One Clear Purpose Per Day

A Creative System to Stay Focused and Finish What Matters

Dear friends,

Like a lot of creatives, I found myself doing everything—but never quite moving forward.

This week, I share the approach that’s helped me rebuild momentum: organising my week around one clear purpose per day.

• How this shift has helped me stay consistent across my newsletter, podcast, and YouTube—without running myself into the ground

• Why I see life as an ecosystem, and what happens when one part starts pulling everything else off balance

• What I learned from almost quitting—and how it helped me create a system that’s sustainable

If you’re trying to stay creative while juggling real life, I hope today's deep dive will help you find a rhythm that actually works.

As ever, thank you for being here!
Jim

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One Clear Purpose Per Day

I. Why Am I Out of Kilter?

The other day a friend asked me how I manage to keep momentum across so many creative disciplines.

I surprised myself with the speed of my answer.
Without thinking, I said: “I have one clear purpose per day.”

But later that night, I realised I’d been drifting.
I was getting things done, yes—but everything felt off-balance. Whatever pulled my attention seemed to pull everything else apart with it.

Worse still, I wasn’t particularly happy.

So I paused. Took a breath. Sat down on a quiet Sunday and looked honestly at my life.

What I saw was this: I was moving forward, but without intention. Not flowing, just bludgeoning through tasks like a creature caught in the machinery of its own ambition.

Here’s the thing:

Each life is its own ecosystem. And when the ecosystem is flooded—by overcommitment, overthinking, or overconnection—it becomes impossible to feel rooted.

In the age of abundance, we’re drowning in our own options.
Overwhelm.
Burnout.
That sense that everything overlaps or that one part of your life hijacks the rest—this isn’t a personal flaw. It’s a modern epidemic.

So I gave myself a gift.
I took a day to stop.
To audit each part of my life.
To return to first principles.

Today, I want to share what I found.

I also want to offer something deeper than AI-flavoured advice or generic productivity hacks.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve learned more in the mucky grinder of reality than from any “guru.”

And the first thing I’ve learned to throw out? The idea that one fixed system can be superimposed on any life.

What’s emerging for me is something more alive. A daily system that bends and breathes with life’s conditions—rather than being glued on top of them.

Let’s dive in.

“Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Rainer Maria Rilke

II. Life as an Ecosystem

I sat down at a café in Berlin—Bonanza, in Kreuzberg—and took a moment to take in the space: a quiet study in minimalism, with polished steel rising like sentinels, offset by the sweeping, organic forms of giant plants.

A change of space and a strong coffee is never a bad place to start when you’re taking stock of things.

What struck me was: I didn’t even need to think to begin the diagnosis.

Often, the things that could help us most are the very ones we avoid—because we don’t want to meet the voice of self-recrimination waiting in the space between us and the part of life we know we need to fix.

But, that’s how the little lizards become dragons.

We fool ourselves into thinking that if we leave them in the cave, they’ll just go away.
They never do.

Yes, sometimes what we’re avoiding are big things.
But more often, they’re small. We’d just rather not look at them.

Whatever their form though, our ghouls must be faced—and it’s always, always better to do it on your terms and in your own time than to keep pushing them down the line.

Before I’d even opened my notebook, I knew what had drifted:
I’d been exercising less. Avoiding a financial tangle I didn’t want to address.
And more subtly—I’d let go of seeing life as an organic whole, in favour of being pulled by whatever had the strongest pull on me that week.

I think this is something many of us can relate to—how one particular aspect of life can emerge as something positive, only to become a black hole to everything else. A passion pulls us in, until everything else bends around its gravity.

There are of course seasons where we choose to zero in on one thing.
But that wasn’t what I was doing.
What I’d lost was balance—the quiet sense of inner coordination between the different parts of my life.

And so, I’m renewing my approach by looking at life holistically — as an ecosystem.

Now, any ecosystem depends on balance, interconnection, and self-regulation to thrive. The paradox of modern productivity is that it anchors itself in the to-do list—yet its a cultural paradigm that sometimes feels like a forced marriage.

