Creative Mesocycles

Sports Periodization Overview

In 2024 I made two intentional changes to my habits: I started exercising every day, and I stopped working on creative projects that take more than a month. Both of these changes have improved my life immensely. In the process, I have also discovered that my one-month blocks of creative work rhyme in an uncanny way with a concept from sports periodization called the Mesocycle.

Sports periodization is a technique of breaking up an athlete’s training into a hierarchy of time blocks known as macrocycles, mesocycles, and microcycles. Macrocycles are a year and microcycles are about a week. Mesocycles, like my projects, take about a month, and focus on one particular aspect of training. As I progressed throughout the year, I drew more from this paradigm, and I think I have arrived at a parallel approach to my creative work that I’m truly excited to share.

A Foundation of Daily Habit and Enjoyment

This 1-month regimen worked out more splendidly than I could have hoped. It forced me into a dialogue with myself about what would be fun to work on for a month, and what my life needed. The work shifted from servicing an idea or a vision, and allowed me to choose the work that would be the most nourishing thing for me. If I was burnt out on games, I could make a small AI tool, or build a piece of furniture. There was no pressure - one month was barely enough time for me to accomplish anything at all.

Nonetheless, I think it was the most creatively productive year I've ever had. I made two games for game jams, I built an assistive AI tool that helps me with D&D worldbuilding, I ran a one-off D&D adventure, I helped organize a wedding (my own), I hosted my first game jam, and launched this blog. All of this emerged organically as I bounced from passion to passion.

If macrocycles are built on mesocycles, and mesocycles are built on microcycles, then microcycles are built on daily habit and enjoyment. At the end of the day, the only reason to do unnecessary work in your free time is because those hours spent add to your life. If the art you do is draining you or destroying you, then for fuck's sake, please do anything else.

I think that the most important thing that working in mesocycles did for me was allow me to reconnect with that enjoyment I feel when I make something. If you are interested in adopting this methodology, I would urge you to stay in close touch with your own enjoyment and sense of play.

Sports Periodization

When accomplished athletes complete, they often plan in terms of yearly training cycles leading up to the major yearly competition. This yearly cycle is broken down into smaller periods of focused training through the process of sports periodization.

In this discipline, the yearly cycle of training for an event is known as a macrocycle. This is broken down into mesocycles of 3-6 weeks, which focus on a particular aspect of training such as strength or endurance. A mesocycle consists of microcycles (typically about a week) that are a specific training routine. If you've ever done a weekly weight lifting routine, that routine is your microcycle.

While there are some valid criticisms of traditional sports periodization being overly reductive, it also has a long track record as a viable training methodology because it provides a straightforward structure for athletes to work within. The intermediate breakdown into mesocycles allows them to focus on their long-term goals without becoming overwhelmed by the complexity.

The process boils down to:

Prioritize the things you need to work on in a year (macrocycle)
Work on them in 3-6 week blocks (mesocycle)
Within that block, repeat a weekly routine that improves your focus area (microcycle)
Use that time in your weekly routine wisely though: you only have about a month to make the progress you need.

Creative Periodization

When I committed to only doing 1-month creative projects this year, it was in some ways a declaration of bankruptcy. The truth is that I commit to projects at a far more rapid pace than I complete them, leading to a complete oversaturation of my time. I was burnt out, depressed, and buried in over-ambitious game development and woodworking ideas that I had long ago lost any passion for.

Despite the circumstances, making things was still meaningful to me. Some days I was so depressed that even watching TV sounded overwhelming, but somehow I would still want to noodle on some code. This wasn't sustainable. Those projects were still burning me out, even as I noodled on them. I would sink into my work on them, neglecting other more important parts of my life even as I failed to make meaningful progress. I started writing a small programming language, but stopped seeing the dentist. I tried to make a multiplayer platforming game, but couldn’t bring myself to clean my desk. Both of those projects stalled out on technical difficulties. I found others, but each time I was more and more exhausted.

My compromise with myself was to set a time limit. I could keep making things, but whether they succeeded or failed, after a month I would need to move on to something else. I would try to choose things that I thought I could get done in a month, but if I lost interest or the project petered out, no problem. Just take it as a data point, pull the plug and move on.

Mesocycles are a Sweet Spot

Sports and creative arts are both endeavors where motivated people invest a lot of hard work to develop their capacities, but ultimately the only thing that makes them worthwhile is love for the activity.

