If you have a creative block you’d like some help with, tell us about it – details in the first article in the series.
If you’re not careful, one of the greatest blessings of the creative mindset can turn into a huge curse.
You see opportunities everywhere. Things you read, people you meet, places you go, experiences at work, at home, even in love – all of them are liable to spark a new idea for a great project or piece of work. You imagine how great the finished outcome will be, and enthusiastically start work. But if you keep doing this, day after day, you will inevitably find yourself starting more projects than you can possibly finish. It’s the creative equivalent of having ‘eyes bigger than your stomach’.
And if you have a thriving network of creative contacts, new ideas and opportunities will come to you every day, in your inbox, in meetings, text messages and casual conversations. Because of the way our mirror neurons work, it’s easy to get infected with other people’s enthusiasm (the invisible carrot); and you’re a nice person, so you hate to disappoint anyone by saying ‘no’ when they come to you with a proposal (the invisible stick).
All of which adds to a pile of projects on your desk. You feel stressed, overloaded, guilty, rushing around yet feeling that you’re getting nowhere. Something has to give. And that something is your creativity. Stress, guilt and anxiety take up the mental bandwidth that used to be reserved for imaginative thinking and focused execution. You may be cranking stuff out, but it’s less and less remarkable. It can get to the point where your commitments become so overwhelming that you procrastinate to avoid contemplating it – which only makes things worse.
This is the situation described by Mats, in response to our invitation to tell us about your creative blocks:
My problem is all about execution, I get too excited at first, involved in to many projects and then I get overloaded with things to do. This makes me procrastinate, do other less important things and many things doesn’t get completed. This in turn makes me more overloaded, feel bad about myself and the threshold to to do what needs to be done gets huger and huger like an evil circle.
Family responsibilities and many “must do’s” add to the problem.
Mats, you need to stop taking on so many projects.
That’s the answer, but it’s probably not much help. I’m sure you know it already. And well-meaning friends and colleagues have probably told you something similar. But if it were that easy, you’d have done it by now, right?
So here’s a four-step process to help you cut down your commitments and get back in the creative and productive zone.
1. Stop Saying Yes so Quickly
It sounds like you have plenty of natural enthusiasm, which is a terrific asset. But it’s leading you to say ‘yes’ too quickly and too often. And once you’ve said ‘yes’ to someone else, it’s hard to go back on your commitment.
So the first place to start is to make this your default response when anybody comes to you with a new project:
This sounds a great idea and I’m really excited about it. I think it’s got a lot of possibilities, but I’ll need to think it over before deciding whether I can take it on. Is it OK if I get back to you tomorrow?
It’s important to make this your default response even if you are 100% convinced that it’s something you want to do. If it really is such a great opportunity, and the other person really wants you on board, they can wait 24 hours. If they pressure you for an instant decision on a big commitment, I’d question their motives – and whether they’re going to be a great person to work with anyway.
This will give you a breathing space, an opportunity to reflect and consider the implications of taking on the project. Not to mention looking at your schedule and list of current projects (see below). ‘Sleeping on it’ is a great idea, because it allows your unconscious mind time to process all the details, and gives you the opportunity to take a fresh look at it tomorrow morning. In the cold light of day, you may notice a few niggling doubts or concerns that need to be ironed out – or which could even be a showstopper.
Apparently the Vikings used to make every important decision twice – once drunk and once sober. You may not need to go that far, but beware of making decisions when you’re intoxicated by enthusiasm. A little sober reflection could save you from a big hangover. 🙂
2. Know When Your Schedule Is Full
When you fill a glass with water, it’s obvious when it’s full, so it’s easy to stop before it overflows. If only it were so easy to see when a schedule is full.
Compared to a glass of water, our schedules are invisible. They are made up of bits of information that we can arrange in all kinds of ways – in a diary, calendar, to-do list, or those little scraps of paper that have fallen down behind your desk. We need to find ways of making the information more visible, and gauging when the diary is full.
Step back and look at the big picture of all of your commitments right now. Make a list of the projects you are currently committed to. For each project, estimate how many days work they are likely to take – then add a few on for good measure.
Now look at your diary or calendar for the next three months. Assume that you can only work on one project per day. Mark the deadlines. Now count up the number of days you have available to work on your projects. Compare the number with your estimates for each project. How do they match up?
