How to Start a Sprint: The Box, the Spine, and the Bridge

Hey 🙂

We’re in week one of a new sprint. It’s Wednesday morning, and this feels like the right time to write this down — not just because we’re in it right now, but because I want to document some thinking that’s been sharpened recently by reading Twyla Tharp’s book, The Creative Habit.

Three things stood out to me. And when I’m honest about it, these aren’t entirely new ideas for me — I sort of do all three of them already. But reading Tharp put clearer language to them, and that matters. When you can name something, you can do it more deliberately.

So here are three things I’m leaning into at the start of this sprint.

The Box

Twyla Tharp is a choreographer. High-stakes, multi-million dollar projects. And when she starts a new one, she starts with a box — literally a cardboard box from a stationery store. Everything goes in it. Inspiration, research, music references, articles, artifacts — what she calls “scratching.” The box is the home of the project.

For me, that translates directly into a folder.

When a new project starts, the first move is to open a new board in Fizzy, start dropping in cards for the things we probably need to tackle, and create a new folder in Google Docs inside my Projects folder — that’s The PARA Method at work. Everything related to that project lives there. And it’s bookmarked in my Chrome PARA folder so I can get to it in seconds.

This sounds simple, and it is. But the reason it matters is that as you accumulate sprints — and if you’re running six-week sprints, you could have eight of them in a year — that’s a lot of projects, a lot of documents, a lot of scratching. Knowing where everything is, being able to find it instantly, is not a small thing. It’s foundational.

The box gives the project a home. Before you do anything else, give your project a home.

The Spine

The second idea from Tharp is that every project has a spine. Her use of the word is about having something to come back to — a backbone that helps the project stand up, and that tells you when it’s drifting, going dark, going off track, or getting lost.

The way I interpret that is: before you get into the work, write about the project first.

That first Google Doc I open for a new project isn’t a to-do list or a plan.

It’s more like a short piece of writing that answers: Why are we doing this? What problem are we trying to solve? Why does it matter? Why now? What are we trying to change or test? What kind of result do we want to see?

And just as importantly — what is this project, and what is it not? Because without constraints, projects grow arms and legs. That’s how things spiral.

If you’ve got a team, this matters even more. You want to be able to hand someone that document and have them catch the vision — understand what you’re actually going for, not just the tasks they’ve been assigned.

I’ll be honest: I’ve generally been pretty good at this. But reading Tharp made me want to be much more deliberate about it. Every project needs a spine. Not just the big ones.

The Bridge

The third idea isn’t from Tharp directly — she references it, and it’s often attributed to Hemingway. The idea is this: Hemingway would stop writing in the middle of a sentence. Halfway through a thought, a chapter, an idea. So that when he came back the next morning, he wasn’t starting with a blank page.
The thread had already been pulled. He could just pick it up.

That’s the bridge.

I’ve been doing this more and more deliberately, and it works. Some days you get to the end of the afternoon and there’s not really enough time to get deep into something. The temptation is to call it a day. But what I try to do instead is start something — a draft, a section, a Claude — and leave it unfinished. Come back to it tomorrow.

The tension is being okay with things left undone. And I know that’s uncomfortable for some people. But I’d genuinely challenge you to test your tolerance for it. Deliberately start things you can’t finish today. Sit with it overnight. You might find your brain keeps working on it, and you come back in the morning with better ideas than you would have had if you’d just waited to start fresh.

Julia and I talk about this on our daily syncs all the time — what does progress look like today? How do we move this along? I’m pretty happy as long as things are moving. Stuck is fine to diagnose. But momentum is the goal, and the bridge is one of the ways you keep it.

So that’s the three: the box, the spine, and the bridge.

Start your project with a home. Give it a backbone. And build a bridge to tomorrow.

None of these ideas are complicated. But I think they’re especially valuable right now, at the start of a sprint, when everything feels like it’s beginning at once and it’s easy for things to get messy fast. These three things help you come out of the blocks with some clarity and some structure — and still feel like you.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

🗣️👀

Chris.