Inside: A mental model I use for balancing the competing demands of creating & publishing
This idea first appeared during a coaching session with an artist client back in 2015. It became obvious in the call that there are just two types of creative projects. And in choosing two projects, one might have a chance to make both happen.
It’s a response to demands within the mind of a creative; the competing ideas for what comes next. The ever difficult tradeoff of choosing one project over 5 others.
This isn’t revolutionary, nor difficult; in fact the reason it’s become something I’ve used so often myself and with others, is because of it’s sheer simplicity.
You might even find you do something similar? If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Without further ado, let’s get into Fast Lane vs Slow Lane.
In this article:
The only two types of creative projects that really exist
Why these two categories are key to juggling the demands of a modern creative life.
How both lanes can co-exist and become equally important creative projects.
A simple way to implement this in your creative life.
Fast Lane, Slow Lane
This mental model changed how I think about creative projects.
It’s one way of seeing your projects sit side-by-side each other; and, I think, once you see them this way, you’ll want to always just have these two projects on the go at all times.
No more, no less.
Even though this framework appeared in 2015, that wasn’t the start of my journey as a creative person. I’ve been a working independent creative for going on two decades now; basically my entire adult life.
Juggling the competing demands of all the ideas and interests in our minds is one battle. The relentlessness and requirements of the modern world, another.
With this, comes what can feel like a constant pressure to perform. You are expected (both deep down inside your soul, and by ‘the world around us’ to always be showing up, to always be producing, to be prolific, exceptional and ever present.
It’s an impossibility. And that’s why I think all working creatives need to find some way to balance the competing priorities of modern creative life.
This mental model encourages you to design for a few outcomes:
To focus on one meaningful project that will level-up your career.
To focus on one lightweight project that serves as both marketing and your creative practise.
To balance your priorities between these two projects only.
And help you identify when you are choosing work that’s outside of your core goals.
The value in this is that it’s so simple that it can be a mental model you easily live by. But don’t mistake simplicity for ease; most of the challenges I’ve had in my creative life has been an inability to stay on track with my Fast Lane & Slow Lane.
The times when I’ve achieved significant momentum, I look back and this model was in play.
Similarly, so many of the obstacles I’ve explored with my students, coaching clients & also discussions with peers, is when there’s competing projects, priorities; when there is too many things in one lane or both.
Enough rationale, let’s get into it. I call this mental model Fast Lane, Slow Lane so that it’s something you can recall at any moment. And in case you’re not familiar with a mental model, it’s basically a simple picture you hold in your head that helps you make better decisions. You see something through a particular lens and it changes how you act on it.
The idea of this came up because when we’re working as a creative, we’ve often got two competing types of projects running.
A Fast Lane project is something that is regular, consistent, designed for output over outcome. It should be easy. It should focus on exploration, inspiration, ideation. And it should be something we can ship easily for the world to see.
A Slow Lane project is the opposite; it’s something designed to be a body of work, a level-up, even a breakthrough. It’s a showcase of you producing something that tested you and your abilities. It’s not designed to be shared quickly; and when it lands it usually asks for a great deal of marketing support to get it into the right hands.
The question we ask to recall this model is: “What’s my ONE Fast Lane project & what’s my ONE Slow Lane project?”
If it’s not a fast, easy answer, you have some hard but important decisions to make.
Because if you have more than one Slow Lane project, unless you have significant team and infrastructure around you, you will struggle to finish any of them.
And with too much in the Fast Lane, it’s easy to lose focus, produce without making an impact and run out of time to produce your Slow Lane work.
What makes the Fast Lane work?
The Fast Lane is about speed, taking easy action, consistency, or perhaps experimentation. These are projects where speed matters more than perfection. You’re testing ideas, you’re putting things into the world quickly. Lightweight projects or practices that happen frequently.
This is the author’s weekly newsletter. The musicians series of cover songs. The documentary filmmakers series of mini interviews. This is the project where you document your journey; for example, a daily short-form video diary documenting your creative work over 30 days. 30-second videos, lightly edited, posted for 30 days. Perfect example of a Fast Lane project.
The main goal isn’t creating the most awe-inspiring piece of work. It’s about committing to a project that has lots of little actions or moving parts that optimises for pressing publish, warts and all.
And I think little Fast Lane projects like this are great because they solve two problems with the same action; “how do I stay creative” and “how do I promote myself” can both be answered with one well designed Fast Lane project.
You can come up with a creative concept, do it for a period of time, and it gives you something that feeds your Slow Lane work. At the same time, it’s easily shareable and allows you to publish and build routine in the market.
This way you’re not stuck just trying to promote things all the time. You’ve got a creative project that you’re actually documenting, exploring and refining as you go. It helps you improve your workflows, refine your brand, story and much more.
