Reframe What Productivity Means During a Creative or Intellectual Project

You have a project that does not produce steady output and you keep feeling behind even on the days when you did the work. Thinking, reading, revising, and starting over are not visible on a task list. This reframes what productive time means for this type of work: which apparently wasted sessions are necessary, what forward progress actually looks like here, and one way to track it that does not make you feel like you are failing.

Reframe what productive time looks like during the kind of creative or intellectual project described below.

For the project and current experience:
1. What the person is currently counting as productive and what they are discounting as wasted time
2. Which of the 'wasted' time is likely necessary to the type of work described
3. What a more accurate measure of forward progress would look like for this particular project
4. One way to track progress that would feel more honest than output volume

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[describe the project, how you currently measure whether a day was productive, and what the sessions that feel wasted actually look like]
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