“There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.” – Jonathan FieldsAs a creative entrepreneur, do you find yourself falling into the popular cult of being busy? Me too, I’m raising my hand here. In some mompreneur and blogger circles where I hang out on social media, being busy has become super trendy and popular. Being busy means that we’re clearly filling our time with something useful and meaningful, right? Brad and I started digging into this and we discovered that busy doesn’t equal productivity. In fact, they’re actually not the same thing at all.So what are the 3 biggest productivity challenges for us today? Let’s dive in…1. Constant hyperactivity.Every time we pause for a moment standing in line at Starbucks, the bathroom, or the grocery store, we’re checking your phone. Or first thing in the morning when we’re most creative and our thoughts are open, we’re scanning the headlines for the day. We’re actually stealing away our productivity and trading away opportunities for our brain to generate those great flow ideas.2. Lack of planning.Overwhelm always flows from lack of clarity and lack of clarity flows from lack of planning. That all starts with a big plan, a one-year plan, a two or three-year long vision. All the way down to a quarterly plan, to a monthly plan, to a daily plan. Those structures and systems are in place to support the plan productivity, so that we both have space for creativity and flow.3. Rebelling against structure.Consider introducing creative constraints into your work, which is where you commit to getting a project done in a certain amount of time. Or where you only have one browser window open with some content direction versus creating in a total vacuum. Famous writers talk about showing up every single day to write. When it comes to building your business, you have to show up to build your business every single day.Now that you’re aware of the 3 biggest productivity challenges, meet us over at the podcast to discover how they’re disrupting your genius ideas and creative flow.Join the Creative Business AcceleratorIf you’re ready to stop working all the time and making yourself crazy, and instead want to get focused and clear so you can attract high-end clients, make great money and have a thriving business, then it’s time to become a member of the Creative Business Academy!Free Gift:Downloadable 30-Day The Artful Profit Planner [Link]TranscriptShow Transcript (3,643 More Words)Speaker 1: Welcome to the Path to Profit podcast. With your hosts, Dr. Minette Riordan and Brad Dobson.Brad Dobson: Hi. Welcome again to Path to Profit podcast. This is take three.Minette Riordan: Take three? I think maybe it’s take four.Brad Dobson: With this episode between, let’s see, the cat brought a lizard in. I had a brain fart. I’m not sure where we’re going with the other take. Anyways, welcome. This is our last episode for productivity month. Today we’re going to talk about creative entrepreneurs three biggest productivity challenges. I’m Brad Dobson. This is my wife, Dr. Minette Riordan. Welcome, again.Minette Riordan: Welcome. Are we here this time?Brad Dobson: I think so.Minette Riordan: It’s a Friday afternoon in Santa Barbara as we’re recording this. It’s really quite a lovely day, and I think we maybe we have a little Friday end of the week brain fuzzy going on.Brad Dobson: I’m wondering whether Friday’s is not the right day to record podcasts.Minette Riordan: Yeah. Maybe not. I don’t know if we’ve ever recorded one on a Friday before.Brad Dobson: Anyways. We’ve got a good show for you this time.Minette Riordan: The reason we’re recording on a Friday is because we didn’t manage our time really well this week.Brad Dobson: That’s true. That’s true.Minette Riordan: Because when we talk about productivity on the Path to Profit podcast it’s usually pretty personal.Brad Dobson: Yeah. Yeah.Minette Riordan: Like we’re speaking to ourselves as much as we are speaking to all of you.Brad Dobson: It’s self coaching in a lot of cases.Minette Riordan: It is totally. It is totally self coaching. And we planned the topic a long time ago. We’ve kind of been playing and toying with these ideas and doing some research, and we think we’ve come up with three of the biggest productivity challenges that we know that we struggle with and that we hear from our clients, and we’re hoping that they resonate with you as well. We find that productivity is one of the biggest reasons why creatives are not making a profit in their business. It’s how they’re using their time.Brad Dobson: Oh, definitely. Absolutely.Minette Riordan: Including us.Brad Dobson: And you chose a great quote to go with