Thirty Projects, One Pair of Dice: What Happened When Chance Ran My Studio for a Month

Here's the setup: I have a bad habit of choosing. I choose what to work on, then I second-guess the choice, then I research alternatives, then I check what other people are making, then it's 11 p.m. and I've produced nothing but browser tabs. Choice, it turns out, was my biggest creative bottleneck.

So for one month, I took choice off the table. I wrote thirty possible projects on index cards, numbered a six-sided die's worth of decision rules, and every morning I rolled. Whatever came up, that's what I made that day. No vetoes. No trades. No "actually, I'm not feeling the blues song today."

The List (A Greatest Hits of My Unfinished Brain)

The thirty projects ranged from reasonable to absurd. Write a twelve-bar blues song about my landlord. Paint the mailboxes in my apartment complex in colors the HOA did not approve. Film a four-minute review of a parking lot — just a parking lot, treated with the gravitas of a Criterion release. Record a spoken-word piece using only sentences overheard at a grocery store. Make a zine about a fictional roadside attraction. Write a letter to my ten-year-old self using only product reviews found on Amazon.

The rules were simple. One project per day. Thirty to sixty minutes minimum. The work had to be finished, even if finishing meant declaring it done while quietly knowing it wasn't. And crucially: everything got posted publicly. No vault of shame. If the dice said parking lot review, the internet got a parking lot review.

Week One: The Honeymoon of Not Deciding

The first thing I noticed was how fast mornings became. Normally my creative routine is a negotiation — forty minutes of dithering disguised as "planning." With the dice, I rolled, I winced or cheered, and I started. There's something almost meditative about a decision you had no hand in. You can't argue with a die. It doesn't care about your feelings, and weirdly, that's freeing.

Day four gave me the mailboxes. I painted them sunset orange and teal with the confidence of a man who cannot be blamed, because the dice made me do it. A neighbor asked if I'd lost my mind. I said yes, essentially, and pointed at the index cards. He helped with the second coat.

The Middle: Where Motivation Goes to Be Tested

Week two is where the experiment earned its keep. The dice don't know your energy levels. Day eleven was a blues song, and I hadn't written music since high school garage band trauma. I sat there with a borrowed guitar, three chords, and lyrics that rhymed "rent" with "spent" with "meant." It was objectively rough. It was also, I realized halfway through, the first song I'd finished in six years.

That's the dirty secret of creative choice: sometimes it's not taste holding you back, it's the illusion that you need to feel ready. The dice don't ask if you feel ready. They clatter across the table and hand you a parking lot.

The Surprise Winner

Here's what I didn't expect: the piece I'm proudest of this entire year came from roll seventeen. A four-minute video review of the parking lot behind a strip mall in Ohio — proper drone shots (well, a phone tied to a broom handle), a dramatic voiceover, a slow zoom on a shopping cart. I treated that asphalt like it was Monument Valley. People shared it. People felt something about a parking lot. I've spent months polishing projects I chose carefully, and a random roll about parking infrastructure outperformed all of them.

Why? I think it's because when the dice choose, you stop performing seriousness. The stakes drop. And low stakes, it turns out, are where the weird, alive stuff hides.

What I'd Tell You to Steal From This

You don't need to surrender a month. Try a week. Write ten projects, number them one through ten, and roll two dice (reroll doubles or add them, I'm not your parole officer). The point isn't the randomness — it's the removal of the negotiation. Every minute you spend choosing is a minute you're not making, and for a lot of us, choosing is just fear wearing a beret.

The dice are back in the junk drawer now. But the list of thirty is still pinned above my desk, and on the days my brain refuses to pick a lane, I let a plastic cube pick it for me. It has never once suggested I do more research first. There's a lesson in there somewhere.