The internet never sleeps, and neither do creators.
We’re always juggling content creation, a never-ending to-do list and a constant stream of online comments and messages.
It seems no matter how hard we work, there’s always more to be done.
For most of us, what started as a fun after-hours project has turned into a 24/7 full-time gig. It feels like we’re always one step behind.
But that’s no surprise. I don’t really mind working hard as long as it allows me to do what I love. I bet you’re the same.
But, we need to find a way to make this work sustainable, otherwise we could face burnout. If you overwork yourself, you risk losing your passion for content creation which inspired you in the first place.
So, in this article, I’ll be sharing 10 productivity tips that have helped me stay on track and keep things sustainable on my creator journey.
Being a Creator is Tough
Being a creator can be more challenging than it seems.
Not only do we need to create high-quality content, but we also have to run our own business, be our own boss, and manage our own clients.
Because of this, there are a number of common challenges that we all face in the world of creative business:
- You’re creative. You like to work to your own rhythm but sometimes get swept of course by new ideas
- You’re probably focused on hitting big external milestones that you can’t actually control.
- You like being your own boss but you never have enough time to actually do the work of content creation.
- You catch yourself trying to do too much at once.
- You feel a little bit trapped on the content hamster wheel.
- Your motivation fluctuates along with your mood.
- You might feel like you’re falling behind.
My Top 5 Lessons for New Creators
To combat these challenges, we’re sharing our top 5 lessons for new creators. Each lesson includes 2 top tips which can help you put the lesson into practice, so you can take action straight away. These lessons are
- Time Is Your Most Valuable Resource
- Life Maintenance Is Not The Goal
- Play The Infinite Game
- Be Present And Intentional
- Stop Comparing Yourself
Let’s get into it.
Lesson 1: Time is your most valuable resource
We can always make more money, but we can never make more time.
As a creator, time is your most valuable resource. Just like we do with a bank account, we need to keep a close eye on how we spend our time.
We all have a never-ending list of projects that we’d like to do, whether that’s starting a YouTube channel, building a podcast studio, or editing your backlog of content.
But the unfortunate truth is that we just don’t have time for everything.
To become a great creator, we need to make the most out of our valuable time by only focusing on what matters most. You should only do the projects that are the most important to you.
In his book The Third Door, Alex Banayan tells the story of when he asked famous billionaire Warren Buffet about prioritisation.
Stepping up to the microphone in front of a packed convention centre, Alex asks:
“I’ve heard that one of your ways of focusing your energy is that you write down the 25 things you want to achieve, choose the top five and then avoid the bottom 20.”
Buffet replies:
“Well, I’m actually more curious about how you came up with it because it really isn’t the case – It sounds like a very good method of operating, but it’s much more disciplined than I actually am.”
But, even though the advice didn’t come from Buffet, Alex realised it was actually still solid advice, and Buffet even agreed.
This idea of energy prioritisation is key when it comes to preserving our valuable time and spending it wisely.
So to help you uncover which projects matter most, our first 2 tips are all about setting your priorities.
Tip 1: The Energy Investment Portfolio
Similar to Alex’s idea to think of 25 goals and then avoid the bottom 20, The Energy Investment Portfolio is all about prioritisation. It’s designed to help you think about all of the projects that you currently have, or would one day like to have, and then picking the most important few.
To do this, take a blank piece of paper or an empty Google Doc and split the page into two columns.
On the left, write a list of your most important active projects. This could be things like creating your next YouTube video, writing a book, or preparing for a podcast.
In the second column to the right, now list all of the projects you’d like to do one day. This list becomes your backlog.
The two lists combined give you a quick reflection of where your energy is currently being invested. As we only have a limited amount of energy, we need to make tough decisions to keep the active list manageable.
The idea here is to focus on completing your active projects, before transferring something ne over from the backlog.
This system is great for 2 main reasons:
- You can quickly share the doc with people to let them know how much you have on, and
- It helps you say no to new projects or pause active projects that aren’t as high priority as you first thought.
By monitoring your Energy Investment Portfolio you can start effectively managing expectations. Then, you can direct your energy towards the things that matter most.
