly. This two-level approach to progress check-ins — honest preparation before, responsive monitoring during — is what right-sized monitoring actually looks like. The goal isn’t perfect data. It’s enough data to keep the feedback loop running, and enough self-compassion to act on what it tells you.

If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: the next time you notice yourself avoiding a check-in — not opening the spreadsheet, not stepping on the scale, not looking at your training log — pause and ask yourself why. Are you afraid of what the data will say? Or have you stopped caring about the goal altogether? The answer to that question can determine your next move.

If the goal is alive, fix your monitoring — set up the systems, build the habit, make it routine.
If the goal has gone stale, give yourself permission to let it go and redirect your energy toward what actually matters to you now.

Either way, the first step is the same: pull your head out of the sand and check your progress.

References

Candib, L. M. (2008). Obesity and diabetes in vulnerable populations: reflection on proximal and distal causes. Annals of Family Medicine, 5(6), 547-556.
Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1982). Control theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality-social, clinical, and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 92(1), 111-135.
Conn, V. S., Hafdahl, A. R., Brown, S. A., & Brown, L. M. (2008). Meta-analysis of patient education interventions for adults with chronic illnesses. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 40(1), 52-58.
Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I. et al. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198.
Huang, S. C., Zhang, Y., & Broniarczyk, S. M. (2012). So near and yet so far: The mental representation of goal progress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(2), 225-241.
Michie, S., Abraham, C., Whittington, C., McAteer, J., & Gupta, S. (2009). Effective techniques in healthy eating and physical activity interventions: A meta-regression. Health Psychology, 28(6), 690-701.
Muraven, M., Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1999). Self-control as a limited resource: Regulatory depletion patterns. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 774-789.
Polivy, J., Herman, C. P., Hackett, R., & Kuleshnyk, I. (1986). The effects of self-attention and public attention on eating in restrained and unrestrained subjects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50(6), 1253-1260.
Sweeny, K., Melnyk, D., Miller, W., & Shepperd, J. A. (2010). Information avoidance: Who, what, when, and why. Review of General Psychology, 14(4), 340-353.
Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., & Benn, Y. (2013). ‘The ostrich problem’: Motivated avoidance or rejection of information about goal progress. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7(11), 794-807.
Webb, T. L., & De Bruin, M. (2020). Monitoring interventions. In M. S. Hagger, L. D. Cameron, K. Hamilton, N. Hankonen, & T. Lintunen (Eds.), The handbook of behavior change. Cambridge University Press.
Bonezzi, A., Brendl, C. M., & De Angelis, M. (2011). Stuck in the middle: The psychophysics of goal pursuit. Psychological Science, 22(5), 607-612.
Bravata, D. M., Smith-Spangler, C., Sundaram, V., Gienger, A. L., Lin, N., Lewis, R. et al. (2007). Using pedometers to increase physical activity and improve health: A systematic review. JAMA, 298(19), 2296-2304.

AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): This blog post was researched and written by the author. AI tools (Claude) were used to assist with editing and structural organization of the draft. Inline illustrations were generated using Google NotebookLM and Gemini, with minor editing by the author. Cover image was generated with Gemini and edited by the author.

Forwards & Towards by Stellar Mammals & Jacob Burgdorf: My Sixth Music Album Release

Wed, 18 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Whether it’s learning a new skill, building something meaningful, or making music – the path to reaching your goals and dreams is forwards and towards.

Discover some fresh flow music and focus-inspiring beats in my sixth album as Stellar Mammals and my second co-written and co-composed album with the amazing Jacob Burgdorf on trumpet and more. “Forwards & Towards” is my latest collection of instrumental tracks for your flow, reflection or relaxation.

📻🎶 Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music and all major music streaming services.

Check out our liner notes, reflections and more about the project below.⤵

Release Notes

Released on July 31, 2025. Performed, written, composed and produced by Stellar Mammals, aka Mark Koester Featuring, co-written and performed by Jacob Burgdorf Electric Guitar by John Stevenson Photo & Original Cover Design by Mark Koester Stellar Mammals Production 2025.

