Detach from your work to make it work

The article

• Dreyfus spent about a month procrastinating over his own wedding invitation. Later, with an issue of his Niche design magazine about 90% done, his progress slowed sharply. He blames both on deep personal attachment to the work.
• He thinks the point of design is to finish and release work. He calls big goals like changing the world narcissistic aspirations. In his words, they mostly live in job postings and pitch decks.
• Meaningful work isn't supposed to be easy, he says, it's supposed to be progressable. He aims to move forward a little each day. He works without goals or metrics in mind, which stops the self-analysis and outcome prediction.
• Projects tied to identity, like a designer's portfolio, attract endless revisions. Every decision seems to say something about his whole practice. The same attachment that drives him also blocks him.
• Client work came easier because he isn't the one making the final call. So he applied this 'client approach' to his own projects and pretended they belonged to someone else. That freed him to experiment. He shipped the first issue of Niche.
• He ends by asking readers to trust the process. Day to day, progress is slow and hard to see. It only adds up to something real in retrospect, whether the work is writing, design, programming or music.