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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 😊

Focus On Intent To Help Control Creativity

If you’re creatively inclined, then you probably enjoy most of your time coming up with ideas, but you’re likely less intrigued by the serious business side that requires a lot of focus and monotonous work.

Any creative projects require these aspects to become full-fledged products or ideas, as annoying as it may seem. Don’t panic when it comes time to set aside your creativity, because you will get back to it.

Instead, just focus on your intentions with the creative idea and work to bring it to reality. While ideas certainly have merit, they’re not particularly useful if they’re never put into action.

Often times, putting them into action can be a tedious process, but it becomes worth it to see your creative endeavor brought to life, able to accomplish the goals that you had in mind when you thought of it in the first place.

For example, if you came up with a great infographic to inform people about a topic that you’re passionate about, it wouldn’t get very far as a simple idea or rough draft. A completed product that was shared and spread online would be able to actually inform others and spread your knowledge, but it’s going to take work.

You’re going to have to do research and cite sources, make it look nice, and go through the work of getting it to be spread and shared around. These are tedious things, but since your intent was to spread knowledge to begin with, it makes it worth your effort.

You might also want to create something with the intent of generating some income for yourself. It might be something like designing logos for up and coming companies or making physical products that people can buy on websites like Etsy.

The thought process is fun when you get to utilize your creativity, but then comes the actual process of bringing it to reality. Gathering materials, stocking your inventory, shipping purchases – all of these things can be a hassle.

Regardless of whether or not it’s a pain for you to do, your intention was to make money. The only way for you to do that is to give them an actual product. Very seldom will people pay good money for the concept of something that they’ll have to actually create themselves.

Instead, they’re more interested in purchasing a completed product, something that they don’t have to put any more work into. That’s where your effort to backburner your creativity comes in handy.

Engage In Digital Minimalism To Maximize Creativity And Focus

While technology and all of the gadgets we have today are certainly useful and can help you work more efficiently, they may also be dragging down your creativity and focus.

Whether it be a ton of distractions on all your devices or the fact that you might be using them as a crutch, they can sometimes do more harm than good for your creative flow and ability to focus.

In these situations, it’s best to put all of the tech down and just focus with the bare essentials. It’s almost like a palate cleanser. While you spend hours and hours writing on Word documents or drawing pictures in Photoshop, you can just as well get it done with a good old fashioned pen and paper.

It might not be as efficient, but it helps in ways that you might not anticipate. The best thing to do when attempting this is to separate yourself from as much technology as possible.

Otherwise, you shouldn’t be listening to music or watching anything, and preferably it’s somewhere outside where you can really absorb the sights and sounds of nature. When you don’t have the distractions of technology, from constant alerts to easily accessible entertainment, you might find that you’re able to be much more focused.

You’re there with only your own work to do, and otherwise you have nothing to really focus on. If you’re having trouble focusing, this might be a great way to get you back on track.

In terms of creativity, technology is very helpful, but it can start to become more of a crutch than a tool. If you know that you can always reference random guides online and draw inspiration from all kinds of other designs, then you may start to lose your creative edge.

By isolating yourself from all of that, you’ll be able to use your own pure creativity to create something entirely unique, without the reliance on all kinds of other sources. You should always look at technology as a tool – a means to an end.

It’s an amazing tool that you can and should take advantage of, but sooner or later, you’re going to reach a point where you’re becoming overly dependent on it, at which point you need to take a break and reassess.

Has Your Demand For Productivity Intimidated Your Creative Vibe?

Productivity is often stressed above all else in businesses today. It’s the best way to put out product after product, which typically results in the highest profit yield. However, productivity isn’t everything.

You need to be able to put out something that you’re proud of, something original and creative, and too much focus on productivity may stifle that, leading to some rather negative consequences.

There are many companies that would rather put out as many products as possible instead of making high quality products a priority. There’s a balance to be found between the two.

You obviously can’t release just one small product every year, but you also can’t be rushing so quickly that you’re not putting enough effort into things. Once you start to rush through your projects without care, you’ll start to slip.

If they’re used to receiving quality products from you, ones that are made with much love and care, they’ll be pretty sour once they start receiving a ton of mediocre work.

At that point, word may start to spread, and you can actually end up losing business. Creativity takes time. That is a fundamental part of business – it doesn’t just come out of thin air.

It takes time and care for you to develop an idea fully and to polish it to near perfection. You can’t take all the time in the world to get it done, since you naturally have certain deadlines to meet, but you can put a bit of extra time and effort into it to get it just as you’d like, to make something you’re proud of.

Extended periods of time spent pumping out as much as you can without any true creative input can actually hurt you in the long run as well. It might get you some short term sales, but it’ll start to fall off.

Creativity is like a muscle. It needs to be exercised frequently in order to grow and develop as well as stay healthy. If you’re not spending some time honing your creativity over a certain amount of time, it will start to degrade.

Eventually, you’ll be left without the same degree of creativity that you had before, and it can be difficult to get back into your flow when you need it. Instead of focusing on pure quantity, make sure you’re actually putting some heart and effort into the things you produce.

Well, as I’m sure you can appreciate, there is a lot more to be learnt about increasing focus and productivity; far more than can be covered in this short post, but if you’d like to know more about this, then click on the featured resource below where you can pick up a free report, Stay Focused For Success, that covers this topic in more detail. Download, read it and take action 😊