Track List

Grow Your Garden
Ill-fated Devil
I’m No Fortune Teller
Track Your Progress
Forward & Towards
Fury of the Kingfisher
Galaxy Extra
Homecoming Jay
Silly Goldfish
Starlight Passage
Awake Planet
Starry Eyed

Collaborators / Attribution

Collaboration is a gift. Thanks to:

Jacob Burgdorf — trumpet, horn, guitar and keys. Midwest-born, Los Angeles-based. Find on Instagram
John Stevenson — electric guitar
Kris Cruz — music production assistance. Los Angeles-based Music Producer and Audio Engineer. Find him on Spotify and Soundcloud

Artist and Producer Notes from Stellar Mammals / Mark Koester

About the Album

Celebrate each day’s potential with an open mind. Embrace our chance to start our moment anew. Create something beautiful, awesome and unique. Carpe diem. Seize the day.

These were some of the intentions that I carried with me as I created and manifested my sixth Stellar Mammals album “Forwards & Towards.”

These 12 songs extend my philosophical and creative spirit of being a continual beginner. We each possess the unique daily gift of pursuing our potential, making progress and, of course, exploring. The album’s spirit also imbues a long-standing belief and mantra I hold that the only way to get what we want and where we want to go is, as the title puts it, forwards and towards. A phrase worth repeating and living.

It’s challenging to reach goals, learn new skills and make art. As I’ve written about in my creative principles for music makers, there is no wrong way to make music and probably an infinite number of right ways. Whether I’m hiking a mountain, working on my professional endeavors or pursuing my various and wide-ranging creative projects, I often ponder: What can I do this year, this week, today, or even this moment to move myself closer to my goals and dreams?

Obviously the specific answer can take many forms but more often than not I have to remind myself of one simple truth, namely that regardless of the challenge, you get there by staying positive, moving your feet forwards and going towards what you care about.

Flow is one of the key themes in the album. The direction that we start each day with should be driven by a belief in our internal GPS, and the activities we take on should ideally induce a state of flow. Flow is a profound subjective experience of being-fully-present in the moment during an activity, whether it’s making music, writing code or some other creative outlet. Any thing can get us into flow. Just follow your passion.

Growth is another powerful component of the human experience and a theme in this album. We can always grow and change. Each day is a new year and even a potential new life. We are continuously changing biologically, so why do we struggle to greet each day with vigor of creation and growth? Each day is a gift and a unique opportunity to do something incredible. Embrace and find music that inspires you to live in the spirit of imagining what might be possible by our acts and thoughts.

Sonic Character and Track Highlights

With that focus on forward movement, sonically this album contains many energetic tracks including the opening track, Grow Your Garden, which I worked on for over a year and marked the introduction of a new collaborator – electric guitar by John Stevenson. His original guitar licks ended up on several tracks and complemented well with my more subdued guitar chords and piano parts.

How it started? I would say nearly all of my tracks start with and originate from a fun or interesting sound. Weird and complex sounds and sound design are a good GPS direction for making a track. Nearly every track of mine starts out untitled, and I initially title the tracks using Adjective-Animal format with placeholder names, like Eminent Okapi, Knowledgable Moose, and Obsequious Dotterel. “Puzzled Amaradillo” kept its generated name longest before becoming the title track “Forward & Towards,” and “Starlight Passage” was named “Night Theme” until v9 and finally got a name just before release.

How it evolved? The album’s core material spans nearly 3 years. Fury of the Kingfisher (Jan 2023) and Starry Eyed (Mar 2023) predate the album concept by over a year. Several songs were born in an explosive creation week in May 2024. It’s fascinating how older, sometimes forgotten, songs can seemingly wait patiently and unnoticed in the vault until they found their home on this album.

On the music production side, the guitar parts attempted to reference and sound in the space of John Mayer, Snowy White (“How Was It You”), etc. While the album still sits in the lofi beat space, it continues to probe aspects of psychedelic rock and has a tad more heavy hitting drums.

Here are my top tracks:

Grow Your Garden - A song to greet the day. Energizing mix of a guitar lick complemented by the trumpet/horns. Classic rock groove in a bed of supportive pad/strings. 20 total revisions (8 named versions + 12 backups) and was one of 4 songs born in the May 11-16, 2024 creation burst. This track went on a year-long journey from first idea to a finished opener.
Track Your Progress - Originally named “Puzzled Amaradillo” and spanning 17 total revisions, this track starts with an uncanny, somewhat organic synth ringing sound played on the MicroFreak and carries a slow buildup of the various elements including a core guitar line I wrote. The trumpets come in late but hit hard and add to the crescendo and core spirit of the track.
Forward & Towards - Title track with straight chords and lead line back by a rumbling bass layer and defined by a strong trumpet melody that weaves in and out of the different sections and parts.
Fury of the Kingfisher - Simple idea of a guitar melody weaved with a strong/heavy synth bass and woven to completion with trumpet melody.
Galaxy Extra - Imagine traversing galaxies and you come out hyperdrive and see the beauty before you… Centered on a repeating string section and some looser drum groove, trumpet aids to the opus of discovery and wonder.
Starlight Passage - For its simple, almost cinematic, sound, this track went through a lot of minor and major revisions (24 total). We did trumpet overdubs on the Nov 10 and in April 2025 before it was declared release ready.

Fun, weird ones:

Ill-fated Devil - Organ-led in the spirit of Ray Manzarek / The Doors. Ill-fated Devil had 24 total revisions (6 named + 18 backups). It originated from a live jam session with Jacob + Jasper on Aug 24, 2024, and it took a massive reworking and editing session on Oct 24, 2024 for it to find its final version.
I’m No Fortune Teller - Old Time Radio clip was added immediately after a simple jam idea and it largely just stuck. The song found its final footing after I let go of some “Demoitus” (unreasonable attachment to a particular version)

Blues Guitar Inspired Lofi Jammers

Homecoming Jay - Named after my high school mascot. This song is centered on dueling guitar passages on electric guitar by John Stevenson. This was one of the longer tracks on the album (at nearly 5 minutes). Heavy guitar-led song with the other parts like horn and live drums positioned to patiently complement its overall laid-back vibe.
Silly Goldfish - The longest and most revised song on the album. This track started as a raw guitar session with John Stevenson on Aug 2, 2024 (originally named “Silly Goldfinch”). The big creative question was the trumpet — Jacob laid down three separate variations (Best Brass mute, Harmon mute, Unmuted) before settling on using both mutes: Best Brass on the first half, Harmon on the second. The only song to reach v10.

Ambient outros:

Awake Planet - A song for staring at the stars, reflecting at dusk. Bongos, a string-inspired synth pad and a simple guitar line were used to create the backdrop for the lead trumpet line that were processed with various effects to create more atmospheric qualities at certain points.
Starry Eyed - A pure ambient closer for dreamland. This track had the fewest revisions (just 12). Originally called “Mayan Ancestors in Pentatonic All Blacks” and first composed in Antigua, Guatemala in the inner courtyard of the National Museum Of Guatemalan Art, this track used an echoing vocal synth preset from Arturia and Supermassive Reverb to cover a bunch of the space. Eventually trimmed back and complimented with a lush guitar sound.

Collaboration and Creative Process

This is my second album with co-artist and jazz trumpeter Jacob Burgdorf as my primary collaborator. Unlike Chop Wood, Carry Water which we started together in my home studio, the songs on this album were largely my original creations. I often had an early demo or core idea I’d created and did several iterations until it was relatively polished on the music production side and arrangement. This resulted in collaborating with Jacob when the track was more fully defined and possessed a more finished compositional state. Jacob did an amazing job of embracing the musical and stylistic character of the songs as-is and added incredible complementary melodic lines on trumpet.

The clearest artifact and checkpoint in this compose-first-then-add-Jacob process was on March 8, 2025 when every track was bounced to WAV + MP3 without brass. This gave Jacob space for his overdub sessions.

Another pivotal moment was November 10, 2024 — a mega recording day when we laid down trumpet overdubs on 5 songs simultaneously (Fury, Track Your Progress, Starlight Passage, Galaxy Extra, and Forward & Towards).

Like all of my previous albums, this album came out of a bigger vault of demos and potential tracks. From about ~17+ candidates, it was curated and reworked to its final 12 chosen tracks. Several tracks I was excited about didn’t make the cut this round, but I am excited to see if they fit a future project.

Liner Notes from Jacob Burgdorf

First Thoughts: This was my second album co-released with Stellar Mammals. In contrast to the first, Chop Wood, Carry Water, many of the compositional elements were developed before the addition of trumpet. It was a great opportunity to add to these concepts and help develop the music. In addition to the contribution of the trumpet there were many hours refining the tracks and adding input on instrumentation, use of space, balance, and overall vibe.

