How To Optimize Your Creative Time As A Soloist: Get Tactical

There’s a misconception about creativity as a soloist: that you need huge swaths of free time to be creative.

Sure—sometimes we need those chunks of time to think big thoughts and move our ideas out of our head into sharable form.

But most of us can be highly creative even with small buckets of time. (BTW, we just recorded a podcast episode on this, so if you want a deeper dive, check it out here).

When prepping for that episode, I started noticing how even small time bits can be turned into something interesting, useful or occasionally even mind-blowing.

The trick is to get highly tactical, which might look like:

Making a big picture list of the creative projects you want to work on—like “design new productized service” or “develop roadmap for ideal clients to sell on my website” or “write and publish book”.

Attacking one of those projects by breaking it into smaller steps—conduct listening tour, define audience for productized service, determine client outcome(s), write process outline, research competitive offerings, test pricing, write landing page  (notice how some of these can be accomplished in a short session).

Blocking out critical time on your calendar for the mission-critical—I did this with 2-hour chunks when I drafted my book for example.

Rethinking all of those tiny bits of free time that present themselves unexpectedly in the course of your day: the half hour between meetings, the client who just pushed your call out 15 minutes, the dentist running late.

Changing your mindset so that every block of free time looks like an opportunity to creatively indulge.

Because when you’re running an expertise business, your future depends on thinking, writing and speaking—all creative acts.

Think of making time for them as the treat you give yourself, your audience and your business.

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