But the best part is the entire time you’re just asking yourself “how do I make something simple today”.
The Slow Lane
The slow lane is where your bigger projects live. This is where your body of work goes. This is the musician’s EP or album. The Filmmaker’s documentary. The authors next book.
These are larger, deeper projects that are going to take significantly more time, resources, and care. They usually have multiple parts to them. They likely require team. They will always take longer than you plan and eat up more resource than you expect; they do this because the creative work, and your determination to make something great, will supersede and previous notion of what’s possible in a certain budget or timeframe.
The point is that you know what your most important deep work project is and you will do whatever it takes to allow that project to realise its ambition.
The slow lane is purposefully slow because of its size and gravity and the depth of the work; but also because of the potential it has for breakthrough.
Slow lane projects are the ones that are going to give you something to show up in the world with; they validate your creative existence and they give people a reason to stick around.
In a world that has increasingly optimised for Fast Lane projects, take note that work in the Slow Lane is not easily replicated, by humans or machine, and I believe will become increasingly valuable.
With that in mind, the creatives that choose to exist only in the Slow Lane, run the risk of never being seen.
Just as they always have co- existed, both types of creative projects will only become more important in the future.
This Deep Dive was first explored on our YouTube channel, you might like to go deeper there. Watch on YouTube →
The lines between creativity and marketing are blurry; and rightfully so.
It could be easy for some to mistake this as a way to have a creative project and a promotional campaign. But that’s not what this is.
I have always felt the best marketing for creative work is more creative work.
Things that are experiential, expressive, explorative and evolving.
Marketing, or work created with the objective of reaching a marketing goal, doesn’t design for those 4 things. Marketing is about formula, repetition, clarity and actions. So when creative people try to “do marketing” I think they (we) falter because we get lost in the formula and the outcomes.
Marketing is increasingly becoming creative, in all industries; but a significant amount of marketing today is simply providing a scientific formula for creativity that people can copy and replicate. So what do the masses do? They copy and replicate, until that idea isn’t creative anymore.
But creative people, with hard won creative skills, aren’t formulaic, we seek the 4 E’s I mentioned above. So when we create a great Fast Lane project that we can be proud of, we give ourselves a fighting chance at a; staying creative, but also b; creating something that can be seen by the public as marketing, but by us as creative output.
That’s a win = win in my book.
Both lanes need space to feed & breathe
I also want to highlight the value of these two lanes feeding each other. because one optimises for publishing, it helps displace the dreaded world of perfectionism.
On the other hand, our Slow Lane is vital to give us meaning and purpose and something bigger to work towards. Only producing 1x 500 word article or 1x 10 minute YouTube video per week for the next 30 years sounds like a great way to disincentivise the entire project.
The big project coming adds validity to your Fast Lane and makes it worth more. And when people get to experience both, they’ll feel the connection. And connection they have; creativity breeds creativity and I truly believe you need deep work and light work to go hand in hand to get the best of both worlds; without one, the other suffers.
The other risk is space; not having enough. If you’ve ever tried to get two or more major projects off the ground at the same time, you’ll know what I’m describing. I have found myself in this situation more times than I can count and it’s never ended well.
Recording a studio EP with a renowned producer, planning an interstate tour and major pr campaign whilst finishing a bachelor degree and starting a grassroots music festival and producing a TV show pilot all at once wasn’t a sound plan for sustainability.
Launching a community and conference series whilst managing and performing in multiple bands and getting a consulting business off the ground and developing a range of courses whilst attacking the conference speaking circuit = A recipe for burnout (and boy did burnout follow).
I used to conflate ambition with busyness. And hey, I have no regrets; my incessant determination to explore the creative industries was (and still is) insatiable. I’ve just learned that despite one’s appetite, there is only so much that can exist in either lane.
I really do think one project in each as a major focus is the only option. I’m not saying that’s easy. Most creative people I know have multiple passions and projects. As I write this, I know full well that by complete unfortunate chance I am likely to have a debut album ready for a major promotional campaign in 2027 alongside Futureative’s first 3x online conferences.
Which is why right now I’m making plans to strengthen and clarify the Fast Lane projects alongside the Slow Lane priorities so they have breathing space.
How will I go? Only time will tell, but I’m sure hoping that past failures, better delegation, clear boundaries, protecting personal and creative space and my own personal and our business goals here at Futureative will help make 2027 a sustainable & focused creative adventure.
How to implement Fast Lane, Slow Lane
The first action is to specifically name and identify the scope of both projects. If you think of “all your big projects” and “all your marketing” you will end up with an unfocused mess.
If you have a clear project outcome, with a defined scope, in both columns, you will have something to aim for and achieve.
At Futureative as we right this our Fast Lane is our Substack. We’re committed to a weekly article and exploring new content ideas, particularly on Instagram right now and largely in thanks to K.A.COOKE’s incredible work.
