Creative Efficiency: The Secret to Mastering Time and Focus as an Artist

The Artist’s Unique Challenge

As creatives it’s easy to feel like we’re always behind.

We’re never doing everything we could. Between client work, promoting our stuff, industry relationship management, collaboration, free flow creativity sessions, personal projects, and practicing and refining our skills, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

On top of that, we face a very unique challenge. We have to be creative and free flowing where having a clear goal is counterproductive, and also be able to sit down and get stuff done.

In other words, we have to be able to operate on two very different modalities:

1. Narrowed focus: Zeroing in on a task that needs to be completed, thereby focusing all of our attention on this one task to get it done. This is what moves the needle and helps us reach our goals.

2. Expanded focus: Exploring different ideas and being open minded and not afraid to try new things. While our exploration may be rooted in guidelines and conventions, we’re not bound by them. Not having any particular goals other than just seeing what happens and following tangents that we discover. This is what leads to the greatest ideas.

If you just slave away at a creative project and go through the motions to get it done, it will lack originality, be uninspired, and often very boring.

It’s very clear when we experience a great creative piece that the creator was inspired and uninhibited by conventions and rules. Free flow and expanded focus is critical for artists and creatives - how else are you going to get new ideas and novel perspectives?

On the other hand, if we don’t know how to sit down and get a task done, we’re never going to finish anything, we won’t be able to deliver on time, and no one is ever going to experience our creations. We need to have a system to take those ideas we got from our free flow sessions, narrow in on them, and bring them to life.

It creates all sorts of problems when we try to mix these two modalities.

If you are at a point in the project that calls for expanded focus and you’re trying to “get it done” it can be detrimental. I’m sure you’ve experienced this.

You’re trying to come up with a melody, and you only have two hours to write, and if you don’t get it right in the next 15 minutes, you’re not going to have time to develop it further today.

You’re sitting down at your desk to write a post on X and nothing is coming to mind. Maybe you’ve been working all day, and you just need to get this done, so you can check off that box and go to bed.

You’re trying to come up with some exciting B-roll for a video, but all you can think of is the old boring close up shots of leaves and flowers that’s been done a million times.

In other words, you’re facing the dreaded monster of Writer’s Block (*gasp*).

The reason this happens is because of what we discussed above. You’re trying to narrow your focus in a situation that requires you expand it.

You’re not going to think outside the box by looking closer at it.

The way out of this is to have the idea ready to go when you sit down.

Always have a folder full of ideas that are just ready for further development when you need it.

It’s like having a tree full of fruit ready to plucked in your backyard.

But to have that tree we need to plant the seed and nurture it, so the fruit is ready when we need it.

I have built up my own tree so now I have the opposite problem of writer’s block: Too many exciting ideas that I want to work on, and now I can’t choose!

At the time of writing this, I have longform content ideas for the next 10 weeks, 200+ shortform content ideas, as well as three music album concepts all mapped out and waiting to be executed. And I’m growing the tree every day.

I don’t say this to brag, but to show you how easy it can be to come up with ideas when you master narrowed and expanded focus.

How do you plant and nurture your own tree? The first step is to recognize peak creative times and map your unique creative flow, which we’ll talk about next.

Mapping Your Creative Flow

To take advantage of this you must first realize that there are times where you feel more productive than others.

It’s different for everyone exactly when that is and you need to discover what works for you.

For some people it’s the first two hours in the morning of each day.

For others, it works better to have two-three days in a row in flow, and then a couple days of narrowed focus.

Obviously, it also depends on all the other life stuff we each have going on.

So you need to identify how your creative flow peaks and reserve your idea generation sessions for these times. And there’s only one way to do it.

Experiment with different schedules. Take advantage of when you feel creative and write down as many ideas as you can, however that looks for you, depending on your art.

You will know when you’re tapped out. But try to stay with it as long as you can.

With time, you will learn to have a pretty good idea of when you might be more creative. Schedule these in your calendar and have sessions during these peak times and just do idea generation.

Come up with 10/20/100 ideas in a session. And do not judge them. Just write. Then you develop them at times when you’re not at a creative peak.

The key is to have a balance of sessions of narrowed and expanded focus, where the former builds upon the latter.

You also need a system of jotting down ideas as they come to you when you’re on a walk, in the shower, at work, or commuting.

For example, the idea for this newsletter came to me on a walk in the sun about a week ago. I had worked all day, took a break, put in my earbuds and put on some music, went on a walk and about 30 minutes into it, I got the idea. I grabbed my phone, opened up my Notion app, and wrote it down, made a quick outline and expanded on the main idea a bit, and didn’t think about it more for that day.