It was created mostly in Venice California with some of my first remote collaborations. The title means a few different things. First, it means moving forward on an objective regardless of obstacles. To make progress and move toward a goal. Second, it is also the act of becoming through the doing of a process. To go from little knowledge of something and growing into someone who obtains that mastery and title.

Here are a few thoughts on specific tracks:

Grow Your Garden - Muted trumpet, was improvised upon first listening. A fantastic job done in post, cleaning up intonation issues with the muted trumpet.
Ill Fated Devil - With help from a local musician, the organ and keyboard parts were laid down in an afternoon jam session. Most of the trumpet work was improvised in that same session. With a cool desert flair that gives the song a hypnotic feel. The music brings to mind images of a desert caravan or an exotic bazaar. The bass line near the finish (written on keyboard), brings some new interest on the low end.
I’m No Fortune Teller - The most lofi inspired track on the album. Using samples from a radio program. The trumpet parts were crafted over several sessions. Playing over a hip-hop style beat, I focused on having a smooth flowing sound. The intervallic leaps in the trumpet were intended to give a sense of uncertainty, complimenting the dialogue.
Forwards and Towards - Happy with the first take and the overall feel we finished with minimal editing on the track. The distorted guitar and the natural distortion of the mute complimenting each other lay the ambiguous feeling to the title track of the album.
Track Your Progress - Adding the delay on the trumpet to the intro and the ending of this song felt natural. Thinking it filled the space nicely without crowding the other textures. The main trumpet part in the middle adds to the feel of the music without taking too much of the attention. On some of the other tracks as well the desired effect was for the trumpet to add to the music on an equal level as other instruments like the guitar or keys without becoming the main thing happening sonically. During the mixing and mastering process we went through several versions with the trumpet at different levels. It sounded best when the trumpet was more in the mix instead of a little outside. This song has also been an inspiration to track my progress on my endeavors. Gaining information that can refine the process.
Fury of the Kingfisher - Using repetition the intended feeling was for a meditative introspective kind of sound. Eschwing from higher notes or accented passages to give a feeling of calm. The melody is simple, along with the accompanying part which are both atavistic in nature.
Galaxy Extra - The foundation laid by Cello and a shuffle tumble drum beat. A short atmospheric piece that is wrapped up with the muted trumpet.
Homecoming Jay - Another example of filling the space without dominating it. Leaving plenty of room for the guitar, to take the lead melody lines to come through. Going for a conversation like interaction.
Silly Goldfish - Mostly a free improvisation over the existing track. Always listening to what is given and playing something that compliments. Trumpet mute is used extensively on this track and others. The mute is close to imitating the sound of a voice and has characteristics and idiosyncrasies not achieved with open trumpet. On this particular recording session I was trying a new mute out and doing several takes over the material. Ending up being happy with both and liked elements of both. We decided upon using the typical ‘Best Brass’ mute on the first half and the more traditional ‘Harmon’ on the second. The slight contrast adds some textural differences while giving testament to the process in the final work.
Starlight Passage - This was the first remote collaboration with Stellar Mammals. Knowing where the peaks and valleys of a song informed my entrances, motif development, dynamic range, etc.
Awake Planet - The second remote collaboration. A simple intro that matched the spirit of the piece. After a short break a free improvisation covers the remainder of the piece.

Final Thoughts - Creating this music has been as much of a joy as a learning experience. Getting more familiar with the process of listening through several versions of a mix and noting the desired changes. More insight into capturing the sound from the bell, gain staging, rendering files with correct bit rate, and transfer of stems. Grateful for the amicable collaborations that continue to create innovative soundscapes.

Jacob Burgdorf

Creativity, Production and Time Tracking

Roughly 158 hours went into Album 6 with about 50% on song writing and 30% on reworking.

I take a data-driven, time tracking approach to a lot of my life. Tracking my time and setting weekly targets helps me see where my time goes and holds me accountable to time input as part of tangible creative outputs. It also helps me reflect on the journey and lean in or disengage when I’m working on multiple pursuits. As noted in my 2025 year in time blog post, I spent 155h on music in 2025, which was about half as much time on my music compared with 2024 when I produced and released two albums.

Between the release of Chop Wood, Carry Water and the final review session for Forwards & Towards, I tracked 158 hours of album-specific music production time across 297 days (September 25, 2024 to July 18, 2025), averaging 3.7 hours per week (~32 minutes per day) over 195 sessions.

