I just finished teaching my Illustration Projects course with my undergrads for the seventh time. I find myself thinking about this class and what it’s taught me every year around this time.

In fact, this time last year, I wrote a blog post inspired by the class called Resetting for the New Year: the power of a self-compassionate annual review.

I’ve been a college-level prof for 25 years, and most courses I’ve taught don’t have this effect on me. I think about making them better, but I don’t think about them making ME better (although sometimes they do!).

I think Illustration Projects leads me down this path because it’s almost a controlled lab experiment for quarterly planning. Year after year, I’ve seen extremely consistent patterns emerge.

Here’s why: Illustration Projects is not a normal class with a bunch of specific assignments. Instead, it functions as a sort of group independent study. Students, often for the first time, conceive of, scope out, then plan and (attempt to) complete an independent project of their own design over the entire 15-week semester.

The big patterns

→ Almost to a person, students are over-ambitious as to what they think they can get done in a semester. It doesn’t matter how often I warn them at the beginning of semester, they still fall into the Planning Fallacy. We humans are like that!

→ Then, my students feel terrible about the necessity of revisiting and updating their planning based on reality in the middle of the project. Changing their goals makes them feel like they failed (even though I tell them on day 1 that this will happen).

→ On the other hand, students resist using the time-and-practice-based “quota tasks”, as I call them, that I strongly recommend so that they’ll have check-offable tasks to complete each week.

Quota tasks, like “do 3 hours on the draft” are a way to feel awesome and mark progress. They’re a way to concretely see that you ARE doing the work, even when you can’t check off “Finish draft of project” for weeks on end because it’s mooosstly finished? But not quite?

→ When my students ignore my advice and don’t use quota tasks, and then can’t check off “Finish draft of project,” they end up feeling like they’re behind and failing. (Despite doing lots of excellent work on the draft, and even doing finished work on some parts while others aren’t fully-baked yet).

→ Relatedly, the most severe underestimations of time tend to fall in the drafting, sketching, and prep phase.

What does this all add up to?

Well, vanishingly few of my students finish their projects in the projected time…unless they’ve changed their projects’ form so radically midstream that “finished” looks utterly different than it did on day 1.

Does this mean planning to finish large projects is a doomed enterprise?

Not at all!

Mostly, the work they do is fantastic. Above and beyond what they’ve been able to pull off before.

It’s also very often (by the end and after all the pivots) so much closer to what they really want to be doing than when they started. Nothing like on-the-ground experience to teach you what you actually like and want.

And then, they very frequently DO finish the projects…

…in the following semester.

It turns out that the structure of the semester is helpful in encouraging action, but the hard time limit of the semester is not as useful.

Doing the work week by week, and not spending too much energy on whether you’ve hit a specific milestone, is how the big stuff gets done.

Of course, I’ve also seen these same patterns in action for the last 8 years with post-student adult clients in the Creative Focus Workshop.

All of this experience was the underpinning and inspiration for the workshop I just offered, Flexible Container Quarterly Planning that I led live a few weeks ago.

So fun. So useful. So interesting.

In the workshop, we used a combination of realistic capacity + flexible quota tasks to plan out projects with an emphasis on self-compassion [flexible] alongside taking action [container].

As we round the corner to another year, I’ve minimally-edited the live course into a self-paced format so you can get access to the help you may need to create a quarterly (or annual) plan that’s compassionate and also powerful. If this is something that would help you, check it out!

Whether or not you want help with it, I hope you carve out some time to do a self-compassionate annual review this month, as I talked about in that blog post linked above, and use those reflections to set yourself up for a fantastic year in 2024.

I wish you all the best for the end-of-year holidays!

Warmly,

Jessica

P.S. ICYMI above, Flexible Container Quarterly Planning is now available as a self-paced course to support you in creating a realistic AND ambitious plan for 2024! Check it out and join here.