Scheduling creativity? Is that really a thing?
The creativity myth leads us to believe that inspiration comes in random bursts. And if you try to force The Muse, you will fail. The thought of scheduling creative time seems absurd to those who buy into this myth.
There are certainly moments of random creative inspiration. That’s usually where new ideas pop up. For me, this usually happens when I’m falling asleep. Or, even better, in the middle of a formal event, like a funeral. (Not the best time to pull out a notepad to start scribbling ideas.)
If your creative pursuits involve occasional projects as a fun hobby, this random burst method probably works well enough. When you get an idea for a project, you can set aside a few hours to work on that one idea.
But what about those who want to build a creative business or develop a more professional portfolio of artwork and writing?
The work-when-you-feel-inspired method isn’t going to cut it. If you wait for those creative bursts, building up that portfolio will take forever.
So how can you work on writing, art, and innovative business plans when you don’t feel creative?
WHY SCHEDULE CREATIVE TIME?
Creativity is skill that takes practice. While you might have innate creative instincts, in order to develop technical skills as a writer, musician, or entrepreneur, you have to work at it. The more you work at it, the more you learn to switch on those skills. Setting aside regularly scheduled time might require a bit of a shift in mindset. But by scheduling time for creative work, you develop your skills and make faster progress.
Here are some of the most important reasons to start scheduling regular time for working on your creative projects.
1. Train Your Brain
Your brain is a muscle. And like all your muscles, if you spend time training them, those muscles grow and get stronger. The same is true for your brain. The more you use it for creative work, the stronger those creative instincts become.
By scheduling regular creative time, your brain adapts to what it should be doing during that time. The more practice you have at sitting down at the same time, your brain learns that at that time of day, it is supposed to tap into creative thought. Over time, when you sit down at your scheduled time, your brain switches on those creative skills because it has learned to expect that time is dedicated to creative work.
2. Creativity Breeds Creativity
In addition to training your brain for creative work at a specific time, the brain also learns to develop itself. Just like any skill, the more you do something, the better you get at it. The same is true for creative work.
The more time you spend working on your creative projects, the more you learn about technique, new methods, and effective use of time. You learn to build on the previous day’s ideas. As a result, feeling blocked, or uninspired, happens a lot less. This ensures your scheduled creative time is more productive than the burst method.
3. Limits Distractions
Just as a manager in a traditional office will schedule meeting times, scheduled creative time helps you prepare for certain projects and prevents interruptions. A traditional meeting means you, or a team, move to a specified area at a specified time to discus a specified agenda.
With creative time, if you only work on your projects when you have time or when you feel inspired, it’s too easy to get interrupted by other things. Family issues, phone calls, and To-Do lists get in the way of your creative thinking. If you make an appointment with yourself, and tell others that is your time to work, you are less likely to be distracted by outside influences. That time becomes just like any meeting where you are only allowed to focus on one thing – your creative work. Unless there’s a true emergency, that scheduled time should be reserved for your creative projects.
4. Projects Take Longer Than Expected
If you normally work on a project-by-project basis, how many times have you thought you could get something done in a hour, only to find out it took five? Often, we underestimate the amount of time a creative project will take. If you only set aside a block of time for a specific project, you might find yourself running out of time before the project is done.
By scheduling regular time, your consistently work towards completing projects. If you have extra time, you can always work a little more. But by having that set time, you make progress towards your creative goals on a regular basis. And, you don’t feel defeated if something isn’t finished because you know you have your scheduled time again the next day.
5. Batch Projects
Creative work comes in waves. Sometimes you need to devote time to a large project because of an upcoming deadline. Other times, you have several smaller things that need to be finished. Scheduling creative time allows you flexibility to work on whatever project needs the most attention.
For those times when smaller projects take priority, scheduled creative time allows you to batch projects. Batching projects is just like baking a batch of cookies. You cook more than one cookie at a time. So batching creative work means you finish more than one project in a setting.
Batching works well for things like blog posts, social media updates for your business, or any smaller projects that don’t require as much research, documentation, or detail. By batching smaller projects during your scheduled creative time, you have more time on other days to focus on the larger projects. You can knock out four blog posts in a couple hours. Then you can use time on other days for bigger projects.
Being creative doesn’t mean you have to wait until inspiration strikes. If you do wait, it’s going to take you a long time to get much accomplished. By scheduling time for your creative work, you train yourself to be creative on demand.
While you’ll still have moments where you can’t seem to come up with the right words or figure out a plan for a new business strategy, regularly scheduled time to work on your creative projects strengthens your creative skills, and allows you to make consistent progress.
*Do you have a set time you can devote to creative projects? If not, how might trying a scheduled time for a week change your creative process?**
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