Activity Breakdown:

Jamming & Song Writing: 82h 17m (52%)
Reworking & Finishing: 50h 30m (32%)
Review & Planning: 15h 31m (10%)
Practice & Learning: 5h 31m (3%)
Other: 4h 02m (3%)

The 52/32 split between creation and finishing reflects the different process on this album. With most songs starting as my own compositions before Jacob joined, the jamming and song writing phase was front-loaded and expansive, while the reworking phase was more targeted. Instead of building from scratch together, we were essentially reviewing and refining arrangements and integrating Jacob’s trumpet and input.

The weekly timeline shows the rhythm of production: strong bursts in October-November 2024 and January 2025, a quieter stretch in February, then renewed energy in April-May as the album moved into its finishing phase. This kind of data is a good reminder of the marathon effort it takes to finish a multi-track album project.

Collaborator Breakdown:

Of the 158 hours, 49 hours (31%) was collaborative work:

With Jacob: 45h 20m (29% of total)
With Kris: 4h 03m (3%)

Jacob’s 45 hours on this album is up from ~36 hours on Chop Wood, Carry Water – a deeper collaboration even though the compositional starting point was more solo this time around.

Spreadsheet Organization and Iterative Reviews and Revisions:

Since my second album, Symbolic Wonderlands, I’ve used a spreadsheet to organize and help me finish my tracks and complete and release albums. This album benefited from having a spreadsheet to rank favorite tracks, track progress and revisions and collect notes and feedback from improvements. It was useful to determine which tracks were in and out. Color coding reviewed or reworked tracks made the process more obvious visually as well. It also gave me format to share and collect feedback with collaborators.

Example of my Album Tracking Spreadsheet (V5) with revision count and song ratings using hotdogs and other visual indicators of progress.

Initially, according to my spreadsheet, I had about 75+ tracks to choose from. All told, I went through about 8-9 formal revision phases.

Files & Song Revisions:

Beyond my toggl time and spreadsheet tracking, my album files directory tells its own version of a similar story: 1,111 files, 14.6 GB, 9 mix versions, 4 mastering passes, and 317 WAV renders across nearly 3 years of material. It was an iterative process from 2-track demo (v1, Sep 2024) to full assembly (v3, Dec 2024) to final LANDR master (v9, Jun 2025).

The revision chart tells another side of the story. Each bar represents the number of Ableton project saves – every arrangement change, mix tweak, or new idea getting its own version. Silly Goldfish led the way with 32 revisions, while Starry Eyed (the oldest track, and the only one without trumpet) needed the fewest at 12.

Activity peaks by file count: Jun 2024 (159 files — creation burst), Apr 2025 (153 files — album assembly), Jul 2025 (220 files — licensing/distribution prep).

Album Comparison:

Album	Total Hours	Period	Pace
#3 Cosmic Coastlines	125h	19 weeks	6.5h/week
#4 Stardust and Dreams	123h	28 weeks	4.4h/week
#5 Chop Wood, Carry Water	155h	23 weeks	6.7h/week
#6 Forwards & Towards	158h	42 weeks	3.7h/week

Interestingly, Album 6 had the most total hours from my recent album projects, though only by a small margin compared to Album 5. It also had the longest maturation cycle at 42 weeks from start to completion and slowest pace or weekly input. Unlike 2024, when music was one of my main things, music was not my main venture in 2025. I’m glad I managed to complete this album by July nonetheless, since there were a lot of things competing for my attention and time, including client work, startup projects and a lot of travel too.

One of the other gaps leading to less output and less time on my music was a decreasing number of collaborators. An especially acute need was not having an assistant music producer. Personally I love the early creative side and the final finishing phase, but I struggle getting strategic help maturing key aspects of certain songs, like drum grooves, arrangement and jams cleanup and adding counter melodies. As I lean into my next album project and more music making in general, I am more intentionally seeking out and bringing in new collaborators and music makers. I’m also trying to ensure I put in a more sustainable baseline of music making time each and every week too, ideally 3-5 hours per week.

About Stellar Mammals

Stellar Mammals is a creative project centered on creating lofi, instrumental positivity music for any number of situations, moods and selves. It tends to lean into the hip-hop lofi while also offering up ambient and cinematic moments too.

Checkout our recent work:

Along with creating the music and art, I am pretty open about my journey and process. You can read an assortment of notes, blog posts and reflections on music production and creativity on my blog. Start with From Zero to Album: My Personal Music Production Learning Journey.

