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.
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.
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 😊
We all have a hundred different ideas that we feel could be a smashing success in our industry.
Whether it be the idea for a new product or service, there’s more ideas than there is time.
This is where you need to learn to reign in all of those ideas you have and construct an action plan that not only fleshes those ideas out so you can weed out the likely winners from the duds, but it will help you focus on boosting productivity.
Why do you need to do this?
Because it’s been proven that the human brain can’t focus on more than one thing at a time.
When we try to divide our attention, we end up scattered. Our quality also suffers. While learning to multi-task may seem like a great idea, narrowing your focus so that you’re tackling one task at a time will always produce better results.
So, what can you do when you have more ideas to grow your business than you have time for?
Begin by jotting down the top ideas that come to mind. Don’t write summaries or get carried away with hashing out the details. Instead, write down titles for each idea.
Then, tear them apart, one-by-one. Be realistic with your expectations and the time you have to spend on each project. Think about your core audience and what they’d be most interested in.
Create a priority list based on all the ideas you have. Again, keep your audience in mind because the ideas you have may not align with what your market is actively looking for.
Otherwise, you’ll spend more time thinking about and analyzing ideas, versus bringing those ideas to life.
A project management system is a great tool when it comes to not only fleshing out potential ideas but in staying on track with the projects you’re working on.
Day-to-day operations can be exhausting to keep track of. With a system in place that makes it easy for you to assign value to projects, allocate time and be able to generate a quick snapshot at where you are during each project will make it easier to stay focused on your end goals.
There are countless project management tools available to you including Asana and Basecamp.
You can easily create schedules using Google Calendar found here:
https://gsuite.google.com/learning-center/tips/calendar
By now you probably realise that there are different ways you can improve focus and subsequently, increase productivity and quality output and I have covered a number of them in this and other blog posts.
And now I want to give you a few more tips and strategies that I hope will help you. You can never have enough ways to boost your productivity, right?
Previously I have mentioned the importance of narrowing your focus down to one main goal at a time since it’s been proven that our brain responds better when we are working on one project at a time, rather than attempting to multi-task.
Use project management tools such as Asana or Basecamp to help you stay on track.
What projects aren’t panning out? What do you feel is less likely to be a success?
What tasks could be wiped off the to-do list? Take a step back and evaluate the things you’re spending your time on, staying on the lookout for ways to free up your time and improve your focus.
This is an important one when it comes to staying focused. If you’re finding yourself burned out working on tasks that you are simply not interested in, chances are the quality of your projects won’t be up to par.
Instead, learn to delegate the tasks that you don’t personally enjoy. Not only will you be able to increase output, but you’ll be able to provide a higher level of quality to your customer base by turning to the experts.
Struggling to complete a task because you lost focus?
And finally…
We all struggle with focusing on tasks, especially repetitive or mundane ones. Even the most organized of us all has those moments where no matter what we do to try to refocus on our goals, it feels as though we’ll never get ahead.
So cut yourself some slack when this happens. Acknowledge the fact that you can only do so much. Sometimes taking a step back and giving ourselves permission to simply take a creative break is enough to boost productivity and re-focus on the bigger picture.
Here are some steps to take that may help you with that:
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 😊
For many people, having structure is very beneficial to their work. Having goals, milestones, and plans on how to achieve them is a great way to keep yourself on track and focused.
However, that doesn’t mean that more structure is going to be equivalent to more or better results. In some cases, if you have too much structure, you might actually end up doing more harm than good to your creativity processes.
If you were to have every little detail of your work planned out and highly structured, down to when you’re going to do what, where you’re going to do it, and how it’s going to get done, then you’re really not leaving yourself with much wriggle room.
If you feel like doing a different part of your work on one of those days, but force yourself to follow the schedule and plan, then you’re going to be unhappy with your work and probably end up creating something that isn’t your best effort, because you didn’t want to do it.
Some of these ideas will have to come naturally, and you can’t really predict when you’re going to be feeling creative and when you’re going to be feeling more work oriented.
You need to have a bit more flexibility in your plans. Instead of planning day by day or hour by hour, you should instead have weekly goals to fulfill, so that depending on how you’re feeling on various days throughout the week, you can accomplish everything you need to for that week without being overly dependent on a schedule.
