Posts Tagged ‘creativity’

7 Strategies for Making Time for Your Creative Pursuits

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

it’s my under­stand­ing that there are some peo­ple out there that still have a job and have fam­i­lies they like to spend time with. I’ve heard of such peo­ple. But seri­ously, once, I had a day job too. I do have a fam­ily I love to spend time with. So I know a lit­tle bit about how hard it is to find time to do the things you really love while spend­ing a lot of time doing the things you have to do to make every­thing else possible.

Making time is an inter­est­ing turn of phrase. It almost implies that if we just con­cen­trate, we’ll man­i­fest extra min­utes or hours out of noth­ing. The truth is, every day has 24 hours, 1,440 min­utes, 86400 sec­onds. Except for those weird days that don’t because of time changes. We’re not going to be mak­ing any more time. We have to make do with the time we have.

Being a suc­cess­ful cre­ative pro­fes­sional, whether you’re only doing it on the side of a big­ger gig, or you’re a full time free­lancer, requires some unique time man­age­ment. There are a mil­lion meth­ods out there, a mil­lion tools, all about how to man­age your time effec­tively. There’s a rather large pseudo-​​cult around “Getting Things Done.” I’ve exper­i­mented with it, but I didn’t find that it was the right man­age­ment sys­tem for me. I wanted some­thing a lit­tle more organic, and some­thing that takes into con­sid­er­a­tion that some of us have jobs where we’re actu­ally expected to be on email more than an hour a day.

I’ve yet to hit upon a par­tic­u­lar method­ol­ogy that works for me, but var­i­ous tips and tricks have col­lected in the recesses of my brain in the time I’ve been doing this. Here are some of the strate­gies that work for others:

  • The Early Riser: get up before any­one else in the house does, stum­ble to the com­puter, and work before you brain even fully comes online.
  • The Late Night Insomniac: wait until every­one else in the house has gone to bed, and then get your work done before stum­bling off to bed.
  • The Minutes Stealer: work a lit­tle here, a lit­tle there. Have a daily goal, and squeeze out what time you can in places. This kind of spo­radic approach.
  • The Lunch Breaker: most peo­ple with full time jobs get lunch breaks. An hour to yourself–if you don’t have errands that need to be run, and you can prac­tice your cre­ativ­ity with­out spe­cial instru­ments– is valu­able. It’s built right into your day. This some­times means giv­ing up a meal though, which I’m against on prin­ci­ple. You can’t sac­ri­fice your health for pro­duc­tiv­ity. They’re not inter­changable cur­ren­cies in the long run. You’ll get shorted even­tu­ally, some­times badly.
  • The Sacrificer: Like to play games with friends? Or do you like to watch a lot of TV? Sacrificers give up TV or video games in order to ded­i­cate that time to their art instead.
  • The Vacationer: some peo­ple will take time off from their job, hole up in a room, and pound out a project in a week or two weeks. Believe it or not, some peo­ple can write a novel in that time frame, but I sus­pect they do a lot of plan­ning and research ahead of time, and use the vaca­tion time purely for get­ting words on the page, ink on paper, paint on can­vas, etc.
  • The Unemployed: you have all the time in the world! Except now that you don’t have a job get­ting in the way, you have errands to run con­stantly. Errands mul­ti­ply in the absence of a job, it’s ridicu­lous. Being unem­ployed, so far in my expe­ri­ence, doesn’t make it any eas­ier. You still have to fol­low the basic strat­egy, which is this:

All strate­gies involve tak­ing time you already have and retask­ing it to your new purpose.

There may be some peo­ple whose lives are so absolutely full of jobs and fam­ily that they lit­er­ally can­not spare any time for their art, but I doubt there are many of them. Most of us have time some­where in our lives. It’s just a mat­ter of iden­ti­fy­ing the time and com­mit­ting it to the use you desire most.

Do you use a strat­egy to make time for your work that I haven’t men­tioned above? Share it with us in the comments.

Forcing Creativity

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Some will tell you that it’s not pos­si­ble to force cre­ativ­ity, or that the results from “forc­ing” cre­ativ­ity are sub-​​par to the work that “just hap­pens.”  I’m here to argue the opposite.

For some cre­ative folks, such as myself, sit­ting around wait­ing for inspi­ra­tion to strike, for the mood to be right, and for the stars to align is a recipe for get­ting jack shit done.  We will write off our lack of pro­duc­tiv­ity by say­ing some­thing like “I just don’t have any­thing to say” or “the muse isn’t with me today.”  I’ve used both of these excuses even recently to myself.

Hogwash.  The truth is, noth­ing moti­vates me more than a dead­line that has some teeth to it.  A good exam­ple was the Federations anthol­ogy.  I knew about it for months, and I had pid­dled around with a cou­ple of ideas.  Nothing really set­tled out, though.  The dead­line was lit­er­ally 48 hours away when, the idea of los­ing a good oppor­tu­nity to sell work to a favorite edi­tor hit me.  I didn’t want to miss out on an oppor­tu­nity like this, and that was before I knew which lumi­nar­ies of the field are in the book.   With that dri­ving me, I wrote “The Culture Archivist” and sent it to first read­ers.  Got it back, revised it again, and sent it to JJA.  It went through some edi­to­r­ial revi­sions, and then it was in the book.

The truth I must admit to myself is that I am a cre­atively lazy per­son at times.  I want it to be easy.  And it’s not.  It never gets any eas­ier.  You just get bet­ter at it.  But you still have to over­come the same iner­tia that was there when you first started out.  That takes a com­bi­na­tion of willpower, and if you can man­age it, discipline.

This holds true for every cre­ative endeavor  of mine, whether it be pho­tog­ra­phy, writ­ing, or design.  The hard­est part is just get­ting started.  And you have to force your­self to start.  Because if you don’t even get started, you’re not bloody well likely to fin­ish it, are you?

Force your­self to cre­ate using any means nec­es­sary. Some of these might work:

  • Ask your spouse or sig­nif­i­cant other to with­hold sex until you fin­ish.  Double motivator–you’ll want it done and your spouse will be really encouraging!
  • Go on a bread and water diet until you reach your ini­tial goal. (Do not do really do this, seri­ously.  Eat healthy.)
  • Use an inter­net block­ing pro­gram when you work on the com­puter.  These are usu­ally time based, but I sus­pect that 4 hours or so with­out the inter­net will get some­thing writ­ten and/​or made.
  • Instead of the stick, try the car­rot.  Promise your­self a $50 shop­ping spree if you fin­ish the work, or a night out for dinner.

External forces have always been the best moti­va­tor for me, but with many projects, there’s no exter­nal force.  As a free­lancer, I don’t have a boss beyond the client, and the client isn’t always moti­vated them­selves to fin­ish the project.  So it’s impor­tant for free­lancers to learn to self-​​motivate.

A desire to cre­ate some­thing great is often not enough moti­va­tion.  Sometimes, you have to prod your­self into get­ting started.  But once the ball is rolling, it tends to stay in motion for as long as you can afford the time.  For me, the sin­gle best thing about cre­at­ing things is los­ing myself in the process.  Time becomes mean­ing­less and my left-​​brain takes a nice long nap.  Call it what you will–the zone, in the moment, or some­thing else– it’s one of the great­est rewards of being a cre­ative per­son.  That plea­sur­able expe­ri­ence is almost rea­son enough to make things.  The fin­ished prod­uct is just a bonus sometimes.

What are some meth­ods you use to moti­vate your­self when you have the desire, but not the will?  How do you keep your­self on task?  Share your meth­ods with us.

Tomorrow, I will talk about strate­gies for mak­ing time to make things around a busy life.