It’s 8 pm, I’m taking a shower before bed. I can’t use my headphones to distract myself there.

I start doing the math, what if I posted a new anatomy study every single day, how many followers would I have by now? Or what if I started making an anatomy book a year ago, I would’ve probably already finished it…

I’ve had the book idea for 2-3 years already but the only thing I’ve done is an outline of the contents. And the longer I have this idea, the better it gets. Yet I still don’t commit to it.

Why the book keeps losing

My brain loves short feedback loops, whether they lead to the best decisions or not. When I make an anatomy study in 5 hours, post it, and receive 5k likes in a day, it feels great. There’s a direct connection between my work and what happens after.

It’s much harder to feel that with something that takes hundreds of hours, like the anatomy book. It’s much easier to open commissions and see the number of euros go up, because you know exactly what caused it.

Two months ago my calendar was law, I scheduled every hour of the day and I knew exactly what I had to do at any point. But when the novelty wore off, the schedule stopped working on its own. One cancelled meeting was enough to take me off the rails, and then I found even more exciting things to work on, like graffiti. Each one of those was a reason not to start the book.

Until I build a feedback loop around this project, I’ll never actually commit to it.

How to build a feedback loop

My plan is to start working on it page by page and use those pages as actual separate social media posts. This way I can get the immediate satisfaction and the long-term progress at the same time.

Here’s what you can do this week:

  1. Think of a project. A specific one, the one that you can’t stop thinking about.
  2. Find how it can feed something you’re already doing. For me, a book page can be a post, it can even become a YouTube video tutorial. My newsletters can be broken down into short tweets, that’s why I started it in the first place.
  3. Pick one number to track. I will be tracking the number of pages I’ve done. I’ve already set up a checklist.

If you post it online and people engage with it, that’s a good signal that the project is worth finishing. If they don’t, it’s a reason to adjust the approach before you spend hundreds of hours on it.