How to Silence Your Inner Critic and Ship Your Creative Project

​The end of your project is in sight. Suddenly you add a BIG new area of content that you didn’t plan at the beginning.

Is your Inner Critic sabotaging you?​

In the post, How to Effectively Manage Projects & Keep Your Creative Mojo, we looked at how to quickly set clear objectives for any creative project. 

But the game doesn’t end there. Once you have your objectives, you need to check in with them regularly throughout your project so you stay on track.

​Referring back to your objectives also helps you recognise when you’re project is finished - and stops your Inner Critic in his tracks!
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When to Check in With Your Objectives

1. Daily

Post your objectives somewhere you’ll see them every time you work on your project. This hones the focus of your daily actions.
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2. Goal Setting

Refer to your objectives each time you set your weekly or monthly goals:

• Are you still on track to complete on time? 
• Are there parts of your project you could amplify later in order to get the bare bones done by your target date?

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3. Sticking Points

If you feel confused or stuck at any point during your project, review your objectives and ask yourself,
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“How can I resolve this in a way that will best achieve my objectives?”

Getting to Done

A vastly underrated benefit of setting objectives is that they help you know when you’re done.

This is crucial with an amorphous project such as a website because it’s never really going to be DONE. There’s always some new social media plug-in or technological tweak to enhance it, new work to add, new offers to highlight. 

That’s why, in the post on setting objectives, I stressed the importance of ordering them according to priority. 

If I hadn’t prioritised my website objectives when I first designed it, I would have been faffing about designing a sales page for what was then a very limited number of Artist’s Books. Instead I focussed on attracting potential income through my coaching on-boarding page, knowing I could focus on art sales later.
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Avoiding Function Creep

Using your objectives to gauge when you’re done also stops what’s known in the tech world as 'function creep': When you keep adding extra parameters into the mix. 

For example, I could have tried to reformat all the four year’s worth of posts on my blog before going live with my website. This would have taken me eons! Instead I went with focussing on the ones that are most relevant to the new sections on the site with a view to reformatting the rest over time.
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Another Creep: Combatting the Sneaky Inner Critic!

Knowing when you’re done is also super-important for art projects. 

​We artists have our own version of function creep. I call it the {hidden subtext}. 

Your Inner Critic slips it onto your to do list when you’re not looking and cleverly disguises it as a legitimate objective. 

Here’s one I see a lot amongst my clients:
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Make a piece of art {that everyone loves}.

Of course, we all know that’s not possible. But you’d be amazed at how many versions of this one crops up on goals lists.

Stay vigilant and I’ll bet you’ll spot your Inner Critic slipping one of these into your list!

Set Objectives to Work for You

Setting objectives can help you to complete your creative projects. But to make your objectives really work for you, you need to check in with them at every stage. That way you'll keep your project on track and avoid those subliminal messages from your Inner Critic that stop you from shipping.

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Don't stop now!

Check out the final post in this Project Planning for Creatives series on
​how to make the most of all the lessons you learn when you finish a project.
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