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Productivity
Being A Little Unfocused Can Sometimes Increase Creativity
Many people put too much effort into being creative. If you’re not naturally creative, you may be tempted to force it by sitting down and concentrating intensely, just like you would with more serious work.
It has been demonstrated that being a little unfocused can actually encourage creativity, although that may appear counterproductive. People get their creative ideas from a variety of sources.
It’s extremely uncommon to come up with something creative and original by concentrating intensely on one thing. Instead, if you can relax a little, you’ll be able to absorb more information from the world around you, which frequently leads to greater creativity.
This is not to say that being completely distracted will help you be more creative. You’ll eventually stop being creative because you’ll be so unfocused and distracted from your task at hand that you won’t even give it a passing thought.
Semi-focus is the equivalent of taking in all the sounds of the forest while aimlessly scanning the area. It’s not totally losing yourself in an online show and becoming so preoccupied that you lose all creativity.
You could compare it to having tunnel vision. The majority of the time, having it is bad, and this situation is no exception. You won’t notice anything else if you concentrate so hard on one thing.
Your ability to be creative may suffer as a result. You severely restrict your ability to be creative if you shut out all of the other sources of inspiration around you.
It’s crucial that you lose focus when it matters. Social media is a very popular form of distraction, but it usually won’t do you much good, so try to stay away from it if you can.
Instead, you ought to be unfocused and fully present in your surroundings, such as public spaces and residential areas, soaking up all the sights and sounds you can.
There’s always daydreaming if those settings don’t inspire you to be creative. Daydreaming, which is typically regarded as unproductive, may actually help you think more creatively than you previously realised. This is especially true if the project you’re working on is constantly on your mind.
Pay Attention To Your Instincts About When (And When Not) To Work
You will occasionally reach a point where you are simply too exhausted from the day to concentrate or be creative. You’re only now completely prepared for a break. You couldn’t accomplish that if you followed the typical 9–5 strict schedule.
Although you’re not required to do that, you can choose to take a short break for your own benefit since continuing to work when you can’t do it well is a poor decision.
You should give yourself a little more time to recover before you start up again if there are times when you simply don’t feel like you can produce quality work or content. You’ll have to redo some of that work later because it won’t be up to par if you’re trying to create content without being either focused or creative.
Knowing when to stop will help you avoid having to redo work later or, worse yet, finding yourself in the awkward position of having to apologise to customers for sending them subpar work.
You wouldn’t need to do that if your productivity was at its peak. Do not overindulge in the freedom that comes from not having to adhere to a strict schedule. A lot of people might start abusing it, and because they never feel as though they want to work, they never put in enough effort.
Even if you don’t want to work, you still need to schedule time for it. This is only for those instances when you truly believe that you are unable to work even just a little bit more. You should give yourself some time to unwind and reenergize once you’ve reached the point where you genuinely aren’t able to complete anything else of quality.
Similar to refuelling your car after a long drive Even if you do have to pause for a while, you must do it in order to proceed with your progress. Making yourself do work you don’t want to do has to be the worst thing you can do to yourself.
If taking a quick break is what’s best for your business, then that should be what you do. Keep your pride at bay so you don’t have to work harder than necessary and produce subpar results. Take some time off, then return to give it all you’ve got.
Set Limits With Clients, Customers, And Colleagues
If you’ve worked closely with clients and consumers as a business owner in the past, you know that it can occasionally be a taxing experience. Some clients can be very aggressive and demanding when it comes to your services, but the majority of clients are friendly, and the entire encounter goes by without incident.
Similar things can be said about some co-workers; although some are responsible and rarely ask you to do something, others will try to force their workload onto you and rely too heavily on you. You’ll encounter time constraints with clients and customers rather frequently.
Customers can be highly impatient if you run a firm that deals in custom-made goods, whether they be images, logos, or even data. Because they may not be aware of how much work you have, they may keep asking you to stop what you’re doing and complete their tasks for them.
Of course, there is a little reciprocity involved here. They shouldn’t be given something they were promised in two weeks just to receive it in two months. However, if they’re asking for it weeks before the time you promised to give it to them, it’s time to set a boundary and stop letting them control you.
You should concentrate on any other clients who were promised deliverables sooner. Your entire work schedule shouldn’t be determined by one client. Co-workers provide a very similar issue.
It can begin innocently enough, with you assisting them briefly when you have far less work and they are overburdened. Although this is a great gesture, they might grow accustomed to it.
Over time, your co-worker can begin to assign you additional work that they don’t want to perform, making your workload heavier. You should eventually set boundaries and inform them that you need to concentrate on your own tasks.
The development of technology has made this issue even more widespread. People no longer need to go through the hassle of either visiting you in person or writing you a letter; instead, they can just send you an email or instant message, or even give you a call using Skype or Zoom.
This increases the frequency of this kind of behaviour, so you should be on the lookout for it before it drains you.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
Is Your Creative Flow Being Distracted By Seeking Perfection?
Is Your Creative Flow Being Distracted By Seeking Perfection?
