The RSS feed in your head

Spending too much time on production and project management? Stop it. Shame on you. These are the activities of sloth. No, not physical sloth. You can easily bury yourself in 80 hours of toil. But mental sloth. Because you know you should be working on the future, but you’re stuck in the present. Because the production is easier. Because it’s tangible. You get something checked off your list. And because future planning is equal parts fun and scary. Fun because, well, it’s fun. Scary, because you need to actually figure things out. And make decisions. Commitments. And to hope that the hope you have has the potential you think it does.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret about yourself. We are all blessed with a nice little RSS feed in our own heads. It runs with a constant stream of interesting thoughts and inspiring ideas. And in many cases, all you need is for one of those ideas to really work. It runs its best when you’re out and about, looking at things, talking, walking, or challenging yourself. It runs when you’re being creative. You know how it feels. When you not only have an idea, but you’re doing something with it. When it’s hard to tear yourself away from what you’re working on, because finishing it matters that much. It turns itself off when you do color correction, answer emails, and deal with the day-to-day tasks that we all have to deal with. It stays off when you work with toxic clients who kill inspiration and make you want to hit the local watering hole.

Listen to that RSS feed. A lot of people stall on it, only to let it wither and die. If you’re not getting great ideas, the problem isn’t that you don’t have great ideas. It’s that you’re not giving yourself enough room to find them. And that room is essential. The ideas tell you where you want to go, what you like to do, and how you see it all coming together. Let yourself breathe. Get out there, do things, and stave off the production, so you can turn the ideas into something real. After that, you can take a break and deal with the day-to-day. If you do it the other way around, you’ll never have the space to work on all that important tomorrow stuff that makes tomorrow worth it.