Using Your Next Creative Projects as Bait

How to finish your current project when the new one is so much more exciting

Listen to this voice note here. Or read the cleaned up transcript below.

Hey, I’m Holly Chayes, this is Poetry and Practicalities, and today I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking about that spark of exciting new creative projects, how it can make your current project in process look a little dull and boring and something that isn’t worth finishing and isn’t worth doing.

Normally I type out these types of essays and articles, but I wanted to try something a little different and new today. So we’re doing it as a voice note!

I was talking with a couple other creative business owners the other day and this topic of that creative spark making your current projects look dull and boring and like you didn’t want to finish it came up.

We were talking about how we deal with this and they asked me a little bit about what other people do because I work with creative businesses on their systems and operations and marketing. One of the problems with a creative business is as much as that new spark is amazing and exciting, you do need to finish things so that you can put them out into the world and get things done and run a business. And that’s one of the kind of inherent tensions of how do you follow that creative spark, but also complete enough things to keep your business moving forward?

I’ve done a lot of stuff over the years, but one of the things that I have found most useful, most invigorating, and the best way to balance this creative push-pull of starting new exciting things and finishing enough stuff so that you can share it is: using your new creative project as bait to finish your old one.

I often get this creative sparks like, halfway to two-thirds to 90% of the way through a creative project and I want to start the new thing. I’m bored of the old thing. It has hit whatever hard part comes about, it’s hit that like 50% boring, hard, difficult, slogging mark. There’s not that fresh excitement anymore. But it’s not close enough to like be done and like you can just muscle through it.

So I often use whatever new sparkly, exciting idea is still in its new, exciting phase. I use it as creative bait to get me to finish the old project and get me to keep working on it.

Sometimes that looks like working a certain amount of time on the old project and then working a little bit of time on the new project.

Sometimes it looks like completing certain milestones in the old project and then working on the new project a little bit.

And sometimes it looks like just… head down, finish the old project, get it out, get it good, get it done. And then dive fully into the new one.

I have found this works because the new project is often at a different… I mean, it’s obviously at a different stage, it’s a new project. It can’t be 50% of the way done if it’s brand new. But it’s it’s using a different part of my brain. There’s more blank space. I don’t need to solve problems that came out of decisions I’ve already made. I’m not locked into a structure yet, or I can choose a new medium or message, or whatever I want.

I often find that the old project I need to find creative solutions to questions that I’ve kind of already committed to, or I need to do some very deep structural work. And so that requires a different kind of thinking and creativity than a new project does.

Working on the two at the same time, I get to bounce between the states of problem-solving new problems and problem-solving old problems that I kind of wish I hadn’t brought upon myself already.

I think this works for a lot of other creatives too. I think we love the newness.

One of the beautiful things about creatives is that we can always come up with a new idea.

Giving ourselves time to honor that idea is still really important while also balancing the need to complete what we said we’d complete – even if the only person we told we’d complete it is is ourselves.

So those are my thoughts on new creative projects and old creative projects and how to get things done and using your new idea as a bait to finish your old one and get it out into the world.

I hope you enjoy it. That’s all for now. Talk soon. Bye.