Open with the trick: At the top of your to do list write,

“My favorite thing is to organize my todo list.”

and keep it at the top of your to do list. You might not understand why, but this is very important and I’ll explain why now:

Ruie #1: You cannot force creativity. If you try and force creativity you end up with comedy like early 80s Naked Gun and Police Academies where they paid famous comedians to sit around drink burbon & smoke cigars to bang out scripts. Sure a lot of jokes in Naked Gun and Police Academy movies are super funny, but some are obviously forced… This is the casualty of forced creativity, bad jokes, bad culture, bad writing.

Thankfully it’s always raining creative ideas on us souls. If we do not write them down, we watched them fall to the ground and not be collected in a creativity bucket. Always write down ideas when you get them. Write them on a phone text editor, or voice recorder for later. Email them to yourself. Do what you can, but take notes when funny things happen. When you’re home and see your email and phone notes put them in your todo list.

Now most of us have no problems being creative. It’s what makes us want to abandon projects and jump on others. Yet organizing these notes, keeps your projects distinctly grouped. As a creative soul, I see no problem working on 2-10 projects at once. It’s simply more creative buckets to collect rain in. Active dev normally happens only on 1-3, as life is not a race and neuroscientists say it’s good for the cerebral cortex to bounce from task to task. Only businessmen, bean counters, money grubbers will tell you to pound your nose to the grindstone in one task. Bouncing from several projects actually often brings you joy so you produce more… And if one project starts monetizing and you like it, then you can give it more attention. There’s nothing wrong tackling 2-10+ projects at once if your mind enjoys that. You need to let your mind run the show, not force yourself to do something or it becomes un fun and you do not want to do it. Obviously if you have 10 projects probably 7 or 8 of them are just idea depots in notepad.exe you’re putting the ideas down, but there’s nothing wrong with that. In fact it’s good.

Now that you have wild amounts of creativity gushing, remember the creativity doesn’t stop gushing! It will get frustrating to want to write your story, but the paper you write on needs to be made. I say coding games is like making papyrus. You can’t express your message until you create the book you’re writing in. It’s very difficult to make a game obviously, but the pent up time effort forces you to do revisions on your story. The annoying pent up feeling is like your English teacher saying,”I can’t accept your essay now, go revise it.” You end up revising and revising your story as you code your techs so when you finally release it, it’s super polished! The negative of being held back and pent up becomes a positive as your final product has forced epic quality control to release that required of masterpieces.

Now comes the good part… Organizing your todo list doesn’t take much effort. You don’t have to have a coder’s mentality to work through a huge list of ideas, techs you need to do to implement them. You might not even have any desire to code at all. You might just think,”This has to be better than social media or watching netflix” Suddenly you start moving ideas near each other to see how you can chain comedy together which comes natural. Maybe you get more ideas. You get stoked at your story and all your ideas. Then you see techs you could take a stab at to push it just a bit forward… You have a huge selection of techs because they’re hard, but you’ll see one that’s easy or one you have an angle of attack on. Then you might get stoked to code, or maybe just take those techs and break them down into smaller techs. As you organize your todo list, it’s only a matter of time before you tackle a tech and start coding. The passion of reading your ideas, your love to get it out drives you to artistic utilitarianism to get it out there. It’s like magic… Most people don’t know how to enter into code mode once they’re distracted or go on a road trip, but this is how you enter code mode… You transition by organizing your todo list! This is why you tell yourself,”Organizing my todo list is my favorite thing.” because it’s the driver to make your game which is your love and favorite thing.

More about creativity buckets and writing like Spielberg or Sienfeld who you know wrote down their life experiences and translated them into scenes:

Or take a rev up video knowing coding is like hiding yourself from the world, going to Siberia to fight Drago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL3lJfpenAc&t=28s But you can do it when you realize you’re not fighting another man, but this fight against you and yourself. Have faith, you got this. When you finish, the world’s gonna love what you’ve done and even if not, you’re going to love the better you from exiting that battle, and you can be better to enter the next. Your favorite thing to do is to organize your todo list, with prayer, it’s how you win battles without trying.