- If you’ve got fewer ‘project days’ than ‘calendar days’ you may be doing okay – as long as you’ve got your estimates right. For the next three months, tick off the actual number of days you spend on each project, and use this information to get better at estimating.
- If you’ve got the same number of project days and calendar days you’re at full capacity and can’t take anything else on for the next three months.
- If you’ve got more project days than calendar days you need to make some changes. Your choices are: cancel some projects; renegotiate deadlines; get help; find ways to improve your productivity (that don’t include ‘working harder’!).
Whatever the outcome, you now know whether you have the capacity to take on any new projects. You know whether your glass is half empty, full, or overflowing.
If you value your creativity, beware of filling your glass all the way to the top. Outstanding creators typically leave some blank space in their schedule, to relax, recharge, do nothing and allow their minds to wander – which as we all know, is the time when inspiration is most likely to strike. And Google doesn’t let its engineers spend 20% of their time on their own projects out of the goodness of its heart – it knows that freedom, autonomy and downtime are essential for innovation.
3. Decide on Your Priorities
So much for your present capacity. But quantity isn’t quality – how can you know whether or not to take on future projects, whether they come from other people or your own imagination?
The key to good decision-making is knowing your real priorities. And a good place to start is psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s arranged in a pyramid with our basic biological needs at the bottom, because these need to be satisfied before you can move up the pyramid to the other needs (if you ain’t breathing, you ain’t doing much else).
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Once physiological and safety needs are taken care of, we are free to focus on social needs such as love, belonging, esteem and status. And once our physical and social needs are assured, argued Maslow, we have enough of a solid base to focus on self-actualisation, i.e. becoming all that we can be, by using our talents to the full, for sheer pleasure and achievement. Note that he placed creativity in this category.
The psychologists are still arguing over whether Maslow got it right with his pyramid, and it may not be an exact fit for you and your life. But what I want you to do is to draw your own hierarchy of needs, so that you can use it as the basis for future decisions.
- Draw a pyramid like Maslow’s, with different levels. Start at the bottom, by filling in the things you absolutely have to do for your career/business to survive. If you’re an employee, this includes all the non-negotiable stuff in your contract. If you’re a freelancer or entrepreneur, this is the stuff that pays the bills. Neglect it at your peril!
- Now fill in the very top of the pyramid – this is the stuff you would do if you won the proverbial lottery, i.e. if you had all the money you needed and could spend your days doing exactly what you pleased.
- Now fill in the levels in between – these represent the finer grades of ‘stuff I have to do’ versus ‘stuff I love to do’. You might also want to include things that may not bring you money, but will boost your network and social status – stuff like writing a blog, speaking at a public event, attending a conference or helping out in your professional community.
Your pyramid shows you your priorities. Pin it up above your desk, make it your screensaver or get it printed on your duvet – whatever will help to keep it front of mind for you for the next few weeks, until it’s burned into your memory.
I am not going to tell you to start at the bottom and work your way up. That may sound a sensible option, but if you take it too literally you’ll end up spending all your time on grunt work and none on the stuff you really enjoy. And obviously you should be aware of starting at the top of the pyramid and working your way down (unless you find the ‘starving artist’ lifestyle attractive :-)).
Have another look at your diary. Promise yourself that over the course of the next three months, you will give yourself a reasonable balance between all the different levels of your pyramid. You’ll be doing everything you need to to fulfil your responsibilities, keep everyone happy and keep the cash rolling in. And you’ll also be making time to work on your own pet projects, as well as other things that are both personally and professionally rewarding.
No, you won’t be able to do a bit of everything every day. Some days, you just have to put your head down and crank things out, whether you like them or not. But try to visit every level of your pyramid at least once a week. That should make every week more creative, productive – and enjoyable.
4. Start Saying ‘No’
OK, from the first three steps in this process, you now know how to:
- avoid committing to new projects too quickly
- estimate whether you have the capacity to take on anything new
- decide whether a new opportunity is a good fit with your priorities and other commitments
That should save you from filling up your schedule with projects you dream up yourself. But what about all those proposals and demands from other people? How can you stop committing to more than you can deliver?
Well firstly, 1-3 will help you decide whether the other person’s idea is something you want to do. It will give you the time to think it over, see how much time you have available and whether it’s aligned with your own priorities. So when you say ‘yes’ you can say it confidently, knowing you will keep your promises.
But what if the answer you come up with is ‘no’? How can you tell that to the other person without disappointing them or annoying them?