Tip 2: The Ideal Week Method
Our Energy Investment Portfolio is a great high-level summary of our active projects. But what about our daily prioritisation?
The Ideal Week Method is a 3-step process that helps us visualise how we might spread our energy throughout each day. It works like this:
- .Your Average Week: Begin by taking a blank Google Calendar and start to add the tasks and routines that currently exist in an average week of your life. These include the time you wake up, the different slots of work you do, your hobbies, your eating habits and anything else that you do often.
- Your Dream Week: Next, take a second blank week in your calendar. Start to add the tasks and routines that would appear in your dream week. How would you live if you had freedom of time, money and location? Would you still work? Where would you go? How often would you see friends and family?
- Your Ideal Week: In a third blank week of your calendar, use your dream week to inspire some immediate change into your average week. Could you start to reprioritise your life slightly? Maybe you want to introduce a lunchtime walk with a friend, try some yoga in the morning or work from a new cafe once a week.
You’ll be surprised just how many changes you can make to align your average week towards your dream week when you really sit down to think about it.
By aligning ourselves towards our dream week, we start to reprioritise the more important things in life. You’ll also be making the most of your valuable time.
Something simple like creating your dream morning routine, and making it a priority every day, can give you a huge boost in productivity.
Lesson 2: Life maintenance is not the goal
When it comes to productivity, one mindset shift that creatives can struggle with is to recognise that life maintenance is not the goal.
There are broadly two buckets of ways to spend our time:
- Things that maintain the status quo (things that maintain our lives).
- Things that progress our lives forward.
Typically, when you work a traditional 9-5 job, most of the things you do outside of work will fall under life maintenance.
You’ll cook and clean, recharge in front of the TV, and catch up with friends. You’re not necessarily unhappy, but you’re also not putting any time into working on your big life goals.
Denis Waitley has a great quote on the importance of progress. He says:
“It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfilment, it is in the happiness of pursuit.”
Even creators, who have seemingly escaped the 9-5, need to be careful to avoid the life maintenance trap.
Rather than settling into the same routine and spinning the creator hamster wheel, you need to search for those extra ways to keep making life progress.
These are the things that lead to personal growth. They build new skills, unlock new ideas or deepen our relationships.
So how do we make sure we’re in the pursuit of progress? We set goals.
Setting goals – identifying the mountains we’d like to climb – gives us more than a reason to be more productive. It gives us purpose.
Tip 3: The 12-Month Celebration
Working towards something is profoundly energising. It adds a sense of fulfilment to all aspects of our lives.
So how do we decide on what we’d like to work towards?
The 12-Month Celebration helps you visualise the goals you might like to have for the next year.
First step, close your eyes.
Imagine that it’s 12 months from now and you’re having a huge celebration dinner with all of your closest family and friends.
The vibes are great. Everyone is super happy and the energy in the room is amazing.
One by one, everyone runs through what they’ve achieved in the last year, whether it’s promotions at work, completing a huge project, getting engaged, or any other cause for celebration.
After each announcement, everyone lets out a huge cheer as they raise their glasses to the sky.
Soon, your turn comes to share your achievements from the year.
Ask yourself: what would you like to be celebrating?
Then take a blank sheet of paper and write down your thoughts.
Keep your 12-Month Celebration handy, pin it to your bedroom wall, and revisit it as often as you can to remind yourself what you’re working towards.
Tip 4: Three Side Quests
The 12-Month Celebration is a great way to help find deep and meaningful goals for the next year. This next tip can help make these goals a reality.
To maximise the happiness of pursuit in all areas of our lives, we can create what I like to call Daily Side Quests.
Side quests are fun little short-term goals, like you might find in a video game. They run in parallel to the larger purpose of the journey.
By choosing three daily side quests – one for work, one for health, and one for relationships – we can use small goals to fill our days with purpose.
The beauty of side quests is that it doesn’t matter about the size of the goal. It’s the sense of pursuit and achievement that we’re looking for.
For work, you might like to set a quest of finding a new faster way to do some boring admin work.
For health, you might like to try a new exercise routine. Add some background music to see if it makes you train harder.
For relationships, you might like to see how many friends you can send a quick gratitude note to whilst you’re on your coffee break. Can you keep it heartfelt but concise?
