Creative Productivity

Photo by Fiona Murray on Unsplash

What does it mean to keep a schedule?

Is it a means of increasing our regular productivity? Does it help us to stay focused when life throws a curveball our way? Is it a means to manage our executive functioning, releasing the stress of making a million decisions each day?

In this modern age of the internet, smartphones and social media, scheduling has taken on new levels of urgency for many artists and creatives. We may feel the urge to use a schedule to keep up with or to combat the powers of an algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, trying to keep one step ahead of a culture machine that is field by forces that we don’t fully understand.

Artis have always struggled in a society that equates time to wages. What is the value of a poem, or a piece of art, when it cannot be sold at market? How do we determine the value of the time we spend in creative reverie when there is no obvious financial compensation for our work?

These and other questions drive many of my questions about productivity. I have always wanted my creative work to have a purpose in the world. Not because I hoped to be compensated for it (although as a younger artist I did dream that creativity would be my job) but so that I can feel as though I am making a significant positive contribution to society.

I find myself asking whether I am doing enough with my talent, if I am pushing myself to achieve at the level of which I am capable. It seems as though I am never satisfied, always chasing the next level of available growth and expansion. Part of this is simply my personality — I’ve always been driven by excellence and to some extent motivated by external reward, by the pleasure of being seen and recognized for my work. It doesn’t matter if it;s good enough for me; it must also be deemed good or helpful by my community for me to be satisfied.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. It helps me tune my creative efforts in such a way that I am able to scratch the itch of making utilitarian art. The drawback, however, is that I sometimes find myself searching for a reason to create.

My purpose in writing today was really to explore the question of why I don’t write more often. Is it because I don’t enjoy it, or is it because I don’t feel that it has a strong enough purpose in my community? Am I doubting the power of my own voice? Am I afraid to show up and be authentically present?

This may be part of the equation. A more distressing thought is that I have been trained by social media to view my own work and creative voice through a certain lens, one that is bounded by the value of what I write and publish in terms of how it can drive my “business”, increase “growth” or generate “engagement”.

This is a troubling thought. The lure of social media success is a trap I too easily fall into, with my innate desire to have my work valued in the community space. But this way of thinking too often prevents me from creating for the right reasons. Writing is hard work, and whether I like it or not is hard to discern when I can easily talk myself out of doing it in favor of creating a simple reel or doing a collective tarot card pull. Being on Substack has made me curious about what might happen if I write more regularly again. What would happen if I created a writing schedule that was primarily for myself instead of my audience? What would it feel like to practice writing again, with the goal of honing my craft more so than garnering approval from others?

Such an experiment is appealing to me, since I feel a bit disconnected from the kind of blogging I did over fifteen years ago, before social media became the pervasive force it is today. It was fun to document my life and adventures in creative format without thinking about how it would be picked up or shared by the algorithm.

I’d like to capture that same enthusiasm for documenting my life that seems to have been co-opted by the structure of current platforms. Writing for myself, yet sharing it with others, has fallen by the wayside for me and I’m curious if I can recapture the magic for myself yet create something interesting in the process.

In this case, keeping a schedule is keeping a commitment to myself to engage in creative work regardless of the outcome, in order to sharpen my skills and get in touch with a part of my artist’s life that needs to be revived.