Escaping the Quicksand…

I realised one of the most common questions I’m asked is how do you deal with ‘creative block’ - or how do you get out of a creative rut?

I’ll cover the other most common question - where do you get your inspiration - or how do you keep coming up with new ideas - another time!

So how do we escape the quicksand of the creative block?

You know, I had to stop to think about it for a minute - do I even believe in ‘creative block’? And in all honesty, I actually can’t say for sure one way or another, what I do wholeheartedly believe in is that we can all get ourselves stuck - whether we’ve backed ourselves into a corner or up against a wall or we’re frozen in fear of a tough brief, a looming deadline or a solution we’re not 100% sure of.

What I’ve found appears to be the most common conception of creative block is that moment when I myself have realised that I’ve been pushing around the same assets or vector points or fruitlessly searching for ‘the perfect font’ for hours and getting nowhere.

This is where I find myself at the conundrum - I don’t think this is ‘creative block’. I believe what we’ve stumbled into is simply zoning out. An idea hasn’t worked out like we’d hoped, so we’re trying to force it, or we’re procrastinating over a project/campaign/design we’re not really bought into.

So how do I deal with this kind of ‘creative block’? Dead simple. I WALK AWAY.

That’s it. 

Now while it might not always be the physical act of peeling myself out of the chair and placing one foot in front of the other until I’m far enough away from the screen that I can stop telling myself for a minute that I’m supposed to be feeding the beast, but mentally putting the problematic work aside for a period so you can reset your focus is what I’m talking about.

I’ll often pick up a fun personal project or take a look at another brief - 9 times out of ten I do actually get up and I go and make a drink, often I’ll go and stand at my glass back door and stare at the garden - sometime it’s nice, sometime it’s bedraggled - but it’s always busy, birds, insects, we have a cat heavy neighbourhood who utilise our garden as a thoroughfare so there’s always something to see.

“putting the problematic work aside for a period
so you can reset your focus is what I’m talking about.”

I think one of the best ways I can summarise dealing with creative block quickly is to steal an idea from Douglas Adams - in one of the ‘Hitchhikers’ Guide To The Galaxy’ books, Arthur Dent learns to fly and the concept is covered in ‘The Guide’ as the practice of hurling yourself at the ground and missing - essentially, by being distracted at the last minute and forgetting to hit the ground. 

My thinking is that set yourself limits on the things that can become the ground at which you're throwing yourself against, i.e., scrolling through stock or typography websites no more than two pages or 10 minutes, etc., these then start to become the distractions by which you miss the ground at the last minute and ‘fail’ to get into a rut.

Learn to move on quickly.

The easiest way to avoid ruts, is to make swift decisions - sometime rash decisions can turn into great ideas - not always maybe don’t aim for rash, but certainly I found that with myself, a lot of people have been surprised at my speed of doing - I had one member of a team who often find themselves “pushing mouse” that they ‘felt intimidated by the idea they would never be as good (meaning quick) as me’ - my answer to that is simple, though two-fold; 1. They’d been in the game two years I think, and I had been in getting on for 20, and 2. I just make quick decisions. If something isn’t working out the way I’d planned/hoped/expected, I make the decision to cut my losses and move on. 

“I just make quick decisions... cut my losses and move on.”

I caveat this by saying that I’ve many times been unable to let go of the original concept or thought, but in moving on to something else - another design, or project has meant I’ve been able to reset enough to come back to the original idea and make it work the next time round.

So the simple answer to avoiding the quicksand is to move over it quickly - or plan your route better - use your development time to sketch out a more comprehensive vision for your idea so that the build time can be better spent just putting it together - like Ikea!

Hope this is helpful - if you have other ways of coping with blocks, avoiding them altogether or weighing in whether you believe in them or not, I’d love to know about it, let me know!