The short answer is that you can’t guarantee that they won’t react badly. Other people are outside of your control, that’s what makes them so annoying interesting. Sometimes they’ll fly off the handle or act hurt, or try to guilt you into doing stuff you really know you shouldn’t. Sometimes you just have to stand there and take it. Then say “I’m sorry, but the answer’s still no”. And get back on your real work.
Sometimes you have to risk looking ‘selfish’ in the short term in order to do the things that make the most difference in the long term.
If you’re worried about disappointing people, then it’s better to disappoint them a little bit up front by saying ‘no’, than to disappoint them a lot later on by not delivering on your word.
But a lot of the time, it’s not as bad as that. Since I started taking this approach, I’ve often been pleasantly surprised by people reacting positively, and telling me they respect my decision.
And if you weigh up all those little disappointments against the big satisfaction you deliver each time you complete a task on schedule and over expectations, you’ll probably find the balance tipping in your favour.
But what about the ‘family commitments’ I mentioned?”
Don’t worry, I’ve not forgotten them. For commitments to adult family members, have a look at the earlier piece in this series, How to Find Time for Creative Work.
If there are children involved, they are a special case – which we’re going to address later in the Creative Blocks series …
Over to You
Have you ever found yourself overloaded by taking on too many projects? What did you do?
Can you see this four step process helping you?
What advice can you offer Mats?
About the Author: Mark McGuinness is a creative coach with over 15 years’ experience of helping people get past their creative blocks and into the creative zone. For a FREE 26-week creative career guide, sign up for Mark’s course The Creative Pathfinder.
It happens to me all the time, all this information overload and projects that I want to be working on but get caught up in the minute details.
It’s exactly what you said. You get really excited about a new project so you rush into it because it’s fresh but the consequence is that you put your current projects on the backburner.
Now that you’re working on a new project the old one starts to become stale so you don’t really want to work on it anymore.
I’ve been trying to cut back on the projects I’m working on at one time by simply telling people I’m too busy to start another.
I really like the idea of letting the idea develop instead of jumping right into it. I’ve had a ton of great ideas that I wanted to rush into but letting them sit I’d realize some of them wouldn’t pan out how I envisioned them to be.
It all comes down to self control. Oddly enough, the more you restrict yourself on your future projects, the more creativity you can place on the current ones.
“Because of the way our mirror neurons work, it’s easy to get infected with other people’s enthusiasm”
I never knew about that, but I can completely relate. If someone else is hype about a project, it tends to get me excited. But that feeling can’t take me along to complete the project like I should.
I wrote a similar post from the perspective of entertainment industry professionals:
3 Questions to Ask Before Working For Free
http://www.careergreenlight.com/working-for-free/
Great post Mark. I find that often the person making us take on too many projects is… us, ourselves — as creatives, we’re all subject to ‘ideaphoria’ — a high rate of ideas. As you so rightly say, time & priorities usually knock some of them off want-to-do-list. A useful question I encourage my students to ask when an idea hits is: ‘can I make a unique contribution here?’ If somebody else can do it just as well as you, then let it go. Stay close to what the corporates like to call your ‘core competencies’, the distinct characteristics of your particular talent.
Sonas,
Orna
Two key points strike me as I read this description.
1) You may have the same personality type that I have, namely, you’re a “scanner”.
Scanners get very excited and very involved at the start of a project because its novel and therefore interesting.
But as they do more and more research and realise that quite quickly they’ve virtually “covered all the ground” and understand the problem really well, then their interest tends to wain.
And they’re now on the lookout for the next project that they can throw themselves (briefly) into.
Many scanners have real guilt feelings and anxiety about their “failure to complete” but I’m sorry to say, but that’s just the way we’re built.
We get excited and enthusiastic quickly, but when we get quite quickly to the stage where we can see the entire scope of the problem, and can enunciate what needs to be done to complete the project, then we’re keen to move onto the next thing.
You get loads of value at the front end, but you better hand the project on to a non-scanner plodder to do the completion.
The sccanner can explain what needs to be done to the plodder – he just can’t be bothered to do it himself as his interest is waning, now that he’s already seen the solution in his mind.
Thanks to the author Barbara Sher who brought heartfelt relief to thousands of sufferers worldwide first by explaining that you’re not the only person in the world who feels “completion failure anxiety”.
Secondly, she gives you permission to get excited early on, and then gives you permission to happily drop it when you lose interest.
