For many of us, a large chunk of the creative process can involve just staring into space, waiting for our muse to send us a bolt from the blue. Trouble is, the better you get at your chosen art form, the less time you have to wait around for that pesky muse. As you begin to make a name for yourself in your chosen artistic field, you start to have more projects with deadlines, forcing your muse to meet your project’s expiration date.
Whether you are a writer burning the midnight oil to meet the deadline for a fiction contest, or a visual artist who’s been hired to create a mural for a public building, you become more accountable for your artistic output as you increase in skill. And with that added success comes added pressure, a need to still create great work without the luxury of navel gazing.
No matter what artistic field you specialize in, the following tips will help you to stay at your most productive when working on your creative pursuits.
1. Set Daily, Weekly, or Monthly Goals
Having deadlines isn’t always a bad thing. While it is impossible to force yourself to be creative, having a date in mind by which you need to complete your project will help your brain to focus on creative problem solving to bring your project to a close.
Pull out your calendar. Mark your due date. Work backwards from that due date to today’s date, and develop a progress checklist for each day. Also include end of the week goals and monthly progress goals as well, if you are planning that far in advance.
If you have a plan, a structured plan, it’s far easier to be productive every day when you are working on creative projects.
2. Keep a Journal/Sketchbook Handy
Never go anywhere without some method of recording flashes of inspiration, whether it is a journal, a sketchbook, or a note-taking app on your smartphone. This is helpful for recording ideas as they come to you, so that you don’t have to wrack your brains later and waste time “being creative” to come up with a new idea. You’ll be surprised just how much time you can save yourself by keeping an idea notebook for future projects.
3. Outline EVERYTHING
This sort of goes hand in hand with setting progress goals. And it probably seems a little weird to intentionally set up restrictions for creative projects. But actually, creating a detailed outline for your project keeps you focused on the task at hand, and minimizes the chance that you will distract yourself during a brainstorm. Open-ended creative projects have unlimited possibilities…and that level of freedom can sometimes prevent you from making progress in a single, unified direction.
4. Don’t Skip Meals
Between 20 and 30 percent of your daily caloric intake is used to regulate your brain functions. Skip a meal, and you’ll have to struggle to meet your creative goals. It can be hard, of course, to walk away from your studio when you’re in the zone, comfortably cruising through your creative project. So keep snacks on your studio or at your desk, whether its fresh fruit, trail mix, protein bars, or whatever.
5. Structure Your Brainstorming Sessions
In order to manage your time more effectively, setting clear goals is paramount during brainstorming sessions. It’s easy to start wool-gathering when thinking creatively, so setting goals like “I want to come up with 5 article ideas to pitch to my client in the next 20 minutes.”
In situtations like this, you might want to try time structuring tools like the Pomodoro Technique.
6. Master Your Tools
As our own Leon Ho covered previously, mastering your art form’s basic tools means that you can maximize your creative output.
“When I’m not competent enough with my tools, I can’t enter the flow state,” the post stated, with Leon quoting Steve Pavlina. “Despite using Adobe Photoshop for many years, I never invested the time to master its complex interface because I only used it intermittently. Consequently, I seldom achieve the flow state when using Photoshop because I spend too much time consciously thinking about the low-level action steps. This stunts my creativity because I remain stuck in my left brain instead of shifting into my right brain.”
How do you maximize your productivity when working on creative projects? Tell us in the comments below!
Great tips! I love #5: Structure Your Brainstorming Sessions. This is a hard one for me, because once I set aside time for brainstorming, but once I start, sometimes my mind just wanders and gets lost. I should really write down goals for each session. Thanks!
As a painter that’s typically at the mercy of the ebb and flow of massive creative energy from mood swings, I find that I have to take a somewhat different approach. I keep daily goals that I set on a nightly basis for both art and my freelance projects, allowing time for structure, breaks, daily exercise, food and a cat nap. I try to hold myself to this schedule in a way that fits how I feel for the day, and have simple weekly goals to meet and monthly goals in addition to all of the shows that I have to prepare for. Taking appropriate breaks and getting regular sleep really helps me. Sometimes I cannot sleep for days and marathon painting sessions help to wear me out as long as I remember to take breaks and stretch to not hurt my arm. A ten to fifteen minute nap once or twice during my work day keeps my mind sharp and my body refreshed. I have also found that having unproductive creative time keeps you with a steady flow of ideas. Using children’s mediums like fingerpainting, crayons, and (my personal favorite) glowy markers and paper under blacklight really helps to relieve the pressure of creating work that has difficult or dark subject matter rendered in infinitesimally intricate detail by allowing me to doodle in a non-productive way that my brain can’t interpret as serious production. Therefor, I have fun with the down time, am keeping my chops up, and I’m not pressuring myself to produce gallery-quality work every time I make art.
Some people would argue that skipping meals would put you in a more creative state – like when we were starving cavemen we’d be forced to be creative to find food and that somehow lives in us still today.
Heh.
Outlining everything probably really helps, if done consequently. I still need to work on that.
If I’m stuck on a creative project, I split myself up into my partial personalities and let them discuss the best course of action. I write down those dialogs in a document in Google Docs. Most of the time this method is quite interesting and inspiring.
[...] Creativity vs. Productivity: How to Make Progress When Making Art (lifehack.org) [...]
I like what you’ve said about not mastering your tools leads to you not flowing well enough. I know that in music it can often feel like something is flowing through you rather than out of you, and that’s exactly what you’re describing with photoshop there.
What I usually do, before I even try to get in the creative mood, I will remove anything that could be a distractions. I turn my cell phone off, use the restroom, have food ready, and have coffee and water in my studio with me. Then I can lock myself in, and have absolutely no distractions. At times, if a train is passing, or a family member is speaking loudly, I will put heavy-duty headphones on, similar to the kind drummers use to block out sound. Then without any distractions, I can really get into an artsy mood, and if I just can’t come up with any good ideas, I just relax, and similar to Esthetic Cataclysm, I do things little children would do. I play with the clay, not caring if it is something that is going to be sellable, just so long as I’m creating, it doesn’t matter. This really allows me to relax, and just create art at my own pace. The only tip above I struggle with, is #5. Sometimes I have a hard time staying focused, but I guess that comes naturally with ADD. :) Thanks for the great reminders! :)
~Pianolessongirl,
Dakota
Creativity versus Productivity. I think you can have both. You just need to have systems in place to keep you on track while creativity is flowing. I particularity like one writing technique. You sit down and write free flow for twenty minutes. Don’t go back change anything even typos. Just write. Then, let it sit for at least twenty four hours before you proofread it and make changes. Then write the next section and repeat. Creativity is flowing and you are producing content.
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