this.Minette Riordan: I did, didn’t I?Brad Dobson: From Johnathon Fields.Minette Riordan: Aren’t I smart?Brad Dobson: I held it far enough away, I can see it.Minette Riordan: Where’s your glasses?Brad Dobson: There is often a huge chasm between being busy and being productive.Minette Riordan: There is. There is a huge chasm. It’s been really interesting in some of the mompreneur circles and bloggers and places where I spend a lot of my time on social media hanging out. There’s this whole feeling that there is a cult of being busy. That’s it become trendy and popular to be perceived as busy, because if we’re busy then we’re filling our time with something useful and meaningful. But what we discovered with ourselves and our clients is being busy and being productive are actually not the same thing at all.Brad Dobson: Oh yeah. They’re a long way apart. And these days we’re not peasants where the only thing that you had to do was stuff on the farm or things like that. It’s so easy to fill your time in today’s world with media consumption.Minette Riordan: If you do own a farm, it’s easy to fill your in between times.Brad Dobson: Exactly. The net result is filling your time with looking at your phone and reading all of the latest notifications and things like that. You lose the spaces in between, which is coming from this article that Minette has found about the creatives kryptonite.Minette Riordan: Yeah. It was a great article by Johnathon Fields. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. It was called, Creative Kryptonite and the Death of Productivity. He talks about two specific areas where hyperconnectivity and hyperactivity are actually the creative’s kryptonite. It comes often from what he calls filling the spaces in between. Every time you pause for a moment at a stoplight or you’re standing in line at Starbucks or the grocery store, you’re checking your phone. Or when you go to the bathroom, you’re checking the phone. Or when you first wake up in the morning when you’re really creative and your thoughts are really open, you’re grabbing your phone. We’re actually interrupting our own creative flow and the ability for our ideas to take seed and to germinate and burst into full bloom. Often times our best ideas come and our best solutions to problems come when we’re not paying attention and not being busy. When we’re going for a walk, when we’re taking a shower, when we’re making art or doing something completely different, writing in your journal, going for a way to long bike ride like Brad tends to do in his iron man training. This sense of hyperactivity as the thing that’s actually killing creativity is really sitting with me.Brad Dobson: Yeah. And it’s more than … you mentioned two things there. One is interrupting flow. Obviously distractions do that and that hurts us badly. It’s actually stealing away our opportunities for our brain to generate those great ideas. I found this personally … I’m a big podcast listener as you probably are as well. I spend a lot of time out on the bike or out running and I listen to a lot of podcasts. What I found was that I was actually listening to too many and filling those times where I ended up not taking my headphones for quite a number of rides just to get more spaciousness, because otherwise my brain didn’t have a chance to basically daydream. I think you can call it whatever you want. That daydreaming is actually super important time for creatives. It’s where the … literally the creative ideas come from. It’s your best stuff. If you’re filling your time and all those spaces in between with other things, forcing other media down your throat, you’re giving away that creative time.Minette Riordan: Oh, I don’t think we’re forcing it down our throat. I think we’re greedily gobbling it up and imbibing and circling in.Brad Dobson: Definitely. I brought this up in one of our other takes of this episode I brought this up. Our media and the notifications on our phones and stuff is designed a lot like potato chips are. They’re designed to invoke base level limbic responses to things, not high brain type of things. You’re actually in trouble with your phone, because it-Minette Riordan: It’s designed to be addictive.Brad Dobson: That’s right.Minette Riordan: It’s designed to get you to click and to read and to gaze at all the pretty pictures. I was having a conversation … one of our clients who was saying she’s like, “Aw, man. I really struggled this week. I had a total fall back.” And I’m thinking, what? Fell off her diet, started drinking. I don’t know what she’s going to say. She’s like, “I put Candy Crush back on my phone.” I started laughing because I can