The Magic of One Thing: What I Learned from Talking with Jessica Abel

The Up Drafts is an ongoing series of essays and interviews that examine creativity, productivity, writing process, and getting unstuck.

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BY NANCY REDDY

I love a list. I love the buzzy hum I get from crossing through the items I’ve completed, and I’ve even been known to start my list-making by jotting down the things I’ve already done, just to get a little jump start of completionist satisfaction. So it seemed to make good sense that I could apply this same idea to get my writing done: make a big list of all the writing projects I’m cooking up, then let all the energy of those combined good ideas propel me toward the finish line. At various points in the last year, I’ve made lists of essay ideas, lists of magazines where I’d like to publish, lists of research projects, lists that start with the triumphant all-caps HERE ARE MY GOOD IDEAS. 

So why is it that, for a long time, I wasn’t actually taking those good ideas all the way through finished drafts? 

Talking with Jessica Abel, a Philadelphia-based cartoonist, author, and educator, whom I interviewed via Zoom, helped illuminate a major error I’d made. Though I’d named lots of goals, I hadn’t actually made any of them a priority. Abel, who coaches creative folks working on a wide range of projects, insists that you can only really have one priority at a time. And I’m a convert: since adopting her maxim that you need One Goal to Rule Them All, I’ve been able to start ticking items off that big list.  

I like to think of it as The Magic of One Thing. 

Abel explains it like this: when you have two or three or four (or a whole huge ambitious list) projects you want to work on, but you split your time between those projects, it’s hard to make any serious headway on any particular project. Your time is fractured, and so is your attention and your energy. In contrast, she argues, once you have just One Thing:

If you’re spending chunks of time all week on the same thing, your brain is going to be working overtime on it. When you’re in the shower: brainstorm. When you’re in the car: things are clicking together. Have your notebook or voice notes app handy. You will have ideas. I guarantee it.

The magic of One Thing, in other words, isn’t just the power of hour after accumulated hour on a project; it’s that each hour of work is actually multiplied by the way the project takes up residence in your brain – when you’re seriously working on a project, your brain keeps at it, even when you’re not focused on your computer screen or notebook, on adding words to the project.

I’ve also found, counterintuitively, that One Thing feels more urgent than several. When I write down four projects I’m going to work on during a week, I can poke at each one for a bit, probably make a bit of progress on each, and end the week without any real clarity about the outcome of that intermittent work. But if I name just one or two things–projects with clear milestones attached–I feel more accountable to myself.

And completing projects creates its own kind of propulsive energy. When I spoke with Abel, she called this the “dopamine hit” of finishing a project. That’s certainly something I’ve experienced in the last few months. When I pitched this column at the beginning of the year, I could feel the sticky goo of all my good unfinished projects following me around and weighing me down. (I don’t think I’m the only one! Abel told me that she’s seen people get stuck in two different ways. While perfectionism and fear of failure can be obstacles at the early stage of a creative career, people who’ve had some success and are getting offers to work on lots of projects often end up being overcommitted and not being able to make headway with any particular thing.)

Abel also had some advice about how to choose your One Thing. Her article on One Goal outlines the key principles, and Her What’s Stopping You checklist is a great place to get started in thinking about your creative life more broadly. 

If you’re really having a hard time choosing where to start, Abel suggests choosing “something that feeds your future self”–and letting go of projects that will lead you in a direction you don’t want to go. Many of us have half-finished projects we’re carrying around with us, and the time we’ve put into them can feel like an obligation to take them to completion; Abel calls that Idea Debt, and encourages the people she works with to focus their energy instead on completing the projects that will be most meaningful for them now and in the future, rather than the ones in which they’ve already invested a lot of time. 

For longer projects, One Thing often requires identifying milestones – carrying out X research, creating an outline, drafting the proposal, writing a chapter, and so on. Breaking up a project like this allows people to still have a sense of momentum and completion. 

Talking with Abel also helped me in my ongoing struggle to rethink the relationship between creativity and productivity. When I asked her how she thinks about productivity, Abel responded that most of the time when we talk about productivity, “it’s about literally producing stuff without any regard to what the stuff is. And to be more productive means to take the same amount of time and put more things in there.” While there are parts of our life where this might make sense – fold more laundry, answer more emails, and so on – Abel argues that creative work actually requires more blank space. Abel suggests the “really crucial reframe” of productivity culture and insists that we instead think about “creating margin, not about doing more stuff.” 

I wrote a bit about ways of tracking time and quantifying progress in an earlier column, and here, too, Abel had insight. She said that, if you’re invested in measuring your work, it’s preferable to think in terms of time, rather than word count. Abel says that “my experience shows that counting words tends to be not helpful. Because what’s the quality of the words?” Instead, she says she’s seen that just putting time back into the project can be enormously helpful. Even if you only have 15 minutes a day, she says that can be “a way to get yourself unstuck and get back in touch with your project.” (I’ll come back to measurement in a few weeks because this link between creative work and the capitalist language of outcomes and products is a current obsession of mine!) 

If you’re interested in learning more about Jessica Abel’s creative work, or her work with coaching folks who have gotten stuck in their creative lives, her website is full of helpful resources. I completed the Creative Compass Minicourse, and she frequently offers both free webinars and the paid Creative Focus Workshop. Even getting her email blasts functions for me as a kind of regular “hey you! What are you working on?” which is the kind of no-nonsense nudge I really thrive on. 

As Abel puts it, her work is less about creative productivity and more about “building a resilient and sustainable creative life.”

So what’s your One Thing? What project can you invest 15 minutes in today?

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NANCY REDDY is the author of Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a 2014 winner of the National Poetry Series, and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Blackbird, Colorado Review, The Iowa Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere, and her essays have appeared most recently in Electric Literature. The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She’s working on a narrative nonfiction book about the trap of natural motherhood.