The Up-Keep / The Keep-Up
Keeping up with content
Starting / maintaining (finishing - the work is never done)
being overwelmed
The current state of how we consume content has greatly increased. I believe this is due to the moves consumer tech has been making in today’s market in the past few years, mainly mobile technology. If you’re a church your expected to have a podcast. If you’re an artist you expected to be on Apple Music, Spotify or Amazon. If you’re a designer you’re expected to have a Behance, website or blog to share your process. All these demands that we feel like we have to meet...it all seems exhausting.
I had a conversation with my chiropractor this morning about some past and resent projects Ileana and I have been currently working on for IB. He was quite interested in what I was telling him. I knew what his next phrase was going to be. “Do you have a website?” “I most certainly do!” In the back of my mind all I could think about was how behind I am on updating all the content..blogs, films, photos, other projects. That sense of being overwhelmed suddenly came back. What’s funny is that my doctor and I started talking about that very thing, how most creative professionals get so busy working on other clients work that they leave their own projects for last.
When I got home I told Ileana about that moment. We begin to list off the number of creatives we follow and saw how active they were in producing content for their clients and how long ago their latest blog post was on their personal site.
We get overwhelmed with ideas
Starting is always exciting
Maintaining is the real drag
Where is that same excitement from the start?
How we prevent that:
Bring others along on the journey
Different personalities can bring life to a project
They are also capable of seeing things that one solo person working on it can see
Visit often / set frequent goals
Weekly meetings, goals, bench marks
Find people who do it better than you
Some thrive off competition while for others it keeps them inspired
but let’s get real
Keeping up is one thing, up keeping is something totally different. It requires another discipline (sometimes many others) that needs to be developed. I for one, don’t have the natural disciplines to up keep ideas. I may have ideas that can keep up with today’s trends but now, more than ever, the up keep discipline are currently in develop-mode for me. Having either isn’t a bad thing but I believe where many creatives are is in the grind of always creating new things they are super sporadic. One week would be a fashion blog, another week it’s selling t-shirt’s on Etsy, coffee review blogs, then People of NY type of thing on Instagram.
At this point of my career I’m starting to understand the importance of execution and consistency. Get me together with another creative and we can have enough ideas that would start up a new country! That country will so crumble because with all the ideas that were given, executing a plan and maintaining all ideas for future decades is just far too...nerve racking. The last thing we need is yet another idea. Let’s actually stick to something we can properly and creatively maintain. You know the saying, quality over quantity. I would rather my next vacation be something of value having fewer activities I would thoroughly enjoy than having a bunch of activities being stressed out jumping from thing to thing.
I believe thinking this through has much to do with the art of enjoying the process.
self assessment
What are some things I need to stop doing to be more productive?
What 1 idea can I rally around and make it the best putting all creative energy into?
What are the ideas I can lay to rest for now until the right time, right season comes around?
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