completely relate with how additive Candy Crush is.Brad Dobson: That’s a great example. I saw a fantastic thing. It might have been on Lifehacker about one way to help yourself with your phone and screen addiction was to put your phone on gray scale mode. And I did this for a little bit. There’s instructions out there on how do that for Android and IOS. You realized very quickly and Candy Crush would be a great example of how much the color input is basically making you drool. Right?Minette Riordan: We kind of got a lot of color input going on around here too.Brad Dobson: It’s a Pavlovian response.Minette Riordan: Will that make you watch our YouTube videos more? If we just keep feeding you more color if you’re watching this on YouTube?Brad Dobson: No. You need the little flashing LEDs and stuff.Minette Riordan: Oh, little flashing LEDs or little PAC Man going across the screen.Brad Dobson: Hyperactivity.Minette Riordan: Hyperactivity is one of the biggest challenges. The solution to hyperactivity is just pausing. I think you can pause using technology to your advantage or setting up some rules for yourself. Brad recently wrote a great blog post on how he’s using mini focus blocks to stay on track. And just 10 to 30 minutes at a time of committing to sitting at his desk and working on a particular task or particular project. Not with any intention to complete it but just to make to progress on it. I think that’s a great solution. Having timers on your phone and alerts on your phone that remind you to stop, to start, to take a breath, to stand up, to move, to dance, maybe. I have one that pops up in the morning that says, how are your thoughts today? It’s a mindful pause to just have me check in and go, am I starting this day from a positive place and a positive mindset or am I feeling scattered and overwhelmed or negative and judgy? Just to paying attention to those thoughts can help us pause some of that hyperactivity.But another solution to hyperactivity and to constantly feeling in those spaces is one of the challenges and solutions that we see for our creatives all wrapped up in one light tangled hairball of yarn and that’s lack of planning. One of the things that we see happen so often. In fact, I was on a call with five women this morning on one of my pop up coaching sessions. One of them was saying, “I’m just not getting enough done.” Another one is saying, “I don’t know what to do.” And the truth is they’re not pausing and taking the time to figure out exactly what are the most important next steps to taking their business.I realized that Brad and I got a little scattered this week because over the last two weeks we got busy, we had clients in town, we had a couple live events we were hosting. We failed to do our weekly one hour planning where we iron out step by step, detail by detail, exactly what it is that we want to get accomplished that week. By the time Monday morning rolled around, we’re both going, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be working on.”Brad Dobson: That’s right. Our best work comes from having the spaciousness to have those planning sessions.Minette Riordan: Yep.Brad Dobson: It’s just critical. Otherwise, you’re just in reactive mode all the time.Minette Riordan: And we hear over and over and over again from clients, from people that respond to the podcast, from our different social media channels that the number one thing that creators are longing for is clarity. And one of the two or three number one challenges they’re facing is overwhelm. Overwhelm always flows from lack of clarity and lack of clarity flows from lack of planning. That all starts with a big plan, a year long plan, a two or three year long vision. All the way down to a quarterly plan, to a monthly plan, to a daily plan. Your eyes may be rolling back in your head going, I don’t have time to do all that planning. But I think it was Bryan Tracy that said, “Ten minutes of planning a day will save you two hours of work.” Ten minutes of planning will save you two hours of work.Brad Dobson: Yeah. A stitch in time saves nine. Right?Minette Riordan: A stitch in time saves nine. That’s another great one. Hadn’t thought about that one in a long time.Brad Dobson: It’s good for our makers out there.Minette Riordan: It is. I think that one of the things that I had to learn about having a business partner was how to be in co-creation in that way from a planning perspective and making sure that our plans were alive, that the structure and systems are in place to support the plan, so that we both have space for both creativity and we both have space and structure for keeping things going. Right? An online