Creative Buffer
I haven’t been as consistent as I would’ve liked in the past few days. I can only say that I’ve had a small bout of writer’s block. I’ve probably written six or seven posts before this one to try and capture my current mood and try educate people at the same time but I’ve failed numerous times. On this attempt I told myself I would post this one no matter how bad it was otherwise this cycle would continue indefinitely.
Sometimes we’re uninspired to create. Creation takes a lot out of us as it forces us to dig deep to make something out of nothing. It’s impossible to create non-stop without eventually getting to a place where you’ve created as much as your imagination will allow and you feel like you need a break. Before I started consuming Gary Vaynerchuk content in 2016, I probably would’ve gone on a one month break to try and find my creative form. I would have had some time off and come back even harder. The problem with that approach is that after a month, people forget you exist. With the way people are dropping music so often and the amount of picture and video content we all consume on a daily basis, your content quickly falls to the back when it comes to priority. I couldn’t have this so I started adopting strategies that helped me continue to put out new stuff without looking like I’ve gone on a massive holiday and forgotten about my listeners.
The first thing I did back then was to set up a creation schedule. Now I know what you might be thinking, but this is more of a guideline than an actual fixed schedule. For example, the schedule says to make a minimum of one beat a day, but if I feel extra inspired then I’ll pop out an extra one or two. It’s the same with blog posts. On a good day I can come up with three or four pieces of writing. The reason for over-delivering on those inspired days is to ensure that I have extra content for the days when I’m not available to make anything. This means that I can take my one month breaks and they’ll only look like one week breaks because of all the extra stuff I have in place. Think of it as a creative buffer.
The second thing is to seek balance. Making time to do things that aren’t related to your craft is a good way to go because this allows you to gain new perspective and it gives those creative centres a break. After you recoup you miss how busy you were and rush back to your craft without hesitation. I miss my 9 to 5 for this aspect. My daily hustle at the clinic forced me to take time off music and this made me miss it more. Every day I would come home with extra hunger and fire to create or work on projects because that’s all I could think about from my lunchbreak until the end of the day.
The third thing is seeking innovation. I spend a healthy amount of time looking at new technologies and new methods of doing things to try and integrate them into what I’m doing. I know it’s difficult to dedicate time to it in this day and age because we’re all so busy and the day can always get away from us but new methods might allow you to speed up old processes and save loads of time. Time is money so you’re actually working on ways to save all-round. Another thing that speeds up old processes is cleaning up clutter. If you’re a music producer, go into your archive and sort out your sounds. Understand what you do have so that you can actually make use of it. I hear about people having 500GB of sounds and I wonder if they know what on earth they have. At this point, my entire studio backup is 250GB and that includes everything from vocals to sound packs. If you’re a vocalist, sort out your inspiration, go back and analyse your old music and songs you’ve done in the past to compare points that you can improve on. There’s always something we can do to improve what we do.
In Conclusion, keeping up the creativity at all times is a struggle and it’s never easy to consistently put out good work, but it really does help to take control of your situation and develop methods to combat any creative block as opposed to sitting and waiting for your creativity to return. Your fan base will appreciate you for this.
