Earlier this week I was walking from the living room to the kitchen to put away a few groceries I’d just picked up.
Between the fingers of my right hand were wedged two glass bottles, one kombucha, the other, juice. My left hand had a hold on my jacket and a rather large, round block of cheese, with a bag of apples tucked in the crook of my arm.
Halfway to the kitchen, one of the bottles begin to slip between my fingers, followed closely by the other.
As the bottles wobbled and slid, I instinctively dropped my jacket and the block of cheese from my one hand and just managed to regain control of both of the bottles, as well as the apples before they crashed to the floor.
Disaster (read: sticky, spiky mess) averted.
The incident got me thinking, however, about how often we get ourselves into trouble in our creative lives by first loading ourselves up with more than we can carry, and then, trying to maintain control of it all when one piece begins to slip.
More Options Aren’t Always Better
I think most of us are aware that we’re carrying more than we can sustain control over.
The challenge is we’re confronted with a daily barrage of new tools, tactics, and ideas promising to deliver the results we’re chasing. Seduced by the promise of a quick and easy win, we pick them up without thinking about how they’ll affect the balance of the load we’re already carrying.
And so on top of our client work or day job, we decide to start a podcast… and then a newsletter… followed by a YouTube channel… all while trying to stay active on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter as well.
Instead of stacking these new additions carefully to form a broad and sturdy foundation, however, we simply stack them on top of each other, forming an ever more precarious tower.
Part of the reason we continue to add to our load is that it feels as though there’s nothing we can afford to drop.
Our default response when any strategy fails to deliver the results we were promised is not to reduce our load and bring more focus to fewer activities, but to add more on.
We think that by diversifying our options we’re increasing our chances of success when in reality, we’re increasing our chances of catastrophe.
Part of the potential for catastrophe is rooted in the unsustainable workload we’ve loaded onto ourselves.
More subtly, but perhaps more significantly, however, is the way that each new addition to the load we’re carrying further removes our focus away from the activities that really move the needle.
If we want to avoid catastrophe, and build a healthy, sustainable creative workload, our task, then, is twofold:
- Reduce the amount we’re carrying overall.
- Reconfigure the types of tasks and projects we take on into a more resilient, balanced workload that prioritizes the activities that actually matter.
The first step is to take stock of what we’re already carrying and identify those tasks that matter.
3 Types of Activities that Make Up Your Workload
Part of the challenge of reconfiguring our workload is that with our arms stacked high, we’re unable to see where exactly we’re going and which of our many activities are helping us get there.
It feels as though if we were to drop any of our current activities–even if only for a while–we’d risk losing all our progress and having to start from scratch.
But while we might think nothing we’re currently carrying is capable of surviving being dropped, this is rarely the case.
In fact, if we take an objective look at everything we’re balancing, we find that our different activities fall into 3 distinct categories, only one of which is truly fragile.
1. Droppable Activities
Like my jacket and the block of cheese, there are always at least a few activities we’re carrying can be dropped without any consequence whatsoever.
Sure they might gather a little dust during their time on the floor. But besides that, they can be picked up again when we’ve regained our balance and, after a quick brush off, be none the worse for wear.
When our workload is feeling precarious and we’re feeling our grip start to slip, these activities and projects should be dropped immediately in order to maintain control of other more fragile items.
For me, this category includes things like my Scrappy Podcasting Newsletter, Quick Podcast Tips series on Twitter, general social media engagement, partner & collaborator outreach, podcast guesting, and more.
2. Bruiseable Activities
Bruiseable activities are more like the bag of apples, which if dropped, risk some bruising, but will remain otherwise edible.
Dropping a Bruiseable task is likely to result in a setback. For that reason, we’d rather not drop them, and if we do need to, they shouldn’t be neglected for long. With that said, the damage of a fall is unlikely to be catastrophic and can typically be recovered from.
My Bruiseable activities include the Creative Wayfinding Newsletter, the Elements of Podcast Growth workshop series, my general health (which most commonly suffers to some extent around launches), and relationships with friends and family.
3. Breakable Activities
Finally, we have the Breakable activities, which, like the glass bottles will not only shatter when dropped (perhaps with no way to put back together) but may cause a significant mess for us or others to clean up.
Activities may be considered Breakable because of their complexity, a reliance on timing, and much more.
Perhaps more commonly, however, they may be fragile because a failure in one of these activities would undermine the trust you’ve built with your audience, clients, partners, or other stakeholders.
The activities I classify as Breakable for myself are Podcast Marketing Academy, my Client Work, and my relationship with Kelly.
The full picture of my activities looks like this:
As in the graphic, we should be aiming for a pyramid-shaped distribution of activities, with a small number of Breakable activities on top, supported by a larger number of Bruiseable and Droppable activities beneath it.
The idea is that should we begin to lose our grip, we have enough bandwidth to guarantee control over at least the Breakable activities, if not some of the Bruiseable activities as well.
What we want to avoid at all costs is the inverse of this triangle.
Carrying a high number of Breakable activities puts us in a precarious position, where the slightest slip immediately jeopardizes our entire load.
The Benefits of a Balanced Creative Workload
Taking a more intentional approach to the allocation of the activities that make up our workload helps us in a few important ways.
First, knowing which categories our various projects fall into in advance helps us make quicker decisions about where to direct our time and attention when something begins to slip.
Second, understanding that many of our activities can survive a fall lowers the pressure when things are still firmly within our control, knowing we don’t need to keep them all perfectly balanced. This further helps us maintain our control over everything we’re carrying.
Finally, we’re able to be more intentional about the activities we’re balancing.
This might mean reducing our allocation of Breakable activities down to a small number that we’ll be able to maintain control of even when the going gets rocky. It also allows us to assess new activities before picking them up in the first place.
The more Breakable activities we’re carrying, the more likely we are to cause a mess, after all.
Over time, a more balanced creative workload allows us to spend less energy simply holding on to everything we’re carrying and more energy actually doing creative work that matters.
To us, and hopefully, to others.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilds of creating work that matters?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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