“Better work and less stress”: How to form, and most importantly keep, creative habits

It’s Nice That is currently partnering with Skillshare, an online learning community for creatives, on a series of articles exploring the value of learning new skills. In this piece, Abbey Lossing explains how learning how to animate her illustrations got her jobs at Buzzfeed and Vice, then innumerable freelance clients, and how it's not as daunting a skill as you might think.

When it comes to forming habits, it’s fair to say that most of us have the best intentions at heart. It’s especially evident when picking up a new creative habit, starting out with grand visions of speedily gaining the ability of a new medium, technique or skill. Whether you’re a freelance practitioner looking to add a new tangent to your practice, or developing growth goals in your position at work, picking up the right habits – and stepping away from the distracting ones – is only half the battle.

One initial stumbling block comes when deciding what you want to achieve in the first place. When the horizon seems endless, it can be difficult to select a point to march towards. And, if you pick a goal that feels disingenuous to what you actually want, it’s even more difficult to drag yourself there.

For Thomas Frank who has two Skillshare classes on productivity, finding his goals began by embracing as much as possible, and by starting an impossible list. Similar to a bucket list, an impossible list is a series of goals which may feel out of reach in day to day life. They’re also goals that are made impossible by constantly evolving – once you achieve a goal you immediately set yourself a leapfrog achievement to work towards next. For example, in a creative setting your first impossible goal could be to learn how to animate. Once that goal is achieved the target could shift to being commissioned to animate in a certain style, or for a certain client.

To tackle this Jessica explains she has made her own habits, the first being “my calendar rules all,” she tells It’s Nice That. “If a project isn’t on my calendar, it doesn’t get worked on.” With this in mind, Jessica prioritises what gets placed in her calendar and when, very closely. For example, “if I have a high-priority personal project, it gets put on my calendar as if it were a client project with a real deadline.” The designer also compartmentalises her day according to when works best for her: “I know that my brain is the freshest in the morning, so I always save that time of the day for doing brainstorming, sketching or ideation,” she explains. Then, in between calls she’ll catch up on admin tasks, while saving “solid three to four hour blocks of work time in order to get creative work done”. The afternoons, when she feels less creative brain power is when the production side of her practice, “like vectorising sketches or fine-tuning art that’s already been vectorised,” receives close attention.

Another “creativity ‘hack’” of Jessica’s is to prioritise working on personal projects during the day if she’s feeling “really fired up”. Leaving little room for much else, the designer justifies this focus by pointing out how: “The client work will always get done because there is a deadline and someone who will be mad at me if the work isn’t delivered,” she says. “But, if I save personal projects for night time I’ll likely put them aside and go to bed, or do some other leisure activity.” This approach of Jessica’s also relates to another judgement of Thomas’, quoting the saying that “‘If you can’t stick to the habit on your own, then you don’t want it bad enough,’ and to a degree that’s true,” he says. Yet, if you need to unavoidably hunker down on a task you’re not enthused about, you can make a considerable difference by “designing your environment correctly,” Thomas tells us.

Nigerian Illustrator Ojima Abalaka, who teaches a Skillshare class on “Illustrating the Everyday”, similarly has generated her own system to ensure individual tasks receive her whole attention, rather than being swallowed up by all of them. “Staying organised is really important for my work because it prevents my tasks from getting overwhelming,” she tells It’s Nice That. As well as writing down consistent notes, “I also use Notion to keep track of on-going projects and my daily tasks,” Ojima recommends. “Having a system that lets me clearly see and sort through my tasks and projects makes working easier,” and encourages the illustrator to split her time between personal and commercial projects. Keeping organised also helps Ojima avoid her self-confessed bad habit of “waiting until the last minute to start working on a brief,” she tells us. Guilty of spending “most of the time thinking of ideas” and not enough on the execution, “finding a balance is ideal and will usually lead to better work and less stress.”

Breaking up the day giving yourself assignments, and in increments, certainly helps. On this subject Thomas quotes Peter Drucker’s saying of “What gets measured gets managed”, recommending that no matter what habit you’re trying to implement: “it’s always important to be observing how well everything is working.”

One option is to set time aside to do this, a process Thomas refers to as a “reflection day”. Choosing Sunday as “a good candidate”, look back at what you set yourself to achieve, and simply what happened that week. Allow yourself to delve into “How well you stuck to your habits, whether or not any failures happened, and anything unexpected that popped up and made sticking to those habits more difficult.” Most importantly, try to get into a mind frame that sits between holding yourself accountable, while not placing pressure on yourself to achieve, achieve, achieve. As Jessica so rightfully says: “I have to forgive myself for not being 100 per cent on top of everything all the time and know that it's not actually possible to take care of everything unless I stop also taking care of myself.”

Thomas’ final suggestion is to also try and generate a dialogue around your goals. A good way of keeping yourself on track, but at a comfortable pace, is to “encourage frequent contact with a friend, or with another person with similar goals.” Speaking openly on what you want to achieve may sound just as daunting as finding a goal in the first place, but checking in one another creatively speaking can only ever be helpful for yourself, others and the practice of creativity in general.