Of course, if there’s a case in which you’re feeling a bit too loose, and you’re unable to focus or you’re struggling, you can tighten up your schedule as needed. But when it comes to your day-to-day life, you should have a bit more flexibility and freedom to approach your work as you see fit.
Tightening up your schedule is something that you can do if you really need to see more progress, just know that when you’re in a more comfortable spot, you can let up again in order to regain a better sense of creativity.
One of your goals should be that you’re able to constantly maintain a flexible schedule, so work towards that goal diligently.
Many people have begun mixing their work and off time together, so that they’re always thinking about or doing work throughout the entire day.
They might take small breaks between work, and what ultimately ends up happening is that they don’t get enough work done, but also don’t end up relaxing that much.
Instead, you should separate the two, so that you have dedicated relaxation time and dedicated work time. It’s necessary for your mental wellbeing to have ample time off to relax and unwind from strenuous work.
If you’re working all day every day, with random bits of “relaxation” strewn throughout, you’re going to be getting the worst experience of both parts. You won’t have enough focus in your work, but you also won’t have enough time to properly relax.
During the times that you have dedicated to work, you’re not distracted by anything else, and you can give 100% effort into getting your job done. Once you’re done with work and you’ve worked hard, you can actually fully relax without having to worry about working again until the next day.
Just as work requires your full attention, relaxation requires you to have a clear mind. If you spend your entire relaxation time worrying about the work you haven’t gotten done yet, you’re not going to relax at all, but rather you’ll just be distracted while getting more stressed out.
You should take the time you’ve set aside for relaxation and use it fully. Completely take work off of your mind and just enjoy whatever it is you’re doing. You can be watching TV, chatting with friends, reading a book, or doing absolutely nothing.
Whatever it is, just make sure you’re not letting work bleed into the time you have, otherwise you’re not going to enjoy it very much. Some people can blend their work and enjoyment together, but this doesn’t work for everyone.
If it truly works for you to do both around the same time, then you shouldn’t stop doing that. If you’re unsure, you should try to separate work and relaxation time as much as possible, because that may be what’s going to work best for you.
If you only work well in complete silence and complete focus, you’re going to need to learn how to adapt. Very few places are dead silent. Even if you have your own home office, chances are you’ll hear your family in the background, as you should.
If you’re at a café, there will be people talking. If you’re at an office, there will be background noise and voices. You need to train yourself to be able to either tune out or work well with background noise.
Only working well in near or complete silence is indicative of larger problems with focusing. You might be able to focus in those situations, but you can’t let the smallest things throw you off completely, otherwise you’re going to struggle to keep up with your work in all kinds of places and situations.
One option you have is to simply get used to it and work in places with background noise more often. Instead of holing up in your apartment or house where it’s all quiet while you work, go and work at a nearby café.
This will allow you to work under more and more circumstances, meaning that you’ll be able to efficiently keep up with your work anywhere you go. Of course, not everyone has a nearby café that they’d want to work in for extended periods of time.
Coffitivity is a website that you can use in order to better get used to working in environments with a bit more noise. You have a few free selections to choose from, in various levels of noise, and you can adjust the volume as you’d like.
This allows you to get used to it, even from your quiet home or office. You don’t have to get used to a ton of noise. Everyone has their limit. Nobody is expecting you to work well in the middle of a theme park or at some other loud location.
The point is to be able to handle fairly common level of background noise that you would encounter in a wide variety of situations, so that you don’t need a special place to get all of your work done.
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 😊
Everyone has different sweet spots that help them focus or be more creative. Essentially, different locations or times of day can either be more conducive to daydreaming and creativity or more conducive to focus and continued hard work.
If you try to do one where you succeed better in the other, you can either become unfocused or uncreative, so it’s important to keep them separated. For example, you may be most focused and hardworking late at night.
Sweet spots aren’t just times of day, though. You may also find that different locations that you choose to work at may help or hinder various things like focus. Some people have dedicated office spaces where they find it really easy to focus, while others may find it best to focus out at a café.
