Limit Creative Time for More Creativity

When it comes to creativity, less is more. Giving yourself limited time to express your creativity can create an environment and situation where your creativity decides it cannot be contained and starts to bloom in ways it hasn’t before.

Because I have a day job and also a professional side hustle, when I first started focusing on the side hustle, I felt like I needed to squeeze all my contributions into the weekend in order to maximize my time creating content and building out my platform.

So I scheduled time on my calendar in the weekends only. A block of hours on Saturdays and a block of hours on Sundays.

Well, that failed immediately.

And then kept failing over and over again.

It wasn’t until I got really specific and set a goal to improve my writing habits that I decided to break things down into small daily chunks rather than giant ones only twice a week.

See, the problem was, I had other stuff I could only do on the weekend when I wasn’t working. And also, my stamina to stick with the creative work for hours at a time dwindled quickly.

Finally, I got sick of myself not achieving my goals and instead set out the habit-forming goal of writing for only 30 minutes a day, every day, for a specific span of time. Surely I could find 30 minutes to spend on this effort daily and for only two months while the kids were on summer break.

While it was difficult, it was also really accomplishable. Even if all I did was journal in bed before falling asleep, I had achieved my goal. And aside from achieving my goal, I found that limiting myself to 30 minutes came with a positive side effect:

My brain refused to shut down!

I would start on a topic, and then, when I stopped my daily task after reaching the 30 minute mark, I found that my brain didn’t have a chance to wrap up the complete thought and so, kept going! What I thought would be a single post turned into my brain going through all the different applications or iterations of the information in the background of my day. I could barely keep up! Single posts turned into series. Small ideas suddenly flourished and grew bigger than I imagined!

I had been worried that I would run out of ideas quickly because powering through my current topic list daily had proved to be very productive. But then the ideas just…