Productivity Tips For Creatives: Let’s Meet Those Deadlines

Being a creative can be a lot of pressure most of the time. People automatically expect you to be a steaming bubble of ideas shooting answers and solutions out of your loins way before they can blink. Often forgetting that creatives are human too. And they too experience burnouts, moments where they feel like they’ve run out of ideas and need some sort of refill.

Creatives on a schedule

One major characteristic of a creative is their incredible attention to detail. Imagine, as a creative, you’re walking down the street, probably for an evening stroll. Your eyes capture a sight while walking and all of a sudden, you’re being hit with amazing inspirations from all sides. Constantly experiencing moments like this might begin to feel overwhelming and a lot to handle at some point. As a result, many creatives have a hard time working on a schedule (the spontaneous influx of ideas is real). Some find it a lot more convenient to let their spontaneity take the lead.

However, when creatives find themselves in organizations or working with teams, they are always gonna be constrained by deadlines at which they must deliver. Being productive within the constraints of a deadline soon becomes a priority.

These “productivity tips for creatives” would help you stay on top of your tasks and deliver your projects before deadlines.

Productivity Tips For Creatives

Save High Priority Task for Peak Hours

As a creative, if you’re very self-aware or self-observant, you’ll notice that there are certain hours of the day when you’re most productive. These hours are known as your peak hours. And as everyone is unique, these peak hours vary from person to person. For some people, it could last for an hour, and for others, it could last for 2 hours or more.

Discovering what your flow hours are could help you to properly appropriate schedules for your high-priority tasks. As we tend to be most creative during our peak hours. This way, it makes it a lot easier to do the most creativity-demanding work efficiently, thus improving productivity.

Related: How To Stay Focused In Your Workplace

Place Creativity Boosting Constraints on Yourself

Have you ever caught yourself working better when you are given limited time-related resources? This is the awesome magic that constraints have the ability to wrought on us.

When resources are abundant, there’s less incentive to do things in a creative way.

Putting a constraint on the amount of time you work on a particular project is an even more effective way to boost your creative genius and problem-solving skills. Fix a time constraint for yourself, preferably before the results are required, set the bar high enough to really be a challenge, and constrain you enough to produce better results—but not so high that you shut down the creative process. Match these constraints with your peak hours and watch your productivity sky-rocket.

Use productivity tools

There are lots of tools that can help you manage your priorities and get the needed work done when it should be done.

Any-do is an amazing virtual to-do list where you can organize your tasks, lists, and reminders all in one place. It syncs seamlessly across all of your devices, so you can keep on top of your tasks everywhere. Panda is another fantastic tool that helps in bringing everything you need into one web page, saving you time that would have otherwise been spent trawling through different websites for inspiration.

Focus booster, last pass, rescue time, forest are some amazing apps you could use.

Get the required amount of sleep

Creativity flows better when there is an appropriate release of dopamine and serotonin in the brain. These hormones are responsible for regulating main bodily functions including mood, alertness, cognition, and concentration. Where these hormones are abundant, creativity flows seamlessly.

Stress inhibits the release of dopamine and serotonin hormones

One way to ensure the release of these hormones is to ensure you get the required amount of sleep as this is one sure way to reduce stress. When we are stressed, we want to save brain energy and as a result, we prefer to tow familiar paths. Refusing to let our minds wander abroad and beyond. This is a red flag for creativity.

The body needs up to two hours of deep sleep every night to get your serotonin levels back where you want them. And you can usually only slip into deeper states of sleep if you’ve been asleep for a while and gone through some REM sleep.

Even as a creative, it is very much possible to exert some level of control over your creative influx. This enables you to meet deadlines, and deliver tasks on time.

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