You always want to strive to do the best work that you can. No matter what it is that you’re doing, do it to the best of your ability. These are good concepts to live by, but often times they can be misinterpreted.
Phrases like “to the best of your ability” and “the best work that you can” don’t mean that what you’re doing has to be perfect, but rather as good as you can get it. If you’re allowing perfectionism to pull you off track, it can seriously halt your progress and have some rather adverse effects on you.
Perfectionism is essentially a state of mind in which you start to pick out every small flaw in your work, stemming from a desire for the project to be perfect. This is an entirely unrealistic goal, and the more time you spend trying to get it to be perfect, the worse it’s going to get.
The greatest masterpieces in the world have their flaws, and there is not one thing that is perfect. By striving for something unattainable, you could work for years to try to get something exactly right, and still be unsatisfied with it.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t put any effort into it, but give it your best shot without going overboard. If it takes a few days, that’s fine, but once it starts to get into a few months of work with no progress, you’re going overboard.
While there is the danger of you wasting too much time chasing after perfection, there’s also the negative mental aspects. If you’re consistently dissatisfied with your work, you’re going to end up feeling pretty bad about yourself.
You might think you’re bad at your job or that you’re not putting in enough work, and it’ll only be detrimental to you. Instead of second guessing yourself and wasting time, produce something that’s satisfactory to your standards and be proud of that alone.
There’s no reason that you should overexert yourself just because you think something’s good, but it could be a tiny bit better. At some point, even if you were to reach a point very close to perfection, it would come with what’s known as diminishing returns.
If it takes you five hours to produce something that your client is happy with, but it takes you years to produce something that’s slightly better, but close to perfect, then the difference is negligible. You will have spent far more time doing it, making that work not worth doing in the first place.
Know The Difference Between Beneficial Distractions And Saboteurs
It’s true that some distractions can be beneficial to your creativity. Getting immersed in something that’s related to your creative work or doing something that lets your mind wander can help you be more creative and can often result in some better ideas.
This isn’t always the case, though, and you need to be able to distinguish the difference between distractions that are actually benefiting you and distractions that are holding you back from working as you need to.
For example, if you’re writing a science fiction novel, and you’re running out of ideas, it could be beneficial to watch some science fiction shows with the pretence that you’re trying to come up with new ideas.
It can help inspire you and show you things that you hadn’t thought of before. In this case, the distraction is beneficial. It helps you gather new ideas and gives you a bit of inspiration that you can channel into your work.
However, if your job is to come up with a more efficient system for your job, then a science fiction show isn’t really going to be that great of a diversion. Instead, it’s just going to eat up your time and make you less focused on the task at hand.
Distractions that have nothing to do with what you’re doing are often not that helpful, but that’s not always the case. If you were trying to come up with a new logo for a company and you were sitting outside letting your mind wander, that might not have anything to do with the logo directly, but it can still be a good way to open up your mind to new possibilities.
In this case, even though it’s not related to your work, it can still be pretty useful. One method of determining whether or not a distraction is beneficial to you is to keep a sort of distraction journal.
Log the amount of time you spent with each distraction and make note of how many quality ideas actually came out of that time you spent. If you spent 3 hours watching a show and only came up with one decent idea, it’s probably not that worth it and is just eating up your time.
If one hour spent outside produced three or four decent ideas, however, that’s a different story. At that point, that could be a worthwhile distraction that’s actually helping benefit you relative to the amount of time you spent on it.
Recognize When Your Creativity Has Got Out Of Control
Creativity is something to be admired and cherished, because it can be so incredibly helpful for you. It can give you new ways to do things, new ideas for projects, and bring a lot of light into your life.
However, there is such a thing as being too creative. You need to find a balance between creativity and actual implementation in order for those dreams and ideas to come to life.
You can spend your time 24/7 daydreaming, and during that time you will no doubt come up with some great fascinating ideas. The problem is, it’s almost irrelevant how good an idea is if it’s not put into action.
If you have an idea that would work well, but you don’t implement it, then you’re just wasting your creativity. You should use focus and hard work in conjunction with creativity so that you can actually benefit from your creative work.
Implementing your creativity is tedious work, and it often requires a lot of focus and dedicated effort. If you’re more creatively inclined, this will be more of a hassle for you, but it will be well worth it if you’re coming up with quality ideas.
There’s a certain feeling of happiness that comes with watching something that you dreamt up actually take shape and become a successful idea. It just means you’re going to have to take some time to get it there.
You might be concerned that stopping your creativity to work for extended periods of time will hinder your creativity, but that’s not exactly true.
First, it means that your creative dreams won’t just go on to die out, but rather they’ll actually come to fruition and mean something rather than just staying an idea forever.
Additionally, you may be surprised to find that you can actually become more creative after a break. If you’re constantly using creativity, you may become burned out after a little while.
Taking a bit of a break to work normally can reinvigorate you when you get back to it, making you even more creative than you were before. It’s important to balance hard, boring work and creativity as much as possible.