As part of my weekly routine I go through all my ideas and I put them in different categories. One of those categories is newsletter ideas. In my weekly schedule I have a two-hour narrowed-focus block for writing my newsletter, and when it’s time I just pull out one of the ideas, and start writing. Easy as that.

I don’t have to spend time coming up with what to write. The main idea and the outline is already there. At this point, I’m just filling out and expanding the points.

This also works in reverse. If you’re hard stuck on a creative problem, in stead of repeatedly running head first at the wall of the issue - take a break.

Keep the problem in the back of your mind, but don’t think about it actively. Expand your focus. Listen to your favorite song and dance like nobody’s watching. Go for a walk in nature or take a shower.

Whatever gets you in flow.

Often the answer will come to you, and it will seem so obvious that you will be confused as to why you couldn’t see it before. But, as you know now, it’s because you were looking in the wrong place. Then you zoom out from the problem and can now see the answer clearly.

To sum up, scheduling time for both types of focus is crucial, but it’s also important to learn to flow with how you’re feeling.

Did you wake up one morning and feel super inspired? Go for an expanded focus session even if you had something else planned (considering deadlines, and other life responsibilities, of course).

You will learn to trust yourself as you go.

The only thing left to tackle is “what exactly should I be working on?”. That’s a pretty big question, let’s break it down.

From Vision to Reality: What Do You Want?

To decide exactly what we should be doing day to day, we need to figure out exactly why we’re doing what we’re doing.

What skills should we be working on? What clients should we be taking on? Which personal projects should I be prioritizing?

These are pretty hard questions to answer if we don’t know exactly what we’re working towards.

The best way I’ve found to deal with this, is to think about what our long term vision is and work backwards from there. What do we want our life to look like 10 years down the road?

Just answering this question can save you years of wasted effort. If you’re just going through the motions and not actively participating in where your life is headed, it’s essentially like driving in the dark with the headlights off.

So we start with our long term goals. Where do you want to live? What do you want to do each day? What time do you want to wake up? Who do you want to wake up next to? What do you eat for breakfast? Do you eat breakfast? What car do you drive? What kind of people do you work with? Do you have pets? Who do you spend time with? How many hours do you work? What do you do for exercise? Where do you want to travel? How much money do you have in your bank account? Get as specific as possible. When I do this exercise I like to write it as a story - it connects better that way for me.

By the way, this is not the time to be realistic. We’re building dreams here. To quote David Allen “You can do anything, but not everything”.

Spend as much time as it takes to get everything down on paper. If there’s anything that is a part of your absolute wildest dream life it goes on the paper.

I recommend you make a vision board based on your vision as well, as most people respond to visuals. Stick it somewhere you’ll see it often, to get pulled into your dream.

Now we’ve figured out what we want long term (this is also an iterative process just like your expanded and narrow focused schedule, so it will develop with you), we can start working backwards.

Let’s say our long term vision is 10 years in the future. In order to hit our 10 year vision, what do we need to have accomplished in the next three to five years? You don’t have to be as specific, but it needs to be obvious how the two sets of goals are related.

Next step is our one year goals. What would need to happen in the next 12 months for this year to be considered a win? What metrics do we want to hit? What actions are we going to take to reach them? Do we need to take any courses or get educated in some way?

After that, we get to the quarterly goals. In the next three months what are the lever moving actions we need to do in order to hit our one year goals?

Now we’re getting pretty close to today. What actions do we need to do every day for the next seven days in order to be on track with our quarterly goals?

Do you see how we get more and more action oriented and concrete by breaking it down like this? The 1-, 5- and 10-year goals are kind of fluffy and will almost always include things that are beyond our control. By breaking it down into actual things you need to do this week, you are connecting what you do today to where you want to ultimately end up.

The only thing left to do, is to actually do them.

Action steps

1. Figure out how creativity flows uniquely through you. Experiment with different schedules. Set aside time at least once a week, where you’re in complete flow. If you love dancing, do that for two hours with total abandon and no goals whatsoever. If you love playing soccer go do that. It could be anything. The important thing is that you’re DOING something, not passively consuming something like going for a movie.

2. Start scheduling narrowed focus sessions for getting stuff done, based on expanded focus sessions for idea generation. As you test different schedules you will find one that just clicks. This is an iterative process that you will work on for the rest of your life as you get closer to the ideal (but never reach it - be okay with that) and your circumstances change.

3. Get super clear on what you should be working on by doing the long term vision exercise above and work backwards to determine your actions today.

4. Once a week sit down and schedule a full flow session (playing tennis, going dancing, whatever floats your boat), as well as narrowed focus and expanded focus sessions for your creative work related to your goals.

That’s it for this week. Hit reply and let me know your thoughts on this.

We got this.

Dan