These side quests can help you keep things in perspective. It’s easy to get caught up in the busyness of content creation, so don’t neglect the other areas of your life.
Lesson 3: Play the infinite game
When looking to boost our productivity we might be tempted to view life as a set of finite games: ones which have a start and end, a winner and a loser.
We’re often tempted to try and use productivity to speed up the game. We all want to ‘win’ as quickly as possible.
But our next mindset shift is to see life as an infinite game. The game will never be won and there will always be more work to do. The winner is simply the one who enjoys playing the game for its own sake.
However you’re spending your time, whether it’s creating content, working on a side hustle, or simply hanging out with friends, there will always be more that you could be doing.
There is always a new video idea, a new client demand, or a new place to go and visit.
So the key when it comes to playing the infinite game is to show up each day as our best selves. Then maximise our productivity by focussing on things in priority order.
If we can do that every day, we’re going to make consistent progress while enjoying ourselves. We’re not going to regret how we spend our valuable time.
Tip 5: Rest and recuperate
When we’re busy, it can be tempting to start missing breaks, skipping lunch, and working long hours. We can slip into the mindset that in order to get more done, we have to work harder.
But once we approach our work as an infinite game, we realise that applying a short-term solution won’t be sustainable in the long run.
Overworking ourselves one day will mean that we show up the next day feeling depleted. We’ll be over tired, struggle to focus, and we’ll make easily avoidable mistakes.
To show up as our best selves each day, we need to make sure we’re approaching work sustainably. This means taking the necessary breaks and rests so we can effectively recharge.
Once we’ve found a sustainable rhythm, we can then start to approach our work in order of priority. So, we can make sure we’re directing ourselves towards what matters most.
Tip 6: The myth of failure
As we start to approach our life as an infinite journey, we can begin to reframe failure. It no long has to holds power over us.
Many of us are held back by a fear of failure. The idea of not getting the result we want can stop us from even starting to begin with.
When we view life as multiple finite games, each failure can feel like a devastating end.
But once we begin to see that life is one long infinite game, failure becomes a stepping stone down the right path.
Instead of seeing each setback as an end to a game, we can start to embrace them as learning opportunities. They help us bridge from one lesson to another.
Each setback helps us grow and unlocks new skills and experiences that we’ll need along our journey.
Taking this growth mindset gives us permission to try new things – like starting a side hustle, training for a marathon, or asking out your crush on a date.
We recognise that each setback helps us move forward. It’s also okay if things don’t go as we expect them to.
It’s okay to fail. It’s all part of your journey.
Lesson 4: Be present and intentional
Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh – often described as the ‘father of mindfulness’ – founded the Plum Village Monastery back in 1982.
Throughout each day, a bell would sound to mark the beginning of each meditation session.
But the bells also had an intriguing secondary use.
Randomly during the day, the ‘ding’ of a bell would be used to stop people in their tracks and encourage them to be present.
Nhat Hanh’s called this the ‘awakening bell’.
We can use this idea to make sure we’re remaining present and being intentional with how we spend our time throughout each day.
Imagine a bell that goes off every 15 minutes or so.
When it sounds, ask yourself if you’re being intentional with your time.
Did you plan to spend the last 10 minutes scrolling through memes on your phone, or did you stay focused?
By using our imaginary bell, we can make sure we’re focussing on our highest priority tasks, instead of being distracted and getting off track.
Tip 7: Time Blocking
To encourage intentionality throughout our day, we can first make a plan of how we intend to use our time.
Similar to our Ideal Week Method, we can use a productivity tool called Time Blocking to roughly map out our day. By including rough blocks of time in our calendar, we can make a plan of what we intend to get done during.
The key here is to not overfill your day with unrealistic expectations.
In fact, scheduling 10-minute breaks to sit and relax on your phone might be a great way to work.
We want to find a balance that allows us to be intentional with our time, without feeling overwhelmed with tasks.
Once we have our time blocks organised, when we hear the ‘ding’ of our imaginary bell, we can quickly compare what we’re actually doing to what we had intended to do.
Tip 8: Track Your Time
Our second tip for acting with intentionality is to start using a time-tracking tool.
