The Key to Remaining Creatively Flexible in a Chaotic World
Births and deaths, sickness and weddings, holidays and emergencies—life keeps throwing curve balls, whether we are ready for them or not. Maybe your air conditioning goes out, and you can’t write at home in a heat wave. Or an event creeps into your calendar a week before you’d planned, and you can’t stick to your regular schedule. As professional writers and creators, we can’t regularly brush off working during busy times. While we need to follow a regular work and writing schedule, we also need to flex around plot twists without letting them disrupt the flow of work entirely.
When Schedules Shift
If other responsibilities are rearing their heads and your work time has shortened or your schedule changed, here’s your checklist to keep your writing—and other work—top of mind.
- Prioritize: What are your bare-minimum goals? These are the things that absolutely must happen for your work. They also need to be realistic to the time you have; understand that, depending on the interruption, the day may not be “business as usual.”
- Plan: Break those goals down into smaller, manageable pieces. Create your plan, and make it as specific as you can to help you stay focused. Use strategies like time-blocking and lists to make the most of your work time.
- Implement: Follow the plan. Be sure you include breaks and consider the new time constraints you have, but get to work.
When Wellness Comes before Words
Of course, adjusting to life’s interruptions is not always as simple as shifting when or how much you work. Some situations, such as a death or illness, require a different response. For those times when you need more care and support, consider a broader strategy:
- Focus on what you can control. What can you reasonably accomplish? What can you impact? These questions apply to both work and life and will help you establish what work you can do. Set the minimums you need to accomplish to keep your business going. In stressful times, life can feel out of control, but there are always things you can affect, and that’s where your focus should be.
- Take actionable steps toward your goals, no matter how small. Each step counts!
- Keep going and build your momentum. Small wins can help you push forward, but don’t go overboard and push yourself too hard.
- Take care of yourself. It might look different from normal, but understanding what you need to do to care for yourself can help you manage. Maybe you need quiet to process, or time and space to grieve. Maybe you need a loud, raucous dinner with friends.
- Emphasize progress over perfection. It will not be easy, and it will not be perfect. But every bit you add to your goals helps you get there.
We all want our work to go exactly as planned. But when something interrupts the flow, it just might change the work. Sometimes your experience will add new depth to what you’ve been writing. Sometimes you experience a boost as you get clarity on a situation. Sometimes there is nothing to do but extend your deadline and deal with the consequences.
And that’s okay, too. Life isn’t smooth sailing. We take those interruptions and build resilience that can help us in our future projects and lives in general.
Just keep going.
Jen B. Green