digital marketing business is like a perpetual machine.Brad Dobson: Yeah. If you’re out there and you’re working with a team, you’re working with your partner whoever that may be and you’re a creative and you’re not taking the time to plan and you just want to have everything loosey goosy, you’re being really tough on your partner. You need to step up and admit that. You need to make a change.Minette Riordan: Brad wrote a whole chapter in my book. I wrote a book a couple of years ago called, The Artful Marketer, A Fundamental Guide for Creative Entrepreneurs or something like that. It has a long subtitle. But it’s called, The Artful Marketer. It’s available on Amazon. I’ll give a little plug for that. It’s a great book. It’s everything that we teach and talk about on this podcast in a book format, if you love to read books. But Brad wrote the last chapter in the book about trying to survive working with a creative. It was even before we started working together.Brad Dobson: That’s right.Minette Riordan: We need to maybe update it now that we’ve been working together for two full years.Brad Dobson: Yeah. A little bit of cat herding, I think.Minette Riordan: There is maybe a lot of cat herding. But what I have learned from his systems genius is that concept of creative constraint. I love talking about the concept of creative constraint. It’s something that we teach in our school. It’s one of the design principles. That you actually are more creative when you have constraints in place.Brad Dobson: But I’m a creative and I don’t want all that structure. Ooh.Minette Riordan: But when somebody comes to you and says, “I need you to build X.” And they haven’t given you any direction, any tools, any colors, any rules or ideas.Brad Dobson: And you get a rocket plane with feathers and flags and trees.Minette Riordan: Well, it was like in the Lego movie, the couch.Brad Dobson: Yeah. Right.Minette Riordan: Right. Where he kept wanting to build a couch, and they were like, “We don’t need a couch.”Brad Dobson: Perfect example.Minette Riordan: It’s a perfect example. There was no use for the couch. He just wanted to create this double decker couch, if you haven’t seen the-Brad Dobson: Spaceship.Minette Riordan: Yes. The first Lego movie. It was awesome. But this idea of creative constraints is that when you commit to getting a project done in a certain amount of time or a small portion of a project, it’s like a creative constraint. Where you only have one browser window open and you already have some ideas for the content and the direction that you’re going depending on what it is that you’re creating. But when you try to create in a vacuum, it’s completely overwhelming and can instantly have that inner critic just totally becoming that fire breathing dragon, which is what I talked about in my blog post recently. But it all the sudden stops your creativity. By giving yourself some structure … and famous writers are the one’s who I think talk about this more than any other creative community. It’s showing up to write every single day. When it comes to building your business, you have to show up to build your business every single day.Brad Dobson: Yeah. Story boarding is good example for writers, as well. Right? There’s a structure to it. We have … if you’re looking on YouTube, we’ve got pre-show planning notes for this. We’re both pretty creative people, but we found that winging it just doesn’t-Minette Riordan: We tried. You probably listened to a couple of those episodes and wondered what the heck we were talking about.Brad Dobson: It just doesn’t all come together as well as opposed to having basically a story board that we can run against. That would be the number three major item.Minette Riordan: Challenge.Brad Dobson: Challenge for creatives is overcoming your need to-Minette Riordan: Go with the flow.Brad Dobson: Have everything just spontaneously happen. It’s like the thing about scheduling sex. Right? This came up again in the Gretchen Rubin’s book, Better Now … what is it?Minette Riordan: Better Than Before.Brad Dobson: Better Than Before.Minette Riordan: Yeah. Great book.Brad Dobson: It’s just one of those things that you can still be quite creative, but you needed to have a little bit of structure to make it happen.Minette Riordan: Yeah. And it builds anticipation too for sex and creativity. Right?Brad Dobson: That’s a good point.Minette Riordan: The thing is if I know that on Tuesday afternoon I’m going to writing a blog post about productivity, for example, then I’m thinking about it for days and days ahead time. I’m probably dreaming about it [crosstalk Brad Dobson: Unless you’re on your phone constantly.Minette