5 Habits of Content Creators Who Optimize Creative Spend

The best content creators know how to optimize what if referred to as “creative spend.” This is measured in creative units. You can create a mental picture of this by visualizing one of those old-school wooden rulers used in elementary schools. Picture it having 100CUs. It has been shown that your creative energy is at its peak when you’re around 100. This means that you’d complete high-quality work in less time. People with a creative unit that is around 0 do have depleted creative energy. This means that the work cannot be accepted, and takes much more time. In simple terms, the average content creator can finish work at around 50CUs. The word average means stale, boring, dull and so on. This refers to people that just get by and do nothing to improve or scale their business. Anything that is done with a creative unit that is below 50 would cause the failure of the content.

The right thing to do is to keep your creative unit well above 50, and as close to 100 as possible. In addition, the longer you remain close to 100, the more quality work you’d get to complete and within less time.

It has been shown that even the little things such as promptly replying to your messages on social media platforms, emails and so on, may not seem like a lot. But they can cost you some creative units if you don’t do them. As an example, say you’re on Facebook, just before you start a project that would need a lot of creative energy. You were fully charged with 100 units, but you lost 30 due to being unresponsive to messages, you’d now be left with 70 units of creativity although you might be able to complete the work, but not in the best way possible. Other things that reduce creative units include activities such as unnecessary distractions at your workplace, such as answering phone calls, or spending excess time on social media when you should be working, all eat into your creative unit.

There are main ways of optimizing your creative spend, and they include the following:

  • Doing things that allow your creative units to recharge, thus taking them back.
  • By not depleting your creative units at all by making use of some tactics throughout the day.

All these can be achieved by creating a new set of daily routines, that would eventually turn into habits. This piece would focus on the 10 habits of content creators who optimize creative spend.

  1. Prioritize physical health habits: It’s important for human health to be in a good state. It’d be impossible to create your best content when you don’t feel your best. Engaging in unhealthy activities such as smoking, and drinking an excessive amount of alcohol tends to impair human health. Stress could also affect your health. Working endlessly for long without taking a break could significantly affect your health. In simple terms, your health should be your most important priority. Some of the ways of doing this include keeping fit, which includes engaging in regular exercise, and keeping a healthy diet. In addition, mental fitness is also as important. A content creator that is mentally fit would be sharply focused with clarity.
  • Design a distraction-free zone for deep focus: It’s important to endeavor to have some distraction-free time that allows your creative units to remain high, and also your mind to get into a super deep focus. One of the ways of becoming truly distraction-free is by not checking emails, text messages, social media feeds and so on.

 Making this a habit would cause your content production to go up significantly, in quantity and also in quality. One thing common to content creators is that they work via their computers with their phone nearby. If you’re like this, then you should ensure that all your notifications are off for both computers and other electronic gadgets you may have close to you. You may also want to inform your co-workers that you shouldn’t be disturbed when you’re in your distraction-free modes. Studies have shown that email and social media are the biggest culprits of taking up precious creative units, closely followed by office distractions.

  • Find your creative time limit and habitually return to it: It’s important to know how long you’d spend in your distraction-free creative time zone. This usually varies from person to person, and also vary on a project-by-project basis. As an illustration, you might remain unexhausted for up to 3 hours, when writing about business, self-development, vehicles and so on. However, this is different when creating content strategies or editing blogs for clients, as your maximum time for peak performance may be around 90 minutes. This doesn’t imply that you’d have 3 hours or 90 minutes of peak creativity during any given day. It only means that you’d have to replenish your creative units by doing something different or relaxing for a certain amount of time. This could be activities such as taking a nap, taking a 15-minute walk, doing your dishes and so on. It may be difficult to replenish your creative units completely. The more you make it a habit to replenish your creative units throughout the day, the more periods of creative energy you’d have to complete your content projects.
  • Organize time every week for projects: A lot of mistakes may content creators make is that they sometimes like to wait for the right time to get the proverbial creative juices to start flowing.

 You should consistently block the time into your calendar every week or day, depending on how you manage your workflow. You shouldn’t wait for a creative awakening. You should induce it yourself on a daily basis, and it’d eventually become a habit.

  • Do the difficult tasks first: One of the best ways of getting things done quickly is by doing the most difficult tasks first, especially when the mind is still fresh, and you still have a lot of creative units.

References

(2019). Retrieved from https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Writes-Go-Creating-Ridiculously/dp/1118905555

Forsey, C. (2019). The Ultimate Round-Up of Content Marketing Tips. Retrieved from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-marketing-tips