Thirdly, she suggests some really simple ways to cope with completion failure anxiety – namely buy loads of box files and every new project you get interested in you label and then fill a new box file with the papers, and then you celebrate the incredible number of projects that have fired you up – you point to the wall full of box files and smile contentedly – you don’t beat yourself up because none was taken ploddingly to the absolute conclusion.
And there are many types of scanner – I’m a “cyclical” scanner so I’ll lose interest for, say, six months then I’ll glance the spine of one of the box files and then dive in again re-invigorated, wondering how far I had got last time, and what new thoughts I have now for taking the project further.
There are “serial” scanners; there are “keep all the plates spinning” scanners – there are many types.
And Barbara recommends careers or jobs that you might find more suited to your particular scanner personality.
And she holds holiday courses on some Mediterranean island to help you work through your scanner issues – see her website at:
http://www.barbarasher.com/
I preferred the earlier title of her book that helps scanners, which was:
“What Do I Do When I Want To Do Everything : a revolutionary programme for doing everything that you love”
but her publisher has given it a new title, which I’m sorry but I don’t know.
2) Have you heard of “GTD” – Getting Things Done. Its a great way to organise your whole life, and part of it involves creating a folder called “Projects I’ll do sometime in the future”.
I think throwing a piece of paper about each interesting but non-priority project in there is a great way to keep a tentative hold on things that interest you, but which realistically you’re never going to get around to doing anytime soon.
So my advice would be “get the non-urgent stuff off your desk so you can focus on what’s important, and only on that number of projects that can realistically be dealt with in the time available”. If you have to dump tons of stuff to the “won’t be started, let alone completed, anytime soon” folder, then put them there.
Be ruthless.
If the boss is screaming for 9 projects to be completed in 2 weeks and you know that only 3 can be achieved by then, take 9 folders into your boss and say “Excuse me, Sir, which 3 would you like completed in 2 weeks time?” Let him decide. After all, he’s a leader and he’s paid more than you – so who’s the best person to choose?
Using that “sometime later but probably never” folder, means you’ve filed it realistically, its off your desk, there is a memory held in that folder, but really you should be focussing on the more pressing stuff that have completion dates loaming.
Unfortunately “Getting things done” is a title adopted by many authors, but you can find the true guru of GTD by typing those 3 letters into the Google search box and his entry will come out on top – its David Allen at http://www.davidco.com
Get the book – adopt his system and your life will be a breeze.
That’s no idle claim – I’ve seen the life-changing, life-affirming testimonials from people who were previously “all at sea” but who are now calm and completely relaxed although their schedule and workload hasn’t reduced one little bit. They just now have a system that they know is effective aand reliable and which stops them getting anxious that something forgotten or unintentionally overlooked is going to trip them up tomorrow, or next week, or sometime.
Life change is not achieved, of course, by my single suggestion of the “Do sometime later maybe never” folder – that’s just a small part of the overall schema, but potentially useful in the particular scenario outlined above.
As Daffy Duck says: “That’s all, folks!”
END
@ Murlu – Glad it resonated for you, thanks for sharing your experience.
“It all comes down to self control.” – Yes AND a lot of the self-control is in the short-term. Once you’ve thought it through and decided to fully commit to a new project, you can really let rip. 🙂
@ Hashim – Great post, thanks for sharing. Another example of why it pays to really think things through at the beginning, before you commit.
@ Orna – Thanks for introducing me to ‘ideaphoria’! It’s the kind of medical condition that should exist, even if it didn’t, so it’s great to find out it does. 🙂
@ White Shark
1. Excellent point about partnering with people with complementary skills. That’s one of the core skills we recommend, especially if you can find someone who loves the jobs you hate. 🙂
2. I’ve got a lot of value out of parts of GTD, and the ‘Someday/Maybe’ folder is a nice idea. However, I’m a little sceptical about the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all system out there that will transform our lives.
Great post! I get caught in so many of these things – probably all of them at some point or another. I got burnt out the first time around (creating an e-magazine, Multilingual Living Magazine) and now after a break and putting my efforts into the website of things (MultilingualLiving.com). But boy, I have to really remind myself to take it one step at a time. As Mats said: I get really excited by it all, say “yes” to too many projects and then get exhausted.
This 4-step process is a great way for me to assess each day, project, task, etc.
Thanks!
Corey
Thanks Corey, hope it will be useful. Your site looks fascinating btw.