Tag: momentum

  • How to Push Through a Creative Drought

    I don’t know if it’s the workload or the time of year or just fatigue. But I’ve had a hard time being especially creative lately.

    That’s bad news for a person who runs a company called McLane Creative. My projects and my deadlines could care less how I’m feeling or if I’m inspired. There are people depending on my creative, timely solutions and that’s that.

    I have to push through. And I do push through. Getting stuff done is the bottom line.

    How I Push Through Creative Droughts and Get Stuff Done

    1. Rest – It might seem counter-productive when you have a deadline and are staring at a blank canvas or a mounting todo list, but the most obvious cause of a creative drought is a lack of rest and play. So take a nap in the middle of the day. Give yourself two hours to read a book and dose in the park. Take Saturday off. You are not a machine, you cannot produce 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. This isn’t a reality show. Making time to rest is the most productive thing you can do.
    2. Exercise – When I hit a creative wall during my day I take a walk. Pushing my son in the stroller or riding my bike for errands instead of driving or even doing jumping jacks in my office helps. I like to think of ideas as a heavy substance inside my body. When I get the blood pumping fast the ideas are able to get pumped up closer to my heart.
    3. Discipline – Sometimes I’m hitting the creative wall because I’ve procrastinated. But most often it’s because a project I finished in the past comes back for immediate changes and edits. That little bit of chaos throws me off. Instinct lies to me, building a desire to both finish my current project and go back and make some quick changes on the existing work. Being disciplined means pushing through what I’m currently working on and making late-breaking changes work with my schedule.
    4. Momentum – As creative people we know that productivity is the result of keeping the fly wheel going. So when I have something flowing I know I need to keep going, even if that means working until 1 AM. I’ve found that when I am in a drought I can’t build or sustain momentum. So set-up your work time or todo list in a way that builds momentum instead of starting and stopping all day.
    5. Change Mediums – Just about everything project I do will end up in a digital format. But when I’m not feeling it I’m quick to try another medium. I am not a great artist, but I use paper and colored pencils. Sometimes I go take photos of architectural elements for a project or shoot some video just to try to sparks something I wouldn’t have seen if I’d just sat down in front of my computer with Photoshop or Illustrator.
    6. Documentation – When things are really, really bad I spend 20 minutes taking all of my tasks for a project and adding them to a Google Docs spreadsheet. This turns my project into a series of small tasks that I can easily do without needing much creativity.
    7. Suspend reality – I have two offices. One in my home and one in shared, rented space downtown San Diego. (Little Italy) That helps me have fresh space in which to work. But sometimes I need to do even more than that in order to manufacture some creativity. Sometimes I work in a favorite coffee shop, sometimes  I book time to work for a day at a friends office, and sometimes I sneak a half day or whole day onto the end of a work trip just so I can work somewhere else. Suspending reality also means shutting down all of the distractions which pull you away from your creative space. (Shutting down chat software, putting your phone on silent and not returning text messages, logging out of Facebook and Twitter, etc.)
    8. Finish something – Perhaps my biggest droughts come when I have lots and lots of projects going and none of them finishing. I’ve found that finishing a project helps me be more creative on my others. It’s as if I can put that project behind me and that gives me more energy/space to think about the others. So finish something! (Or suspend another project to get it off your shoulders!)
    Photo credit: Dust Bowl 1936 by erjkprunczyk via Flickr (Creative Commons)

  • Manage Acceleration or Acceleration Manages You


    Back in college I had a job managing a group of machine operators. Part of my job was to make sure that the materials for the equipment were easily available to my team so that they could keep the machines running as much as possible. I taught my team to think of the machine as a cash register. When it stopped running the company stopped making money. With that simple mindset we were extremely efficient.

    Our materials came from various sources around the world, I purchased in bulk through a series of middle men, then stored the materials in our warehouse. In our department, we kept a small quantity and I would order replacement items on a regular basis and a different department would go get what I needed and bring it near our area of the warehouse and we would put stuff away.

    Typically, this was a smooth operation. But sometimes, like on a weekend or over a holiday, I would have to go out into the warehouse and get my own materials.

    Our stuff was densely heavy. So, I would take apart skids of materials on their shelves and put what I needed onto a very heavy hand cart one item at a time. Then I’d push as much as 1 ton of materials and put them away in our room.

    This cart was really cool in it’s simplicity. It had big steel wheels, heavy wood, and a massive steel bar for pushing or pulling.

    You know what was interesting about that cart? I could put thousands of pounds of materials on it, give it a big shove, and then walk along with it along the smooth concrete exerting very little effort. It took way more energy to stop it and start it than it did to just keep it going in a straight line.

    To keep that cart under control you had to find the right speed and apply an even amount of force. If you did that it was fine. If you didn’t apply enough force consistently you ended up working way too hard. But if you got going too fast… you would be out of control and you might not actually be able to stop it.

    I always feared that someone would walk out in front of me and I wouldn’t be able to stop the cart before it hit them. That never happened. But one of my co-workers did hit a very large steel post (buried in concrete) and bent it severely.

    That is physics in action. A giant mass doesn’t need to go very fast to apply a large amount of force against a stationary object.

    It is also a lesson in how momentum works. In order to keep moving with the least amount of effort, you have to apply a steady amount of force.

    I think the cart taught me a lesson way back that is easily applied to stuff I do today.

    Moving a lot of mass involves the right amount of force

    When I reflect on things that are out of control in my life… maybe I’m misapplying force? Maybe I’m going too slow and working to hard as a result? Maybe I’m going too fast and changing directions is just too difficult? And maybe I’m just not patient/disciplined enough to walk at the right pace or applying the right level of direction?

    Accelerate safely

    Too often, I have an attitude that I can do everything at once RIGHT NOW and all the time. And that means that things sometimes get out of control. Sadly, it also means that sometimes people get hurt.

    The role of friction

    The key to the cart working in the warehouse is that there’s very little friction between the steel wheels and the smooth concrete. That’s why its so important to keep the floor of a warehouse clean. Outside of the warehouse, friction is the variable in the equation that is not always under my control. In order to maintain momentum, I need to constantly monitor and deal with sources friction.