After learning more about sports periodization, I came to view my little 1-month projects as Creative Mesocycles. Given shape through a name, Creative Mesocycles stepped into my world fully reified and concrete. It felt like a major breakthrough.

Through the sports lens, I could situate my 1-month sprints within the context of a larger mesocycle such as improving my craft or making a larger project. I could see how those mesocycles would need to change depending on the macrocycle. On the other end of the scale, I could see how I had not been minding the regularity of my microcycles - if I wanted to do work outside of my job, I needed to stop sprinting so hard day after day. It led to fatigue and burnout every time. I’d do a lot better if I had planned rest days where I did something completely unrelated to my mesocycle like drawing or reading, or if I tried to superset in something that was less fatiguing like design work and journaling.

From the creative lens, I could also see how my mesocycles had benefited from being dynamic and humanistic. If I were to plan out my mesocycles for the whole macrocycle, it would become a backlog and crushing commitment. I think lots of pro athletes plan their years like that, but as an amateur being creative for its own sake and lifting weights for general health improvements, I don’t think it makes a lot of sense in my case. I think for both exercise and creativity, I benefit a lot from the reflection period at the end of each mesocycle where I can honor the work I’ve done and check in to figure out what next step is singing to my heart.

Through the application of this framework, I think I have arrived at four qualities that I find essential in my creative mesocycles:

Scope: If I listen to the artist in my brain, he will want to craft a magnum opus every time. He will have more ideas than I could ever test, much less execute. However if I gently say "yes, but you only have a month. What could be done to point a finger at this vision?" then I find this artist in my head to be pleasantly amenable to a smaller project that captures only the most compelling and essential parts.
Focus: Once the cycle has started, it is easy to hold focus for the month knowing that the time is so short. When I inevitably have ideas for a newer, better project halfway through, I can tell myself "that's great – do it next month if you feel like it". When I inevitably suffer setbacks or become disillusioned, I can tell myself "just do your best. There's only a week or two left."
Time-Boxing: At the end of the month, what's done is done. Sometimes the project is incomplete. Even when it is complete, I'm usually over it by then, and want desperately to move on to something else. I like the finality of the self-imposed deadline: sometimes I learn that what I wanted to do couldn't be accomplished in a reasonable timeframe.
Reflection: There's always so much to learn at the end of each mesocycle. I postmortem the project to myself, figuring out what went wrong and right. I'm always surprised and delighted by how different it is from what I expected. Then the best part: figuring out what to work on next. I can never predict at the beginning of a month what I will want to work on at the end, so now, I don't even try.

I also think that the 1-month timespan holds a special significance. It is about the minimum time I need to finish a complex feature or simple game-jam game, while also being the maximum time that I can remain inspired enough to work hard on something creative. After about a month I usually notice myself losing the spark of inspiration, and wanting to move on to something else. It’s also about the maximum time I can make a detailed plan for. Therefore I suspect that the 1-month time box is close to some sort of optimal duration of work for my psyche.

Of course, I don't expect this to hold true for everybody across all creative disciplines. I think that if you want to adopt this framework, you should tweak it to fit what makes sense for you. Personally, I think I am going to experiment with some 6-week mesocycles in 2025, so that I can tackle slightly larger projects and maybe write some blog posts about them. It will be an evolving process, but I look forward to documenting it and sharing my findings with all of you.

Future Work

I think that in 2025 I want to work on a bigger game project. My brain is in a much healthier place, and it's feeling like I can finally tackle something like that. I am thinking of this as my new, more focused macrocycle, and it will be interesting to adapt my current schema of mesocycles into it. I have been journaling game concepts that contain a list of core features, and I think that for most of the year I want to focus on just building prototypes of those features. I want to use a mixture of the engines and tools I'm familiar with, and search for a prototype and workflow that I think is fun enough that I can be inspired by what I already have rather than what I imagine it could be.

I suspect that every now and then I will have to have a "resting cycle" where I go off and work on something completely different just for the variety. Or maybe I will start playing with the idea of "rest days", and work in planned days of distraction to my weekly schedule. I'm not entirely sure yet - we'll have to play around with it and stay on our toes. In general, I'm fascinated by this idea of treating my creative time like a workout regimen, and I'm sure I'll have more to share as things progress.

I also want to write about my progress as I go, which is why I started this blog. I hope to start a youtube channel in the coming months as well, and publish devlogs as well as some companion videos for these essays. I hope you’ll follow along, and if you try this, please let me know how it works for you!

/mesocycles/ /productivity/ /gamedev/