You might have heard the phrase “What gets measured gets managed”.
This means in order to keep an eye on how intentional we’re being, we need to start measuring how we actually spend our time.
This is a level above using our imaginary bell, as we can start to look at how we spend each minute of each day.
When it comes to time-tracking, there are broadly two types of tools:
- Manual apps, such as Toggl, or
- Automatic apps, such as Rize.
Regardless of which you choose, tracking our time can help us assess just how productive we are. We might begin each day with the best of intentions, but if we’re getting constantly distracted without realising it, then time tracking tools can help highlight where things are starting to go wrong.
Lesson 5: Stop comparing yourself
As a creator, it’s so easy to start comparing yourself to your competition.
Looking at whose audience is growing faster than yours, or comparing your view count to those of similar videos.
When it comes to looking at our performance, we first need to look internally. Ask yourself why you’re creating content in the first place.
To help, we can use the Growth to Fun Spectrum to get a feel for where our true intentions lie.
Every creator lives somewhere on the Growth to Fun spectrum: a scale that goes from “Optimising for growth” on the left and “Creating content for fun” on the right.
Serious business-focused creators might see themselves more towards the left side of the spectrum.
They’ll buy all the best gear, complete detailed competitor analysis, and try to cause a stir in their niche.
At the other side of the spectrum, hobbyist creators will make content they enjoy.
They’ll have fun during the process, make creative choices based on their enjoyment, and not really look at their competition.
Most likely, unless you have a business backing you, you’ll probably lie somewhere towards the fun end of the scale.
Tip 9: Measure the Gain, Not The Gap
Once you’ve identified if you’re prioritising growth or fun, you can then start to focus on how you measure your progress.
In their book The Gap And The Gain, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy introduce their idea of boosting our motivation by measuring the gain instead of the gap.
By default, most of us will measure the gap between where we are today and where we’d like to get to: our dream outcome.
We take the success of our favourite creators and compare the gap to where we feel like we are.
This can make us feel pretty demotivated, because we see how far we still have to go.
Plus, more often than not, we’ll start to move the goal further away as it gets within reach – meaning that the gap will never be closed.
Dan and Ben’s solution to this is to focus instead on measuring the gain.
By looking at where we first started and measuring the progress we’ve made, we can see just how far we’ve already come.
It can be really inspiring to look back on the past struggles you’ve overcome. This can lead to a huge boost in motivation to carry you forwards.
Tip 10: What’s Obvious To You Is Amazing To Others
Our final mindset shift to help you stop comparing yourself to others comes from best-selling author Derek Sivers.
He encourages us to recognise that when we’re just starting out, we take most of our knowledge for granted as we compare ourselves to the top experts in the field.
In his book Hell Yeah or No, he talks about the time he realised everyone seems to think their own ideas are obvious.
He says we undervalue our own ideas, which stops us from sharing our value with the world.
He asks us: “Are you holding back something that seems too obvious to share?”
To help us uncover the value of our existing knowledge we can use something called the 2 Year Rule.
Rather than thinking of yourself as an expert, think of yourself as guiding someone who is 2 years younger than yourself.
What advice would you give to someone 2 years younger than you?
What tip or tool would you have loved to have known about 2 years ago?
By leaning into the knowledge that we already have, we can stop comparing ourselves to those who are further along the journey, and instead focus on helping those who are just a few steps behind.
This mindset helped me overcome the fear of starting my own newsletter. I thought I wouldn’t have anything to share, but LifeNotes has loads of readers who just like advice and insights from someone who’s been there.
Level Up Your Systems
In summary, being a creator is challenging. It requires careful management of our time, energy and mindset.
By using these 10 productivity tips we can start to work sustainably on our work.
We can start to use our time most effectively, manage our difficult emotions and focus our energy towards what matters most.
Remember, being creative means to find the balance between choosing the most productive route and the most enjoyable route. We want to pursue what excites us whilst always enjoying the journey along the way.
If you’re a creator looking for a way to stay productive on your own terms, then I recommend checking out Spark 2025. It’s an online summit I’ll be running between the 4th-5th January 2025, designed to help you build your own sustainable productivity systems to get stuff done. You can reserve your free spot here.
