FINDING FOCUS IN THE CHAOS: Part One
An email series to help you with the overwhelm
Hello you!
One of the things creatives struggle with is focus. Creative brains more than others find the overwhelm of modern life… overwhelming!
Couple that with the fact that you’re trying to make a living from your passion and all the things that brings up and it’s not a recipe for an orderly mind or life.
So in this short series, I’m going to take you though some thoughts and ideas to help with this overwhelm, so that you can start to create focus and also joy in your creative working life.
So firstly let’s consider:
Why are we overwhelmed?
The main reason I think is the device you are using to read this email/ article.
Thanks to our phones and laptops, we simply have access to more ideas, more opinions, news, thoughts than ever before, and often in portable form.
So it’s not just the fact that we have the internet but also that we carry it with us wherever we go.
As creatives, we are partially lit up by this; after all, this is inspiration, ideas, newness, connection, all those things that we love.
But it is also overwhelm. It is too much. It is a way of comparing ourselves to others (often unfavourably), it is too much choice, too many things.
Just in the way that it’s very hard to pick dinner from a menu of thirty dishes, it’s hard not to feel overwhelmed with the information onslaught that so many of us expose ourselves to.
And also, the creative brain loves new ideas, so even if the ideas are all your own, it’s a matter of which to chose?
And don’t we often leap from task to task without completion? Aren’t we often guilty of trying to ‘multitask’ the hell out of our days? And, don’t we often drop something when it becomes too hard or not interesting enough and chase another more shiny project?
So to start, let’s focus on two things:
Dial down the input
Create decent sized pockets of offline life. To be focused and creative this really is a must. Stop taking your phone everywhere with you, turn off all unnecessary notifications, set your email to manual refreshing for messages, take social media apps off your phone, have time limits for the places you go that suck you in (Instagram, Substack, You Tube), use an internet blocker when you’re doing creative work, have a ‘no news week’ experiment.
Take five minutes to brainstorm ideas that would work for you and commit to three of them this week. Don’t overthink this, your brain already knows where your problem spots are!
Monitor the things you choose, see how you feel, repeat or swap out and try something new. Notice how much more joyful, calm and productive you feel when you untether yourself in this way.
Focus your big ideas
Write down all the things you currently have to do or would like to do. Get honest with yourself about which ones are actually important and will move you forwards. Strike out those that don’t make the grade including things that would be good but you just don’t want to do them.
I don’t mean all your little to do list things here that are to so with current commitments or to keep things ticking over, I mean meaningful pieces of work such as a new product range, exploring a new creative path, a chunky business project like updating a website, planning a large chunk of social media content, creating a new system in your business.
Pick something that you can achieve in a month (or make a very good start on), if you were more focused, the thing that feels most exciting but also meaningful and important to you, business and creativity.
Commit to that thing and put all the other ideas down for now. You’ll be amazed at what you can achieve if you just focus on less things. Because you know multitasking isn’t real, right?!
I’ll be back tomorrow to talk about daily and weekly structure.
With love,
Sarah x
PS If you’d like some support with anything that crops up in this series, you can book a CLARITY SESSION with me, where we will discuss your ideas and thoughts, get focused and plan some action to take you forwards.