Rebuilding a Creative Routine After It’s All Gone To Hell

Joanna Penn’s post about the importance of Creative Routines showed up in my RSS reader this morning. I clicked on it immediately because, right now, my creative routine is basically out the window and there are no hard edges around my process. I scramble after whatever project needs attention most urgently, engaging in long work binges where I’m doing as much as possible to keep all the plates spinning.

Here’s the thing: I love my creative routine. I know the value of having hard edges to my work day, and the power of slow, incremental progress on a particular project. I also know how easily this stuff gets derailed because I start focusing on solutions instead of figuring out what problem I’m trying to solve. 

In short, I’m falling back on two key fallacies of creative project management: If I’m busy enough, no-one can blame me for things not being great, and repeating the same solution even after it doesn’t work, because obviously the problem is that I’m not working hard enough. 

1) SLOW DOWN TO SPEED UP

Both my go-to books on managing your shit as a creative–Todd Henry’s Accidental Creative and Dan Charnas’ Work Clean–advocate for pulling your focus up and looking at projects from a high level. Henry is all about making sure you’re resolving today’s problem, but I prefer the chef-based metaphors of Charnas’ mise-en-place approach:

Chefs don’t run

Chefs have a paradoxical relationship to time. Every day they race the clock, but at other times they seem to be able to stop it. Time is rigid until it’s malleable, finite until it’s infinite. Chefs know some moments count more than others. And they know that one’s perception of time has a lot to do with one’s relationship to space. Those concepts of time and space merge in the almost quantum notion of slowing down to speed up.
…

If you’re running, it’s because you aren’t prepared. If you’re running, you’re wasting energy. If you’re running, you’re not thinking. 

Charnas, Dan. Work Clean: The Life-Changing Power of Mise-En-Place to Organize Your Life, Work and Mind

The point Charnas builds towards is simple: if you’re rushing to meet a deadline, you’re getting sloppy. You forget things, you stop paying attention to where you’re meant to be and what you’re doing. You’re focusing on the impossibility of the whole, instead of the possibility of the smaller constitution parts of getting a major project done. 

At the end of the day, a creative routine is just a solution to a particular problem: how do I get things done, on time and in an efficient manner?, or how do I create space to write in an otherwise busy schedule. 

If it doesn’t feel like the routine will solve that problem, then throwing all your focus behind getting back into a routine may help, but it isn’t always effective. 

2) MAKE A LIST OF HIGH-LEVEL PROBLEMS 

One of the great lessons of the Accidental Creative–one that’s easily overlooked–is learning to get specific with your objectives. We set ourselves a vague objective–get published, become a writer, finish a PhD–then waste time trying to assess what that really means and how to course-correct when things are going wrong.

With that in mind, I sat down and brainstormed a list of reasons that I’m not currently following my routine in a meaningful way. This is the short-list of things I came up with 

• I’m concerned about my upcoming conference presentation, which involves doing a bunch of things I’m not used to doing. Worse, because it’s occurring over the holiday break, I’ve got limited access to supervisors who I’d ordinarily lean upon for support. This is a source of anxiety for me, which means I should be leaning a little heavier on various coping mechanisms. Also, I’ve not actually contacted my supervisors to get some clarity about when/whether they’re available, so I’m largely creating problems to give myself something to fret about. 
• I got stuck on the rewrite of Warhol Sleeping after making changes to the final act. This essentially means I need to write another 8,000 words on a book that I though of as “done,” and I’m being pissy about it because I’d like to work on other things already. 
• I’m incorporating new regular tasks into my routine–cover design, promotion management, copy writing and blurbs for books, newsletter on-boarding and long-term content marketing–and trying to teach myself all of the techniques in at the same time.
• I’m getting used to a new work space, which means my routines are disrupted. Compounding that, my partner has some pretty hardcore health stuff going on at the moment, which means further disruptions to our usual routines there as well. 
• The Holiday season is an endless well of disruptions to my work schedule, often unanticipated. I don’t have an accurate gauge of how many work days I’ve got between now and new years, but I’m aware that I’m probably overestimating.
• The Holidays are also a time when I think dour thoughts about money and income, so I’m trying to make various writing gigs pay off as fast as possible in the short-term instead of focusing on the long-term build that’s central to my business plan.
• We’re in the middle of re-arranging our flat, so there’s a bunch of non-creative tasks that are constantly nagging for our attention and all of them are more complex than they seem due to the lack of storage space in our one-bedroom home. 
• I am low-key fretting about all the things that I’m not doing right now, particular with regards to finishing my PhD, because I don’t have a good gauge for how long things will take me and I feel like I’m running behind. I’m also letting my anxiety kick in here, blaming myself for not doing more prior to now in order to set me up better. 