Riordan: Unless I’m on my phone constantly. But even if I’m on my phone constantly, I’m usually surfing ideas and topics and looking for doing research. All these things are happening so that by the time I show up to my keyboard to actually write the blog post and I have that constraint in place, it flows more easily. I think what we’re super passionate about is that it’s systems and flow combined that create productive brilliance. It’s not systems versus flow. They’re not opposite principles. That the two of them actually work in concert together.Brad Dobson: It’s a whole yin yang thing.Minette Riordan: It is a whole yin yang thing. Yeah. I think we’re going to be diving even more deeply into this topic and we also hilariously [inaudible Brad Dobson: That’s right.Minette Riordan: And get me to be more creative. It doesn’t help when Phoebe brings lizards in. That’s two days in row. Yesterday I was in the middle of delivering a live lecture on Zoom, and she brought a lizard in like right under my feet. It was entertaining.Brad Dobson: Life’s like that, though. Isn’t it?Minette Riordan: Life is like that. Just kind of recap quickly because we could go on and on, I think, about this topic. But, hyperactivity is one of the biggest challenges we see creatives struggling with. Filling your calendar and your time, not just with too many activities, but with the wrong activities. And you’re filling your time with busy work because maybe you’re overwhelmed or you’re not clear exactly what the right activities are that you should be focusing on in order to build your business, which leads to the second business biggest challenge, which is lack of planning.Brad Dobson: Yeah. Overwhelm and chaos because you haven’t planned anything.Minette Riordan: Overwhelm and chaos. I know. I notice it now so much more than ever before will I get to my computer on a Monday morning and I go, “Wait. Wait. I don’t know what direction I’m supposed to be going or what I’m supposed to be doing.” All I need is 10 minutes to look at my notes, to look at our editorial calendar, which we talked about this month. And to look at our paper calendar as well. I’m like, oh yeah, we have a wall calendar. I’m pointing at it. You can’t see me pointing out it, but I’m pointing at it. We have a giant wall calendar with kind of our big rocks we’re working on. We have a desk calendar where we do all of our content planning. Then it all goes into a digital editorial calendar.Brad Dobson: Lots of stuff.Minette Riordan: And then into our personal to do list. This is a process, but once you understand the process it actually doesn’t take a significant amount of time.Brad Dobson: That’s right.Minette Riordan: And then the third challenge was belief that implementing structure impedes creative flow.Brad Dobson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).Minette Riordan: And to help them manage all that we have an awesome free gift for everybody.Brad Dobson: The Artful Profit Planner. It’s killer. It is a system.Minette Riordan: It is. I actually created a system.Brad Dobson: And it’s flow and art at the same time. It’s really cool. I strongly encourage you to look at the link in the episode notes, download it and print it out. Get yourself underway with a little bit more structure, a little bit more day to day spaciousness and some profit tracking, which is killer.Minette Riordan: Yep.Brad Dobson: In coloring.Minette Riordan: Yes. Lots of coloring. If you’ve been following our show at all for a while you know by now that I’m totally addicted to mandalas, into making art in all forms, but particularly to mandalas. Our son designed the mandalas that are in The Artful Profit Planner. If you’re driving and listening, artfulprofitplanner.com. Artfulprofitplanner.com. Totally free resource for you guys. I even made a fun video that teaches you how to use it. But it is a simple step by step system for getting shit done.Brad Dobson: Nice. Next week, next month it is March, is marketing month. Woo hoo.Minette Riordan: Woo hoo.Brad Dobson: All sorts of m’s. In episode 87, Minette got the title for this one. I’m not sure where she’s coming from. What is the title, Minette?Minette Riordan: Are You Trying to Feed Hamburgers a Crowd of Vegetarians?Brad Dobson: Ooh. I think we’ll leave you with that one. Think about that one.Minette Riordan: All right. We’ll see ya on the next episode.Brad Dobson: Bye, guys.Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.You can also view this call’s video recording on our Youtube channel.The post Episode 86: The Creative Entrepreneur’s 3 Biggest Productivity Challenges appeared first on Path to Profit Academy.