Our addiction to ticking boxes at times erodes our ability to see life as a whole. We’re so busy dividing everything up that we fail to see the system is slowly breaking down.

The older I get the clearer I see — modern time managment seem more likely to lead people to burn out than an aligned life.

It may seem paradoxical, but sometimes the more you do, the further you veer off course. Everywhere we see this the peculiar modern phenomenon of humans doing a million things but never feeling they are quite moving their lives forward.

Rarely do we stop to ask: where is all this doing actually taking us?

There’s almost no pause in this modern fixation with doing for doing’s sake—as if motion alone is proof of meaning.

But what if it’s not?

What if this relentless pace is rooted in a deeper fear—the fear that here is never enough?

It makes me wonder — where has the lunatic idea emerged; that the only worthwhile life is ever to be found somewhere else?

It reminds me of the story of the man who spends his whole life climbing a ladder, rung by rung, driven and determined—only to reach the top and realise it’s been leaning against the wrong damn wall all along.

For whatever reason, we can’t seem to anchor our future-orientation in this moment now — and if we’ve lost the ability to be in this moment now, then what, precisely is this goal-oriented future predicated on?

It seems to me we stack void onto void and then surprise ourselves that we’ve drifted so far from meaning.

I think there’s a different way. It takes work and deliberation, and the heart of that work is always trying to find your way back to the centre when you drift.

Which you always will.

But by returning to that centre the future becomes slowly shaped by your own deliberation, rather than pulled along by the mania of what you should be doing.

Personally, I’m always amazed by how much clarity arrives the moment I step back. It makes sense—if life is an ecosystem, then when one part falls out of sync, the whole system feels it.

That’s why I resist the idea that niching down is the only path to “success.” It implies you must sacrifice the wholeness of your life in order to move forward.

And in the wake of that story, we’ve witnessed grind culture’s rise, unchecked capitalism, and the suffocating narcissism of the influencer era.

It’s consequence?

The death of balance.

As I sat sipping my coffee, watching the quiet choreography of the baristas, I found myself wondering—what is it we’re all really trying to do?

It seems to me that we’re always living inside a strange tension: between the part of us that wants to live fully in the present—to love, to notice, to share and be a part—
and the aspirational part of us that hungers for more.

That yearns to express its potential, to create something meaningful,
and to participate—zealously—in the grand drama of reality.

That, I think, is the deeper function of a to-do list:
to build something from the inside out.
To manifest the internal world in the realm of reality.

But the danger of our obsession with forward motion is that we miss the life that’s already happening for the life we’d like to have.
The one pulsing beneath the surface of the plan.

Because the reality is:
Who you are right now matters.

When your ecosystem gets out of balance, the first thing that happens is that you separate from the pulse of life.

And happiness—that elusive myth we are forever chasing—isn’t about outcomes alone.

It’s an expression of alignment, connection and integration.

For me, my little healing began with something small:
just stepping back.

Watching the baristas move with soft, attentive focus.
Letting myself witness my life, instead of pushing through it.

And from that place, asking how I might play a better hand at the game.

Before I outline the shift I’ve made since then, a gentle reminder:

Life is walking a path not yet mapped.
As such, it’s in the nature of this journey to get lost.
When you do so, adjusting your approach is how you get back the knowledge that its all too easy to lose sight of: that every day is its own miracle, and safeguarding your understanding of that is half that battle in life.

So here’s my question to you:

What part of your life’s ecosystem have you been starving lately?

Often, you don’t need to think long to find the answer.
Start there.
Nourish that area.
Then see how you can work that into next week.

Almost without fail, the ship begins to right itself.

And maybe that’s the work of each day — not to do everything, but to tend to the one thing that matters most in that moment.

“It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?”
— Henry David Thoreau

III. The Danger of Digital Dilution

Modern life is complex.

On top of how damn expensive everything has become, each of us is earning a living in an economy that feels like it’s sprinting ahead of us. We’re nurturing friendships stretched across cities and continents, navigating the quiet complexities of family, juggling bills, raising children, showing up, and holding it all together.

And somewhere in the midst of it all:
trying to keep alive a creative dream, a personal project, a business—
some small fire that feels like it’s ours.

It’s a delicate, relentless choreography— equal parts devotion, exhaustion, and hope.

And within it all, we can suddenly feel diluted by the constituent parts of our own life—grateful, somewhere, for all of it, yet somehow dispersed by its disparate threads.

I think this was why so many people discovered something new in the pandemic.

For the first time, we had to undergo an enforced simplification.

For me personally it helped me to return to my centre, and to orientate my life again from what matters most.

But, like many, when things booted up again, I found myself trying to rebuild around this new centre—only to be whisked away by its unexpected acceleration.

Just before the pandemic hit, I was in a great place musically. I’d been on tour promoting Love in the Face of Fear, and I felt like I’d finally found a home with the label Radicalis.

But, like so many musicians, I emerged into a changed world.

Radicalis folded in Germany, and so I set out once again as an independent artist—launching The Isolation Diaries tour in a market that had completely shifted.

The Vorkasse culture—where audiences pre-booked shows—had been decimated. People were tired. Tired of venues cancelling, tired of bands rescheduling, tired of living in a permanent state of refund requests and dashed expectations.

At some point, the audience simply stopped booking ahead.

And suddenly, the simple act of putting on a gig had become a gamble.

It left me with a clear choice:

Either I set my musical life aside,
or I figure out a new way to be an artist in the world.

Having rejected outright the onlinification of life during the pandemic, I now faced a stark reckoning.

I could either begin to reconcile with aspects of modern culture that had sat uneasily with me for over a decade—
or accept that my creative life would need to shrink into something smaller.
Something more like a hobby.

That was the moment I made my U-turn.

After months in the wilderness during The Isolation Diaries—turning inward, logging off, searching for the deeper connection I’d somehow drifted from along the way—
I decided to throw myself into the digital space.

Not in denial of what I’d learned.
But because I finally understood:
If you want to bring what you’ve discovered back into the world,
you have to engage with the language the world speaks.

Culture had moved.
But I hadn’t.

It set me off on this journey of trying to figure out the modern world in new ways — a journey I’m still on and which continues to energise me.

Sometimes, out of rejection of everything you arrive at the most defiant kind of affirmation.

Or, it brings you to the door of what you most avoided and says:
This —
This after all was your challenge.
Yes:
The one you had most avoided.

IV. A SOCIETY OF SMALL BETS

Out of a period of relative quiescence, I arrived at a clear insight about my future.

I would recommit to a life in the arts — but this time, I needed to surrender myself to the path and allow it to reshape me.

I’d faced a similar turning point before — when I pivoted hard into film and photography after losing my deal with EMI in 2013.

It turned out to be the right bet at the right time.

Internet speeds were ramping up globally, video was beginning its long takeover of online life, and every company suddenly needed a trailer. I had strong contacts in the music world, and things moved far faster than I could have imagined.

All of this allowed me to reposition myself musically — and music became an indomitable partner in my life, rather than its centrepiece.

Freelance film work became the engine that kept my musical life alive.

This was the basis of my life as I kickstarted a new embrace of the online world after the pandemic.

It started with this newsletter, which itself was born out of developing a writing habit during the pandemic.

I found during that time that writing became not just an anchor, but a sun — a gravitational centre around which the rest of my life began to orient itself.

Starting this newsletter was a first step toward building a deeper, more intentional participation in online life.

As the internet grew into ubiquity, I found myself grappling with familiar pain points.

Primarily, short-form content often felt shallow. I recognised its potential — especially for artists, offering a direct line to fans. But I remained sceptical about its ability to carry ideas or artworks that genuinely impact people in a lasting way.

This newsletter helped me reframe that view.

Rather than seeing short-form content as an end in itself, I began to see it as one part of a larger ecosystem.

Short-form platforms were for discovery.

Longer-form platforms were for relationship — the places where someone, drawn in by a fleeting idea or a piece of music, could go deeper.

Understanding that connection helped me see how the online world could be engaged with in a more meaningful way.

Put simply, it meant grounding participation in one’s own centre — in one’s own thoughts and values — and building outward from there with intention.

Because I’d seen the other side too: how the TikTokification of culture had fragmented attention, eroded focus, and diluted the possibility of real engagement — not just online, but with life itself.

You can’t be here… if you’re never really here.

I’d pushed back so hard against the online world — retreating into the wild — because I felt my mind fraying from the constant intake of content, not the act of creating it.

I had to ask myself — who am I, who do I want to be, and what does it mean become present in a world designed to keep us permanently elsewhere?

I felt splintered between two extremes:

Either acquiesce to the momentum of society and watch part of myself dissolve into the daily vanishing mirage of temporary content —
or reject it all, and try to live an analogue life outside the bandwidth of modern culture.

Starting a Substack bridged those two extremes.

I don’t mean it as a solution to what is ultimately a challenge of consciousness — how we want to live in an age that constantly pulls us away from presence, from depth, from our own centre.

But it was a decisive step — and, crucially, one I made on my own terms.

Over two years later, I can say this: it helped resolve the twin pain points that had been unravelling my creative life.

First, my life is once again rooted in what I create — not in what I consume. That’s a profound shift.

In a world where many feel their attention and sense of self slipping away, this re-rooting matters.

Our capacity to think, feel, and imagine has been steadily infiltrated by algorithms — systems not built from the core of our own being, but designed by companies whose primary aim is to monetise our attention. These aren’t neutral tools. They shape how we see, what we value, even what we believe.

You can frame it however you like — but that’s the trade many of us have made:
our consciousness, in exchange for convenience, entertainment, distraction.

And for me, starting this Substack marked the beginning of taking that trade back.

What I didn’t yet realise was that it came with its own danger!

V. How the Path Pulled More Than I Planned to Give

The problem with modern life is that there’s always the allure of more — or rather, we often feel we should, or could, be doing more.

I’d set out with my Substack to use it as a foundational core. Not just as a centrepiece for my future work, but as a weekly discipline — a way to clarify my thoughts, ideas, and relationship to the world.

It worked well for me. And soon, I realised I could do more with it.

It was already serving as my content hub — the one piece that gave structure to everything else I was making.

By committing to one long-form essay at the start of the week, I wasn’t just choosing one clear idea to explore — I was laying a foundation stone.

Or rather, I began to see it as the heart of my creative system: a content hub that pumped energy through every artery and capillary of my work.

That realisation was thrilling—not just because it brought coherence, but because it solved a challenge many artists face:

How do you turn meaningful, long-form work into short-form content without losing its depth?

Suddenly, I didn’t just have bite-sized pieces; I had clarity of purpose. Each snippet wasn’t mere clickbait—it was an invitation for readers to dive deeper into the very ideas that were fueling me.

And I could see immediately that I already had the skills to take this further—whether in audio, video, or the written word.

The truth is, everyone connects differently: some love audio and lean toward podcasts, others prefer the visual rhythm of YouTube, while many still orient toward the written word.

So I had a simple idea: turn my weekly newsletter into a podcast and a video — and in doing so, increase the surface area for potential connection.

Of course, pursuing this in reality came with challenges!

There’s a good reason the prevailing advice for online growth is to focus on one platform. Fragmentation by chasing too many rabbits is its own danger.

But there’s also something to be said for responding to the potential of your own skill sets.

Through my years in music, I’d developed useful audio instincts. Through my video work, I’d honed streamlined filming and editing workflows.

Even so, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off while still running a freelance career and keeping my musical life alive. I was aware that I might be walking straight back into the very danger I’d once resisted: busying myself into oblivion.

But at some point along the artistic path, you have to shake things up and try new things.

Sometimes, all you have is trying new things.

Experimentation becomes the sharp blade by which you forge a new future. Even if you’re unsure where you’re going!

And so I went for it — launching the podcast, and then becoming more active on YouTube too.

This trinity — the Newsletter, the Podcast, and YouTube — sharpened my skills and brought a lot of joy as I’ve learned new skills, platforms as well as meeting new people.

It also pushed me. It tested my discipline. And it asked me to keep evolving — both internally, but also in terms of having to get smarter about workflows.

What I quickly learned is that each platform has its own language — you can’t just paste one onto another.

Sure, you could read your newsletter verbatim on YouTube (and some do it brilliantly), but the real power of video lies in bringing ideas to life visually.

That’s my aim on YouTube: not merely to explain the concepts I’m exploring, but to demonstrate how I put them into practice in the real world.

It means that core ideas in the newsletter carry through, but that the viewer can witness how they work — (and sometimes don’t!) — in the realm of real life.

That just works much more powerfully for a visual form because the ideas come to life — rather than just being spoken.

But it did start stretching me!

I’d committed to the path — but the path had started devouring me.
I needed a way to stay in motion without losing my centre.
That’s when I returned to a principle I’d always known, but had never needed more than now.

A few months ago, I realised I was asking too much of myself.

Something needed to change.

Either I would have to put one platform aside — or I’d need to revolutionise how I approached my week.

I sat with the question and soon saw that the easier solution — simply cutting one thing out to buy back time — felt like a step backwards.

Not only do I enjoy each platform, but each one holds a growing opportunity. It didn’t feel like the right call yet, and I wanted to spin the wheel some more.

More importantly, I felt energised by the idea of solving my own pain point.

It felt there was something to be learnt by leaning into trying to figure this out — and an opportunity too. If it didn’t work I could always pivot later.

After all, the act of pulling any dream down from the sky and attempting to ground it in reality is meant to challenge you.

In the final part of this piece, I’ll walk through a few simple tweaks that have helped me solve both sides of the equation.

Namely:

How to avoid feeling maxed out — while still building real forward momentum.
Not by doing more, but by creating more space within the week itself.

VI. Why My System Broke — And What I Did Next

The reason I’d hit a wall was that I’d drifted into a familiar pattern — one many creatives know too well.

I wasn’t living with intention. I was either reacting to what the day demanded or getting pulled so deeply into one project that it broke apart the rhythm of my wider ecosystem.

In a nutshell: I had to choose between being reactive or intentional.

The reason so many of us struggle to build consistency isn’t a lack of will — it’s that we don’t account for how every other part of life will challenge our plans.

For me, the breakthrough began with reverse-engineering my week.

That meant building my week towards the goal.

For example, my content trilogy — the Newsletter, Podcast, and YouTube video — completely crumbled when freelance work meant I was writing the newsletter last minute on Fridays.

That delay made the podcast irregular, which in turn disrupted the organic growth it was starting to build.

Why?

Because the first thing an audience wants is to know when something will land. That’s the unwritten language of trust between creator and audience.

Most of us working in this space will fail at times — but the journey is about building a system that allows you to show up consistently, without burning out.

So I went back to first principles.

I decided I had to start the week by writing the first draft of the newsletter on Monday — religiously.

That way, I’d have enough time to record the podcast and film the video, no matter how hectic the week became.

Except... that didn’t quite work either!

It turns out reality is a difficult beast to tame.

But I felt close.

You know that feeling — when you’ve wrestled with something for so long that you're on the cusp of a breakthrough, yet can’t quite somehow push through the threshold?

The past month gave me the chance to try something new.

With a natural hiatus in freelance work, I finally had space to experiment — and test the system that this whole piece has been building toward.

And so, I began testing. Small shifts, different arrangements, subtle tweaks to how I structured the week.

What I found surprised me.

The solution wasn’t about doing more — but about being clearer.

It came down to one simple principle. One that’s been sitting there the whole time.

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VII. One Clear Purpose Per Day

The problem with reacting to everything in real time is that you quickly become governed by whatever aspect of life is demanding your attention.

It is your life, but not ever quite controlled by you.

I decided to implement a hard stop.

What if I tried to break down multi-tasking altogether.

I mean multi-tasking not just in miniature — doing this for half an hour and then that for half an hour — but rather by assigning one clear purpose to each day.

This isn’t about carving out a full day — you just need to designate one task or goal as your single focus, whether it’s ten minutes, an hour, or even the whole day. The key is treating that one clear purpose as its own standalone priority.

There will always be days when life demands your attention in multiple areas.

But when it comes to your creative work — your project, your calling — try streamling your attention to one aspect of it per day.

It doesn’t matter whether you have twenty minutes or twenty hours.

The important thing is going like hell after one facet of it during that time.

For me its really helped in three ways:

First, it challenges the cognitive tax you pay every time you switch between two tasks. In my experience, as someone constantly juggling between disciplines in the arts, this energy drain is completely underestimated. I feel like I’m buying back a day of my week through this approach.

Second, it gives you the gift of throwing out the nagging feeling there is something else you should be doing. Part of doing anything is about allowing yourself to be here now. The most cancerous aspect of our divided modern attention is that we are constantly pulled towards our phones — without ever knowing what it is we’re looking for.
Give yourself the gift of THIS.

Third it activates the possibility of reaching a flow state because you are inviting yourself to go into a state of deep work. Earlier I mentioned how I’d been feeling out of kilter with myself, as if something felt off. One thing I diagnosed was that I had lost my habit of deep work. In a working sense, this is where it all happens for me — not just in terms of doing the heavy lifting on any given project, but also in the enormous peace it brings me afterwards.

Take this newsletter as an example.

When I sat down this morning, I had the idea — but it took a while to start.

After gritting through a few paragraphs, I felt that familiar temptation to pivot — to check something, tweak something, to do anything else. That, right there, is the way the tech companies have splintered your mind. The question is: what are you doing to actively to challenge it? In my case this morning — by committing to what I am doing — and resisting any distraction at all — I have written for four hours straight and hit peak flow.

It would have been just as easy for me to pivot after two hours — and honestly, I felt like it.

But I recognised something: the other things calling me weren’t time-sensitive. They didn’t need to be done now.

If I’d stopped writing, this article would have spilled into another day — dragging a cognitively demanding task across the rest of my week. That doesn’t just cost time. It burns through creative energy, too.

And if you’re juggling client work, parenting, or day jobs — that’s an unsustainable tax.

What I’ve found is this: it doesn’t matter whether you have one hour or a whole day for your own work.

It’s not about time — it’s about approach.

The reason that my newsletters are longer this month is that one of the decisions I’ve made while I have this precious gift of time, is to go in deeper.

I love short, sharp, value-packed letters too. But sometimes, it helps to travel with someone as they work through something real — to see how they’re solving their own pain points, with all the specificity of lived experience.

It’s also why this system works so well across mediums — especially in podcasting, where the listener is often most open to go deep with you.

The goal of having one clear purpose per day isn’t just about working towards an outcome though.

It is about the quality of experience you are having with your work.

One of the struggles I was having recently was that I felt I was living on the surface. I couldn’t activate that extra gear, the one that opens the door to your best work.

As soon as I made this shift — choosing one clear purpose each day — I started accessing a deeper part of myself again.

This doesn’t mean ignoring all the stuff that makes life, well, life.

It simply means that at some point in your day, you carve out space for the expression of what you really want to drive forward.

That, for me, is about making a sacred space in the day.

Can you make a vow to what you hold most dear in life?

If society is diluting that gift in you, can you stem the time and determine to go in a different direction.

It is not easy to do — everyone struggles with it.

But the precursor is to be serious about your own intention.

• Where are you focusing your energy?

• What is most important to you?

• Can you sacrifice something shallow in the purpose of a deeper commitment?

These are the questions that get my blood going — the ones that pull me out of the shallows and back into the deeper waters of my spirit.

It’s its own form of devotion, a modern type of prayer.

And when I fall out of it, I feel my connection to life weaken.

It is not just about having one clear purpose a day.

It is about saying:
How can I bring the fullness of myself to something — here, now, today?

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VIII. My Weekly Creative Production Flow

As soon as I hit upon the idea, I realised I wasn’t just recovering something I’d lost — I was unlocking an access point to something new.

Unwittingly, I’d set off a chain reaction.

So I’ve started building it out — not just one day with a clear purpose, but an entire week shaped around that idea.

As ever, I’m conducting the experiment on myself.

What would happen if I assigned one clear purpose to each day?

As I mulled it over, I realised I didn’t just want to reverse-engineer the outcomes I was aiming for — I also wanted deeper clarity on how each component of my week could support the whole.

And so I returned to an idea I’ve played with many times over the years: systematising my week.

Now, I know for creative people, the word system can trigger immediate resistance — and I get it.

It’s a bit naff. It reeks of productivity-speak.

But here’s the paradox: what I’m aiming for isn’t about squeezing more in.

It’s about doing less — and doing it better.

Because one of the biggest challenges creatives and freelancers face is something I call the disillusion dip — that part of the day when meaning hasn't yet arrived, and direction still feels out of reach.

Most of us don’t wake up automatically connected to purpose. And that’s really what resistance is: not just avoiding the thing you love, but wondering why you’re avoiding it — even though you love it.

If that’s true, then the question becomes: how do we shape a life that helps us minimise time in the disillusion dip — and build momentum instead?

That’s why I’ve renewed my approach and built a weekly creative production workflow in Notion.

Put simply: I want to know what I’m doing, when I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it.

• The what is the specific piece I’m working on.

• The when is the intentional time I’m carving out for it.

• The why is both the deeper motivation and the weekly outcome I’m moving toward.

It’s helping me trade in moments of doubt for a growing sense of direction.

Because at the last, we are the ones authoring our lives.

And if we’re going to be our own bosses —
we have to actually be our own bosses.

IX. Conclusion: The North Star of a Single Mission

Assigning one clear purpose per day isn’t about breaking yourself on the wheel of productivity.

It’s about the opposite.

If you’re in operations mode, working on a big project, it helps cut through the clutter. It guards against that modern phenomenon of working on a million things — yet somehow getting nothing done.

On the other hand, if you’re in easy mode, but want to keep life ticking over, one clear purpose stops you from being dragged into the tide of half-formed tasks that can hijack a day originally meant for rest, friends, or creative play.

In that sense, it can be about assigning a mission to your day —
or simply being gently decisive with a small window of time.

For me, it helps in both.

When I’m in deep work mode, I find it grounding to say:

This one thing gets done today — no matter the resistance, the tiredness, or the self-doubt.

It’s a simple way to coax myself into motion — especially on days I don’t feel like it.

And when I’m in easy mode, it helps too:

“Okay — I only have an hour. What do I actually want to do?”

One thing it’s protected is my reading time. Instead of losing an hour to forgettable scrolling, I return to the page.

Because this isn’t about chasing productivity for its own sake.

It’s about restoring rhythm to the ecosystem of your life.

• It’s about creating instead of consuming.

• Reclaiming your attention.

• Rebalancing your internal world.

It’s helped me with what I don’t do, too. After years of working Sundays, the decision to make them sacred — to do nothing — has become its own little revolution.

And last weekend, when I was completely hungover?

My one clear purpose:
Do absolutely nothing!

And today?

My one clear purpose:
Write and edit this newsletter.
Repurpose it for the podcast.

Job done.

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X. What to Try This Week

• Pick one clear purpose for each day — something that matters to you. It could be a creative task, an overdue priority, or even rest with intention.

• Block space for it — whether it’s an hour or the whole day. This isn’t about how much time you have — it’s about how you show up to it.

• Go all in — let that one purpose be the anchor of your day. Resist the pull to split your focus or check in on everything else.

• Notice the shift — not just in what you accomplish, but in how you feel. Do you hit flow faster? Does your day feel more grounded? Is your energy cleaner, your mind quieter?

This isn’t a system to do more.
It’s a rhythm to feel more connected to what you’re doing — and to reclaim authorship over your week.

Try it for a few days.
Let it breathe.
Adjust as you go.

And see if something deeper begins to move.

That’s what I’m doing — and I hope some of these ideas help you too!

Take care and see you next week,
Jim