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If you’re a creative type, then you’ve likely encountered a situation where you have a ton of ideas and you keep thinking up new ones, only to eventually get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of them to the degree that you never put any of them into practice. A lack of focus can be a creativity killer!
This isn’t uncommon at all. Many people who let their creativity run unchecked can get overwhelmed when it’s time to sit down and focus. One of the solutions you can try is only allowing yourself a certain amount of time to just be wholly creative.
When your time’s up, you should break for a bit before looking over your ideas with focus and intent and select one of those ideas to actually develop and work on. You can go back to your other ideas later on, but for the time being, pick one and work with it to completion.
This allows you to actually make some progress and have something that’s tangible, instead of just having a collection of ideas. Ideas are certainly valuable, but if they’re never implemented and brought to fruition, they become worthless.
Even if the idea you choose doesn’t end up working out, at least you’re getting some practical application out of it, so that you’re not spending all your time just being creative.
The human mind often gets dazed and confused when being presented with too many options. It’s like when you can’t decide what you want at a restaurant, when you’re looking at a really long menu with so many choices.
You can easily evaluate and pick among ten or so items, but when you’re dealing with 30 or 40, you’ll start to quickly lose focus and not be able to make a good choice. It’s important that whatever idea you select to work on, it should be seen through to completion if possible.
If you just work on it a little bit and leave it unfinished, then it’s no better than never starting to begin with. The whole point of focusing on one of your ideas is to actually have something to show for it in the end.
If you have a half-completed project to show, then you really don’t have much at all. Don’t worry that doing this will stifle your creativity.
You’ll be able to get back to creativity as soon as you finish the project you’re working on. In fact, the break from brainstorming is like cleansing your palate – you may even come up with better ideas after a longer break filled with work.
The thing is that you need to stay focused on whatever it is you are trying to achieve and if you don’t, you’ll simply become frustrated.
Apart from overwhelm, having a poor attention will also affect the way you focus and how productive and creative you are so you definitely need to work on your attention span and that can be a major undertaking in todays modern world where everything is vying for your time and attention!
However, sometimes a poor attention span may actually become a benefit so is not always negative.
Intrigued? Let’s look a little deeper…
A Poor Attention Span Can Be A Benefit!
Like I said in the previous couple of paragraphs, if you have a short attention span, you’ve probably always considered it to be one of your drawbacks. It makes it difficult for you to focus and it makes working long shifts at work a real pain.
However, it does have its benefits, though they’re mostly going to help you in the long run, not in the short term. A short attention span can help you come up with greater creative ideas over time, allowing you to return to them when you have the time to dedicate to it.
Those who are more easily distracted have been shown to be more creative in a number of studies. The problem is, you’re likely not being paid to be creative all the time. You need to have time to be creative, but most of your time is likely spent doing physical work or work that’s bringing ideas to life instead of making new ideas.
In those times, a short attention span can be detrimental, because it disrupts your focus while you’re trying to actually create something that embodies the ideas you’ve come up with previously.
The workaround here is to have a system set up for quickly logging your ideas that pop into your mind so that you can return to them later, and spend time focusing on the task at hand in the present.
You could use something as simple as a little notepad with a pen. Anytime you’re working and get pulled off track by an idea, quickly jot it down and you can return to it later when you have time.
You’d be surprised at how much you continue to be distracted by ideas just because you don’t want to forget them. Once you know they’re written down and can be returned to later on, you can return to focusing on what you’re doing.
It’s beneficial to have all of these little ideas stored away, because at some point you might try to brainstorm something to work on, and you might not have anything coming to mind. Then, you can reference your notebook and use one of those little sparks of imagination to fuel a whole new project that you might’ve otherwise forgotten.
By keeping tabs on your overactive imagination like this, you retain all of those smaller sparks of creativity that can blossom into wonderful, big projects – while still working diligently to bring existing ideas to fruition.
Your subconscious mind is very powerful, and you are using this technique of jotting things down on the fly to tap into that subconscious and some of the ideas you note down could really inspire you so give it a go and see what appears!
Having any kind of focus requires a lot of self-discipline and even if you adopt the jotting technique above you will need to be disciplined to go back and do something with the ideas.
If you want to learn more about how to develop self-discipline, click on the featured resource below for a free report; download, read it and take action 😊
