Finding your Creative Rhythm

Excerpts from The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry.

The ability to respond creatively at a moment’s notice in today’s fast-pace work environment is probably one of the most relevant skills a creative can have.

And by “creative”, I mean you; if everyday you solve problems, innovate, develop systems, design things, write, think or strategize.

For traditional-job creatives, because the value of our work is basically in creating and executing amazing ideas, the pressure to come with our A-game everyday becomes very real. And because most creatives have no idea exactly what fuels their creativity, we’re in a game of luck most times.

The Economics of Creative Work

Because we really don’t know the processes and things that inspire us on our most productive days, we compensate by an always on approach, sacrificing both brilliant work and our physical & mental health with time.

In his book “The Accidental Creative”, Todd Henry presents a matrix for producing brilliant work sustainably:

Creatives conscious of their work-life balance (healthy), producing amazing work (brilliant) once in a while (not prolific) will quickly gain a reputation for being unreliable.

Creatives conscious of their work-life balance (healthy), meeting deadlines frequently (prolific), but failing to produce brilliant work will soon reach a career roadblock.

And creatives that produce great work (brilliant) regularly and consistently (prolific) at the expense of their health (eg. most of us) are at the risk of burnout. Most of us have made this mountain our home.

If we are to create a creative process that is sustainable, it is important that we take a closer look at what we currently do and are willing to be a bit more purposeful in how we approach our creative process.

Finding your Rhythm

To live is to be musical, starting with the blood dancing in your veins. Everything living has a rhythm. Do you feel your music?

— Michael Jackson

Todd Henry in his bestselling book “The Accidental Creative: How to be Brilliant in a Moment’s Notice”, posits that our creative capacity is influenced majorly by five factors and each of us have the capacity to create a rhythm totally unique to us based on how we structure this five things:

Focus

Of course, the first factor would be Focus. The average creative is juggling a thousand & one ideas in their minds on a slow day. Couple that with multiple project stakeholders, unclear project directions and social media, its no wonder we’re often confused on what we’re really trying to do.

Lack of clarity is the recipe for ineffective work.

In order to create effectively, it is important to build our focus. And in his book, Todd Henry presents many methods that I’ve classified into two broad categories: clarifying objectives and prioritizing tasks.

Clarifying objectives involves understanding project goal and stakeholder needs, outlining and clumping tasks. These techniques help give you direction to effectively channel creative output.

Prioritizing tasks involves shaving off less important tasks from your schedule and prioritizing commitments. Many top performers like Tim Ferriss & Todd Henry advise outlining 3 major goals to accomplish each day.

Another thing that helps is turning off notifications and having high-focus periods. Taking deep dives in intervals using things like the Promodo technique allow you focus energy into short time periods.

Pauses to scroll through Twitter updates for 5 minutes.

Relationships

True to the stereotype, many creatively gifted people tend to display a natural tendency toward introversion as creative work often involves getting lost in the process of moving big conceptual rocks and developing exciting and elaborate new systems, strategies, and concepts. However, one of the most powerful sources of creative inspiration is other people. Purposefully engage with a community of people that lead you to creative insight.

Consciously investing in healthy relationships and communities yields long-term benefits for everyone involved and can be specifically beneficial in helping you to see the world from new perspectives, opening new doors of creative insight and helping you stay inspired.

In finding our creative communities, three things to look out for are: People who inspire you. People who challenge you to be better. People who you can be 100% authentic with.

And if you can’t find that circle of friends, might be a good time to start one.

Energy

Managing energy should be as important as its much more famous cousin: time management.

This is because even though we’re able to draw out a schedule to utilize every single minute within the day, we all still have periods within the day that are high-energy for us and other periods are less productive. Good practice would be that we take time to discover our natural high-energy periods and maximize them for creative work while shifting more mundane responsibilities to low-energy periods.

As more and more companies embrace flexible working hours, it allows creatives better structure their work for times when they can be most productive, however for traditional workers, there is only so much control you have over your time. Still Todd Henry encourages us all to:

Identify our peak periods and plan around them

Identify our Red zone activities (activities that drain all our energy) and see how we can reduce their reoccurrence.

Eliminate less effective activities that we do as time-fillers.

Stimuli

“Garbage in, garbage out” was my grade school’s teacher’s favoutite go-to phrase for explain how input and output worked on computers.

And just how computers can only work with the data that they have access to, the quality of the output of any process is dependent on the quality of its inputs. This holds true for the creative process to.

Despite their importance, remarkably few people are intentional about the kinds of stimuli they absorb on a day-to-day basis. Todd recommends many techniques for increasing your creative palate that I broadly classified into two:

Curating: Highlighting areas you want to improve on and creating study plans around it. Curating resources and experiences that inspire you.

Exploring: Stepping out of your comfort zone to have new experiences.

If you want to regularly generate brilliant ideas, you must be purposeful about what you are putting into your head.

Hours

Finally, Time is the currency of productivity, and how you handle it will ultimately determine your success or failure. Heavy

But in order to really thrive, we must shift away from our collective obsession of squeezing every second out of every single minute and instead focus of effectiveness. You need to ensure that the practices that truly make you a more effective creator are making it onto your calendar.

Plan your weeks around what keeps you inspired. Leave yourself free time that let’s your mind wander. Have time that just for you to create, without the pressure of selling or external validation.

To deliver the right ideas consistently, we must begin the process far upstream from when you get the idea.

Final Thoughts

Discovering the things that inspire our greatest works will definitely require taking time to introspect, experiment and refine. It won’t be a one-week sprint. But it’d be a necessary investment, because if we all can hone into and give time to the things that keep us creative, then our chances of regularly putting out exceptional work radically increase.

And the more high-performing creatives there are, the merrier.

What area struck you the most? Are there any methods you’ve applied that help you stay consistently inspired? Drop a comment. I’ll reply every single one.