Unsurprisingly, none of that is easily resolvable if I’m focusing solely on getting my regular hours in on the writing front. They’re bigger problems than the routine, and while a regular creative routine will definitely help resolve them, it won’t do it if I’m trying to do everything at a run.

3) DEFINE THE SMALLER CHALLENGES

Every dot point in my list is a big problem that’s really a mass of smaller problems, all of which get a lot easier to handle when they’re broken down into component parts. For instance, when I look at the problems surrounding my new work station, there are a series of sub-problems that need to be resolved:

• How do I optimize the space for deep-focus work like drafting and editing?
• Since the work station is in our bedroom, where will I do any morning work I engage in so I don’t disturb my sleeping partner?
• What are the current problems when I go to use the space?
• How do I avoid engaging in filler work or wasting time on social media when I’m seated at the new desk?

Similarly, when I look at the conference paper listed up top, there’s a similar list of subproblems:

• What do I need to do in order to get feedback on the paper during the holiday period where campus is shut down?
• What are the parts of the paper where I feel like my confidence is lacking?
• How can I reduce the impact my anxiety is on the process of getting this done?
• How do I draft the remaining parts of the paper in a calm and efficient manner?

Here’s the nice thing about making this kind of list: when you start getting into the habit of looking at the actual problem, rather than what you’re trying to do to resolve it, there is usually a series of potential solutions that start to reveal themselves because you’re asking the right questions before you start working. 

Which means you can start listing possible solutions in a focused, efficient way instead of staring at the big problem and trying to resolve everything at once.

4) BRING YOUR FOCUS IN TIGHT

No-one really writes a book or a conference paper in one go–it’s all just a series of little tasks, strung together until you’ve built a cohesive whole. Focusing on your end point may get you eager to start work, but staying working is usually boosted by focusing on what you’re doing now instead of where you’d like to go.

Bringing the focus in tight give neat-and-easy tasks instead of the broader problem. It gets rid of the ambigiuty of things like get back to my creative routine or finish my novel and gives specific courses of action like use RescueTime to block the internet until I’ve embedded habits in the new works space and figure out how to make the big bad in Warhol Sleeping hatable the moment he first appears. 

In short, the stuff that needs doing that I was hoping my creative routine would resolve if I just kept banging away.

5) PICK YOUR TRIGGERS & SET YOUR HARD EDGES

When all those other things are in place, it’s time to go back to your triggers and hard edges–basically, the thing that tells you it’s time to start working, and the things that tell you it’s time to stop.

These are usually the first thing you’ve turned too when your routine has gone to hell, but focusing on them frequently overlooks the fact that there’s frequently reasons a creative routine that’s been serving you well is no longer running smoothly.

Now that you’ve got a clear vision of what needs to be resolved, focusing on things like I start writing at 9:00 am and will spend two hours working on my novel will be a little more effective, if only because you’re not subconsciously resisting the idea of trying to overcome a series of poorly defined issues (If you’re not sure what your triggers are, I strongly recommend checking out Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, which is a fantastic tool for hacking your work processes).

Similarly, if you can, set yourself a point where work ends for a while. Know that you’re going to try and resolve problems within a very specific window, but there’s a hard edge where you’ll physically stop and walk away from the task. This makes it imperative that you bring your focus to bear, and keeps you from slipping back into the pattern where working more is equated with working harder.