You might be really creative being outside, or laying comfortably in bed. Regardless of what your sweet spots are, you should utilize them to the best of your ability. Studies have found that location and time of day can greatly affect mood and productivity, so if you’re in the right sweet spot at the right time, you can get a lot more work done.
It also helps to separate areas that you work in and relax in. For example, if you tend to spend a lot of time on your couch relaxing, if you sit there to go and work all of a sudden, you probably won’t feel like focusing very much.
Your body can easily become accustomed to locations and will default to whatever you typically feel there, such as relaxation on the couch, and it’ll be hard to switch from relaxing to hard work.
The variations in these sweet spots are why 9-to-5 jobs don’t work well for many people. If you need to be focused throughout the time you spend working, but you don’t focus well until the wee morning hours, then the entirety of the 9-5 time slot is going to throw you off and make you less productive.
By allowing yourself to get things done where you feel is best, you’ll benefit yourself by enjoying the work a bit more, and also benefit your business by being more productive. It’s all about personal preferences and wielding them effectively.
There are two main “settings” you’ll work with throughout your career. Typically, you’re either doing productivity-focused work, or creative work.
You need to be able to separate the two into different periods of time. The reason they need to be kept separate is that each one requires you to be in a different state of mind. While creativity lets your mind wander and come up with new and exciting things, productivity and focus require you to home in on one specific thing and do it as well as you can.
When you’re trying to be creative, it’s fine to be unfocused. This doesn’t mean that you can be outright distracted, of course, but more so blurred while still looking at the project you’re working on.
It allows your mind to have room to experiment with different ideas and fresh, new ideas. When you need to be productive, you need absolute focus to get things done. You should follow your strict methods that work, and that you know work.
Don’t experiment with different things – just keep working with what works best. At this time, you don’t have room to maneuver very much, and you’re probably really locked in to whatever it is that you’re doing.
Depending on the job you have, each of these modes might have different times spent on them. For example, a construction worker or someone working in engineering might not want to experiment and be creative too much, but rather they want to work with what they know will work well and be effective.
You need to have separate times of the day for each one to take place. You might be more focused in the mornings, but more creative at night, or vice versa. If you try to force the two together, you won’t be happy with the results.
You’re either going to end up stifling your creativity with an over-focused mind, or you’ll have a mind that’s too open that ends up hurting your productivity. Test your timing and strengths and see what works best for your schedule and planning.
It’s very easy to get distracted these days. In addition to the normal situation of people trying to get you to do different things, you also have the distraction of technology that allows you to focus on all kinds of things at the same time.
This can be a big problem for your creativity, and might end up being the reason that your creative projects are taking longer. Multitasking is usually seen as a beneficial trait. In many work-related situations, it is.
You’ve probably encountered times when you’ve gotten into a creative flow, where you’re working well and you’re quickly moving along with your work. This flow is key to quickly finishing good creative projects, because it’s the time when you’re working at max efficiency.
The only thing is, this flow requires focus on the project at hand only, and if you’re getting distracted by other things, then you’re not going to be able to maintain that flow. You may not even notice that you’re multitasking when it happens.
You might see it as a normal part of your work day, where, while you’re working on a project, you stop for a short bit to work on something else before quickly getting back to the project at hand.
It might also be a situation where you’re doing something congruently with the project, such as making a phone call or reading some emails. Multitasking forces you to break your focus, even if just for a moment, and your mind has to quickly play catch up to get back to where you were.
Going through the movie all in one sitting without any distractions is like cutting out multitasking. It goes fast, and is also the best way to do it. You can pause the movie and do other things in between scenes, or you can mess around on your phone while it’s running, but that’s going to cause you to lose focus and make the whole process take longer.
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 😊
Creativity is sometimes a difficult process to capture, and you can’t force it.
When you are trying to get into the creative flow, it can sometimes be difficult to get ‘into the zone’ and get the creative juices flowing.
That being said, there is always a way to dial in your focus and get the best creative work out of you, from devising the optimal workspace to choosing the right tools and even whether it is a good idea to collaborate with others on a particular project and we are going to look into these options right now. Use them to boost your creative thinking to get things done.