(If you want an example of the 4 E’s I mentioned earlier in action, check out some of their recent articles in The Practise & The RoundUp)
Our Slow Lane, is a series of online conferences; we had originally slated them for 2026, but time got away from us. We’ll 100% have these going live in 2027.
That’s it; our scope for both projects is evolving, but they are locked for 2026 and into 2027. We are focused on Front Row + our summits. If we can produce and evolve Front Row and keep pushing how that feeds our socials, and when we run our conferences, we’ll be in a place where our Fast Lane feeds our Slow Lane and our Slow Lane feeds our Fast Lane.
So, then what?
Well then you need to make sure your actions match your lanes. A project management app can help a lot. Ask Kaye, I’ve tried every app under the sun often many times over. Recently we’ve come back to Asana as it’s giving us a way to manage tasks, goals and a calendar, perfect for a significant event live a virtual conference. In the past, I’ve often preferred a simple pipeline in a Kanban board like Trello or Notion, moving tasks from left (inbox) to right (completion). This is great still for Fast Lane projects.
But you need to audit your workflow and audit your tasks.
How are you finding space for both lanes and are other non-priorities finding their way in? These are the questions to get relentless about.
You may have foundational work that needs to be completed in order to really make your Fast Lane & Slow Lane’s work. We have found that this year as we’ve been evolving our workflows, brand & content strategy. This is ok as long as this becomes its own Fast vs Slow project, with an end date.
I also think it’s important to know what lane you’re operating in each day. It’s highly unlikely that you will get to be in both lanes on a given day. And if you were, I would hope you can look back on your week and see you prioritised both. If one gets more focus than the other, working out why and how long that will happen for is key. In an ideal world I think it’s good to say: is this a fast lane day or a slow lane day? Is this a fast lane week or a slow lane week?
Switching between tasks always carries a cost, so having space for both, but seeing tham flow into each other is something to practice and watch out for.
How to make sure the model is working
Now there’s one last thing to consider and that is ongoing maintenance; with a such a simple idea in theory, it’s so easy for it to fall away. So here are a few common issues that I think so many creatives find themselves in and what to do instead:
Too many slow lane projects at once. If you’ve got an album and a tour and you’re recording a mini-documentary and you’re doing it mostly alone and you’ve never produced those projects before, well you might find that the weight of it all is going to pull the whole slow lane apart. If you can’t make meaningful progress in a 30, 60, or 90-day window on one part of your project, you’ve got too many things in the pipeline. Better to put a song out and do one gig over the next 90 days, then see if next time you can do a little more.
Audit your lanes regularly and be ruthless in cutting out busy work (even if it feels important).
Stuck in the fast lane only. If you’re just posting content and your fast lane is the same all the time, you’ll get sick of it, your audience will too. I think it’s a really easy way to burn out and lose connection with the purpose of the creative project itself. In my experience it’s not always the workload that burns us out. It’s the lack of connection to our creativity and therefore our vision.
Optimise for the 4 E’s we explored earlier, and check to make sure you’re not falling into a outdated formulaic “marketing for the sake of marketing”.
They don’t have to both always be on. You don’t have to right away know exactly what’s going to go into each lane. Sometimes it’s important to just step away and say “I need to do a bunch of research and discovery to work out what my slow lane project is, or if it’s something I really want to do.” So make research and discovery your Fast Lane activity. Poorly defined slow lane projects get stuck and stifle creativity. The same can be true if you’re overly optimising for marketing goals, where you might lose sight if the purpose. If you genuinely need to hide away for a while and make some slow, real work, do it, just make sure you have an end date. And vice versa, if you have a goal of experimenting publicly to reignite your creativity, do it, with a goal to ask the universe for your next Slow Lane project. It’ll show up as soon as you allow it to find you.
If you’re stalled, choose a lane and a timeframe, let yourself off the hook and go have fun again.
What do you think of Fast Lane, Slow Lane?
That’s it, that’s my simple mental model and a whole bunch of insight behind it; remember simple doesn’t = easy. This one requires constant reflection and refinement. But I hope the idea is something you can reflect on, make your own, or even just see how you might be able to tweak how you’re already doing something similar.
As always in these Deep Dive articles, I’ll leave you with a few final questions to reflect on. I’d love to hear your insights in how you are already doing something like this or how you might incorporate some ideas here.
So with that in mind, I’ll leave you with…
A few questions to reflect on:
Right now, do you know what ONE project is in your Fast Lane and your Slow Lane?
If you have multiple options, can you temporarily make one project a focal point in each lane, at the expense of your other projects?
Is your fast lane fuelling your creativity, or has it become repetitive marketing tasks that aren’t moving you forward?
Is your slow lane moving forward each week and if not what’s one thing you could do to reignite that momentum?
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