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Get Better at Creative Self-Evaluation
The most important step is one we often skip
Thirteen years ago, I took a creative methodology class. The teacher — now a friend of mine — broke the creative process down into three simple steps:
- Plan.
- Execute.
- Evaluate.
It’s a system I’ve since enthusiastically adopted in my own life. For any creative project, I’ve found, it works on multiple levels.
On a macro level, planning is when you do all of your research and sketching and ideation, execution is the actual designing and building of the thing, and evaluation is your post-mortem learnings.
On a micro level, every step can be further broken down into sub-steps following the same pattern. Take planning: First, I need to do research on the creative process by googling five different people’s personal processes. Then, I execute on that by searching and taking notes on what I find. Finally, I evaluate what I’ve gathered: Do I have the information I need to move forward? What’s missing? What logical step could come next?
We’ve all grown up planning: making to-do lists, for example, or adding things to our calendars. And we’re all used to executing: Design. Write. Build. Code. Do the work.