The environment that you choose to work in can have a significant impact on your performance. The way your workspace looks and feels and how it’s set up can completely change your ability to work well, both creatively and normally.
It’s a copy-paste design that’s easily manufactured and highly efficient to build, but is absolutely awful to work in. Plain, bland, neutral colors in an area that looks nearly identical to everyone else’s, with very little in terms of customization.
This type of space will stifle your creativity for sure, and may not even be the best place to focus for some people. The first thing you’ll want to do when creating your own workspace is think about the aesthetics and décor you select.
It may seem unimportant, but if you’re going to be spending hours upon hours in this same place each day, you’re going to want it to look nice. Get comfortable furniture for you to use.
So many office chairs are uncomfortable, so get yourself a nice, ergonomic chair that you can stand to sit in for hours at a time. Additionally, get yourself a top-quality desk that fits your space well and has everything you need, from drawer space to the right height to fit your personal build and preferences.
Don’t shy away from putting up decorations. Don’t just go for the typical office motivational posters but put up stuff that you actually like the look of. Some people might put up some floral designs, while others might prefer a more old-style wood design.
Get your computer and monitor set up, and maybe even a phone charging station. For creative designers, have a drawing tablet set up that you can work with. You can even include amenities like a mini fridge that might not be directly related to work, but still make the place nice (and convenient) to work in.
The idea is for you to create an atmosphere that you really don’t mind spending time in, because if you hate your office space, you’re definitely going to lose your focus and stifle your creativity.
Technology and the tools we use to boost our productivity are usually discussed in tandem, and for good reason. Technological advancements have made productivity go through the roof, allowing people to communicate and work faster than ever before.
Choose your tools wisely in order to better focus while you’re working. For example, if you’re a graphic designer, and you use a tablet to do your work, such as an iPad, you’ll know that it’s not just a device for drawing and designing.
Rather, it can instantly access movies, TV shows, social media, and more. If you’re easily distracted, then you’re left with a tool that can instantly allow you to distract yourself, if you so choose.
If you can instead do your design work with the simple pencil and paper, and later on transfer it to your photo editing program of choice by scanning it, then you won’t be distracted during the creative design process.
The final touches of it can be done using technology, but all of the meat of it can be made without distractions with the bare essentials. Another example would be a writer using a laptop.
Sure, it has things like Word on it that you can use to work, but it of course has the internet, which can quickly suck you in if you’re not careful to avoid distractions.
In this case, writing out something long like a book or something would be a bit much to ask using paper and pen, but you could possibly have a separate work laptop, one that’s disconnected from the internet so that you don’t run the risk of getting distracted.
For example, someone who is new to Photoshop might be quite intimidated when they open it up and are presented with so many different options. You could spend hours upon hours going through all of the different options, settings, and tools in that program, but instead you need to focus on your work and be productive.
If a program of that calibre is intimidating and distracting, try using a more basic one that you can use to focus.
Having people to work with on creative projects can be both a blessing and a curse. While it’s true that others can provide you with additional insight and more inspiration than you originally had, it can also harm your creativity in two main ways.
If you’re no longer used to working on your own, you can become overly reliant on others to bring their ideas to the table so that you can adapt and mould them into your own.
Without your own sense of raw creativity, when you start to work on your own, you’re going to feel a little bit lost. What tends to be more common though, is other people’s ideas intruding on your own, and muddling your vision of your work.
It might seem a bit pretentious to claim that you work best on your own, because you don’t want other people’s ideas interfering, but sometimes it’s very true. If your vision isn’t complete when other people start to comment on it, it can veer you off from your original completed concept that would’ve been better than what they steered it towards.
Commentary and suggestions are welcome after the fact in order to adapt your idea to better suit your needs, but that should come after the initial draft, so to speak. It’d be like if you were writing something, and someone behind your back started throwing out words while you were mid-sentence.
One very common one is through social media. Posting work-in-progress items online opens up a floodgate to the masses, allowing them to throw in whatever off hand comments and critiques they might have, which can really get in your head and make you second guess yourself.
Another common way this happens is in person. While you’re working, people might walk by and make suggestions or criticisms, and while they may or may not mean well, it can still be very distracting and very frustrating to deal with.
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 😊