Strictly doing either one will lead to some negative consequences. All work makes you less creative and you’ll start to get repetitive, while all creativity doesn’t really give you much to work with if you’re not putting things into action.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
7 Life-Wrecking Dangers Of Procrastination
7 Life-Wrecking Dangers Of Procrastination
Putting things off from time to time may not cause too many problems in your life. On the other hand, chronic procrastination can consistently jack up your stress levels. It lowers your self-esteem and can cause severe mental and physical health problems.
The negative effects of procrastination can range from something as simple as missing a deadline on an important task, or it can be something more long-term, such as a missed opportunity that kills a dream.
Some of us may be lucky enough to identify our procrastination habit in time and may be able do something about it.
For others, it can have long-lasting effects that resonate throughout their lives.
The reasons that people procrastinate can be incredibly varied and they may not always obvious. Sometimes, it is a hidden fear that we don’t want to acknowledge, or it could be simply not wanting to do something because it just doesn’t motivate us.
Here are 7 life-wrecking dangers of procrastinating you should remember the next time you are thinking about delaying some action or task you know you need to be doing today.
1 – You Lose Valuable Time
Odds are you already feel like you don’t have enough hours in the day. Why procrastinate and make the situation even worse? The most fleeting and valuable commodity you have is time. It can’t be replaced.
Procrastinators often look up with deadlines staring them in the face at the last minute and think, “Where did all the time go?”
When you have to fly around at the last minute trying to cram a few days’ worth of work into a few hours because you’ve been procrastinating, you realize that you’ve wasted precious time that you can’t get back.
2 – You Miss Out On Valuable Opportunities
Any time you do one thing, you are costing yourself the opportunity to do something else. Putting things off until later, when later finally arrives and you absolutely must take action, doesn’t allow you to be free in case a wonderful opportunity arises.
Procrastination doesn’t allow you to answer when opportunity knocks.
3 – You Never Realize Your Full Potential
Studies show that if you procrastinate once, you’ll do it twice. Procrastinate a couple of times, and you begin to plan procrastination into your regular routine.
The people who create their dream realities make effective use of their time.
When you waste time and put things off, the results you finally achieve are watered down and rushed.
Everyone has incredible potential inside them, and when you lazily and continually “wait till later”, you kill your inner desire to better yourself in one way or another.
This means you rob yourself of living the greatest and most fulfilled life that you possibly can.
4 – You Sabotage Your Career And Relationships
Procrastination is the enemy of efficiency and productivity. When you put things off in the workplace, you kill your chances of advancement. You might even get fired.
When you consistently procrastinate in a relationship, you’re telling the important people in your life that you simply don’t care. This means you run the risk of damaging, or even permanently ruining, relationships that are important to you.
5 – You Crush Your Self-Esteem
Low self-esteem and procrastination are comfortable bedfellows. When you put things off and put things off until you have to rush around at the end and get them done, you feel bad about yourself.
You wonder, “Why can’t I just do what I need to do?” You ask yourself, “Why can’t I take action in the pursuit of things that are so important to me?”
This leads to thoughts that you deserve failure, since you must obviously are programmed for poor performance and a lack of motivation. This low level of self-belief and self-esteem leads to more procrastination, and a very unhealthy mental cycle develops.
Negative emotions like self-hatred and self-doubt create stress, and stress is at the cornerstone of all chronic disease. It is in this way that …
6 – Not Meeting Goals
Procrastination seems to become a major issue when we start to think about setting goals or wanting to achieve or change something.
Don’t get me wrong; you really may have a strong desire to change, but you just find it impossible to take that vital first step.
This can be incredibly confusing and frustrating; you might find yourself thinking, “Why is it so difficult to go for something that I know I want so badly?” Only you can answer that; you’ll have to explore a little deeper to try to find out why you are resisting and effectively sabotaging your own personal growth.
We set goals because we want to have a better life, and these can be business, career, relationship type goals. If you don’t even attempt to reach these goals because of procrastination, you reduce the possibility to better your life.
You need to find what the root cause is behind your procrastination, especially if it’s preventing you from achieving your goals, or you may never attain them and you may be losing out on some of what life has to offer you.
7 – Procrastination Can Quite Literally Kill You
You may think that statement is a little harsh or “over-the-top”. Actually, it isn’t. People who procrastinate constantly make poor decisions. You put off going to that doctor’s appointment, justifying your decision by saying that you probably won’t be able to afford his bill.
You find excuses for putting off exercising all the time. You know you should eat better, but you can always start your new diet tomorrow.
Aside from the poor mental health that comes from a lack of self-esteem, procrastination can lead to physical health problems that have serious consequences.
Stress is related to the top preventable causes of death. Procrastination is a powerful stress booster. Put off taking care of your physical health for years, and you increase the odds that you’ll die from a serious illness or disease.
Stop procrastinating. It’s a killer, a job and relationship wrecker. Putting off important tasks and responsibilities leads to so many negative results. Chronic procrastination can make it virtually impossible to live a life of fulfillment and success.
And remember, one way to beat procrastination is to stay focused and many people struggle with this. If you want to learn more about staying focused, check out the featured resource below for a free detailed report; download, read it and take action 😊