About the Artists

Stellar Mammals is a Venice Beach-based producer and technologist. His full catalog of music, projects and videos is online at StellarMammals.com. He is available for contact, performance, licensing, collaboration, music production and projects at StellarMammals@gmail.com.

Jacob Burgdorf is an LA-based trumpeter, musician and music teacher, originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Check him out at BurgdorfMusic.com and on Instagram. He is available for contact, performance, teaching, collaboration, and more at jacob.burgdorf@gmail.com.

Got a comment or question? Send me an email or reach out on social media.

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AIDA (AI Disclosure Acknowledgement): All music was written, composed, performed and produced by the credited artists. Liner notes were written by the credited artists. Album art was from a hiking trip on Catalina Island with a small assist from Midjourney (Generative AI Art Tool) to add more dramatic clouds. AI tools were used to assist with some data analysis and blog post editing.

Mark Koester

What If Daily Progress Is the Real Motivator? Book Notes on The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile & Steven Kramer

My Quick Take Book Review

What I Got Out of This Book

Background: Teresa Amabile, the Diary Study and Our Inner Work Life

Our Best Work Days Happen When We Make Progress

Progress in Meaningful Work as THE Daily Motivator

Self-Aware Progress Tracking Practice: My Lived Application of the Progress Principle

Concluding Thought: How to Live the Progress Principle

[Bonus] The Reflection Journey Template I Built From This Book

Related Reading

References

Is This the Long Middle or the Desperate End? What Greely's Arctic Expedition Teaches Us about the Uncertainty of Goal Pursuit

The Greely Expedition: What We Know Now

Seas of Ambiguity: Three Moments of Navigating Phase Identification

Living the Question: Long Middle or Desperate End?

At the Farthest North

Related Reading

What if I Had to Only Choose One Thing? Book Notes and Reflections on Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

My Quick Take Review

What I Got Out of This Book

Diagnosis: The Pseudo-Productivity Trap

Newport’s Prescription: Slow Productivity in a Nutshell

The Four Words I’m Carrying Out

Do Fewer Things

Higher Quality

Finish (at a natural pace)

Seasonality Reframe: A closing thought

Related Reading

80 Hours, 9 Posts: What a 7-Week Writing Sprint Taught Me

The Experiment: Campaign-based Goal Tracker for Writing

The Numbers

What I Published

What Worked and What I learned

1. The ultradian sweet spot

2. Protect the morning block

3. One post, one day

4. Two blogs created natural variety

5. Book reviews are the fastest format

6. Smart notes are fuel, especially for low-energy days

What I’d Do Differently

What’s Next

Concluding Thoughts

Related Reading

I Forgive Myself, Now I Can Work: Book Notes on Feel-Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal

My Quick Take Review

What I Got Out of This Book

“Success doesn’t lead to feeling good. Feeling good leads to success.”

“Burnout can happen to anyone when work stops feeling meaningful”

Energy Investment Portfolio: Fix for Overexertion

Alignment Experiments: How to navigate when you feel misaligned

Concluding Thought: “I forgive myself, now I can study”

Related Reading

References

Cut Your Goal in Half: Book Notes on Finish by Jon Acuff

My Quick Take Book Review

What I Got Out of This Book

“Perfectionism magnifies your mistakes and minimizes your progress.”

“A noble obstacle is a virtuous-sounding reason for not working toward a finish.”

Concluding Thought: “Goals you refuse to chase don’t disappear — they become ghosts that haunt you.”

Related Reading

Additional Book Notes, Quotes and Key Takeaways

Stuck in the Middle: Why Motivation Collapses Halfway to Your Goal

The Classic Theory (and Why It’s Incomplete)

The U-Curve: Every Goal Has a Crux

What the Middle Feels Like: Torn Between Continuing and Quitting

Two Valleys, Two Solutions

Hour 121: Reading the Wall

References

Is What I Am Doing Useful?: Book Notes on The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

My Quick Take Book Review

Background: Who was Alfred Adler?

What I Got Out of This Book

“All Problems Are Interpersonal Relationship Problems”

“Whose task is this?”

The Courage to Be Disliked

Contribution to Others

Book Notes, Quotes and Key Takeaways

Concluding Thoughts: Living Earnestly in the Here and Now

References: