On taking less work this year

The studio is going to work on fewer projects in 2022. A short note on why, partly so I can be held to it.

The pattern across the last three years was to take on roughly twelve projects a year. Some big, some small. The maths worked, in income terms. The maths did not work in any other terms. The work I am most proud of was always made in the months when there were fewer projects in flight. The work I am least proud of was always made when there were too many.

The new model is six to eight projects a year. Two big, four to six small. Each one gets more time per week. None of them get squeezed into the gaps between the others. The studio’s monthly income will, on paper, be lower. The annual income will, I suspect, be similar, because the bigger projects can be priced at a level the studio could not justify when it was running at full tilt.

The bit I am most uncertain about is the gaps. Two months a year, on the new model, will have no scheduled new projects. Past me would have filled those months by chasing new business. Present me wants to use them to do the work I keep saying I will do but never actually do: rewriting the studio’s own site, recording short videos for clients to refer back to, reading the things I have meant to read, building tools the studio needs but has been making do without.

The argument for this model, more rigorously than I have made it, is in Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity. Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule is older and points at the same underlying problem. The companion piece on hiring slowly is the personnel-side version of the same argument.

I do not know whether this works. The honest version of the post is that I am writing it down so that, in December, I can come back and check.