Some creative projects take years. If you only work on things that pay off by Friday, you’ll never build a cathedral.

Short feedback loops are satisfying, and they quietly select what you attempt. Work that returns nothing for a long time gets abandoned less because it is wrong than because nothing arrives to confirm it, while the quick things keep winning your hours. Some work simply cannot report back early.

Keep one long thing going alongside the fast ones. Give it a small fixed slot each week, and judge it by whether you turned up rather than by what it returned.