This post focuses on strategies to help creative professionals overcome procrastination and boost productivity.
You remember the famous speech of Martin Luther King. The night before the speech. Martin Luther King was busy re-writing the speech till 3 am in the morning.
And right before he was about to give the speech, sitting in the audience he was still editing the draft. I am sure, he was not correcting his grammar.
11 minutes on the stage, he said the historical 4 words, ‘I have a dream’ and the best part, these words were not even in the speech which he wrote.
So, where did the words come from? Yes, Martin Luther King did deliberate procrastination to unleash his creative genius.
“You call it procrastinating I call it thinking.” ~Aaron Sorkin
Procrastination is labeled as a negative word. But William Shakespeare said it best “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
As an Entrepreneur, you will be twisted, crippled, rejected, and often misunderstood. But your will to succeed at any given moment will decide the length you’ll go on your journey.
To procrastinate creatively, you need to first understand the creative process.
The Creative Process Goes Like
- This is an awesome idea.
- This sounds tricky.
- This is crap.
- I am crap.
- This might be okay.
- This is awesome.
When you’re doing creative procrastination, you will have to skip the ‘I am crap’ part.
When you are about to do the thinking process, pick an idea and follow the following thought process:
- This is an awesome idea.
- This sounds tricky.
- This is crap.
- This might be okay.
- This is awesome.
Tip 1: Write Everything Down
No matter how great your IQ is, or your much you can remember, as an Entrepreneur, you need to write everything down.
Start with personal journaling and move it into creative writing.
To start off with, write everything that goes into your day. After you establish that habit of writing everything down, you will be able to take down ideas from it.
You will perform best when you will do it when you are procrastinating. While procrastinating your mind will be relaxed & you will come up with great ideas.
You can also plan your day. Jot down the to-do of the day or whatever needs to be done.
Tip 2: Make Deadlines
Another way Entrepreneurs can shine while procrastinating is by adding deadlines to their projects.
For me, deadlines provide greater clarity of what I want to achieve.
Having deadlines gives you the sense of urgency you need to get the important tasks done. For instance, I always find it very boring to prepare project reports. At Branex we prepare project reports for all projects that are successfully completed. These reports include time spent on the project, screenshots of the final designs, color codes, font names, a creative brief, and customer details.
Apart from motivation, these reports provide us with a way to stick to heavy deadlines and do things on time.
I use Outlook calendar heavily for managing my tasks and my deadlines.
Tip 3: Change Your Environment
Sometimes it is not the project itself, it is the environment that makes all the difference.
If you want to procrastinate creatively you need to change your environment.
By changing the environment, you can procrastinate in some different surroundings which will activate the creative juices in your brain.
In our firm, bloggers are the creative types. They are often found wandering all over the place, and what they get by wandering? An awesome blog idea.
Tip 4: Don’t be a Perfectionist
You don’t need to be perfect. Sometimes a half-baked product is a great way to unleash your creative genius.
Also Read: 7 Productivity Hacks for Lazy Entrepreneurs
Instead of spending hours trying to get the color to match exactly, try to get the closest match and show it to your client. This will enable you to get that task done and allow your client to evaluate the color and tell you if they want a closer match.
Tip 5: Execute Now & Figure Out Later
Not everything can be figured out right at the time.
Sometimes you need to execute things and pivot them later.
While you are busy procrastinating for the next idea. Go ahead and launch it.
Running a successful online creative/design business means that you will have to work on both interesting and the no-so interesting projects. You must take on the tasks and do them with a positive attitude.
Take everything with a positive attitude.
You don’t need to jump to conclusions. Just let the creativity come naturally.
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