I’m emerging from a creative cave, and so I thought I’d talk a bit about the creative cave itself.
In a creative cave- and this is just a term I’m using- it’s not some official thing- you know you want to focus thoroughly on one thing, and so you deliberately stop doing other things that will drain time energy and attention away from the One Thing.
In Simple Prospering, I work almost entirely with sole proprietor businesses. Meaning, businesses where one person wears all the hats. Or that one person may hire some part time assistance or freelancers for various tasks, but they don’t have a team, even a very small team, of employees.
So they are responsible for many things: Delivering their service, marketing their service, doing admin and customer service... That’s just the nature of being self-employed in a tiny business.
And when that is functioning well for us, we are able to weave in and out of these various tasks at different times. For example, maybe you devote Tuesdays to marketing, or you do your bookkeeping admin every Friday, etc.
But when this isn’t functioning well, we aren’t weaving in and out of attending to different tasks and it feels instead like we are obligated to run on four different treadmills simultaneously. Which is not possible!
When it feels that way, at least for me, that’s my cue to zoom out and see if that’s actually true, or if I can be more intentional about what I’m doing when. And if I feel there is something that really needs some devoted attention in my business, then I know it’s time for a period of creative cave time.
Some examples of reasons for creative cave time might be:
Looking for a new office space
Changing how you deliver your services
Debating a new business model entirely
Hiring an employee
Preparing for a big event
Going through a new training or getting a new certification or degree
All of these examples required devoted time attention and energy.
In my case, it was about wanting to focus on the Healing Arts Practice Incubator. I wanted to make sure it was as well organized as possible for current and future students, and I wanted to re-think how I grew it.
Before you can head into a creative cave, you have to decide what you won’t be doing during that time.
And that usually means taking an honest look at things that you are in the habit of doing, that you probably feel you can’t not do, but, in reality, nothing bad will happen if you take a break from doing those things.
Things I couldn't take a break from during this creative cave period:
Earning income- I was still seeing clients through creative cave time. I made some really fun websites for clients in Simple Prospering.
Tracking income and expenses- For me this is something I need to pay attention to every week. If not, I easily let it slide and then I’m back to, "Wait!? Where is all the money I’m earning going!?" So I keep up the habit.
Responding to clients- This falls under customer service. In HAPI- the healing arts practice incubator- that’s in the form of the private podcast feed for q&a. In Simple Prospering it’s communicating with clients if a question comes up.
Things I COULD take a break from:
Podcasting! I love podcasting. It is not a dreadful activity for me. And for that reason, it’s easy for me to devote time to it, even if that time is better spent elsewhere.
When I am podcasting it takes up about one to one and a half days of my workweek. Which is significant! And while my podcast is useful in many ways- as a public service for people in tiny businesses, as a marketing tool for my own tiny business, as a place for me to get better at communicating things, etc, it is also not so essential that I can’t take breaks from it for a while.
Examples of other people’s things-they-could-stop-doing include:
Responding to every single email any client sends them- This is someone who was receiving many emails in-between sessions and it was eating up a lot of time. So they instead automated a response that let people know they were having difficulty keeping up with all the mail to their inbox, and asked people to evaluate if they needed to schedule an email session- and pay for it, with the rates listed- to get a response, or if it could wait until their next scheduled appointment.
Posting on social media. Almost always useless.
Scrolling on social media. Definitely almost always useless.
Cutting one client session day out of the work week for a period of time, or cutting out early morning or evening sessions for a period of time- Depending on when you work best you can create newly freed up time periods in your work week.
Once you’ve decided that you do, in fact, need some creative cave time, and you have figured out what you can take off your plate to make room for it, then unapologetically take it!
It’s easy to keep up habits of taking care of everyone else first. It’s hard to carve out the time you need for your business and to actually use it for yourself.
So ultimately, it’s about setting an intention that is clear- what do you want the creative cave for? And then using the time for that goal.
I won’t pretend that once you are in the creative cave that it is super linear. I call it creative cave time for a reason. With any creative process, what you start out making and what you wind up with are often different. Creative processes are not predictable or especially controllable. They require patience with the germinating seed.
I can't say that I’ve had much luck deciding in advance how long I’ll be in the cave. I know some people who find that really beneficial though- so you might be one of them!
But as someone who is most happy creating stuff, and is most happy, honestly, in a focused single-tasking cave, I can tell you a little bit about how to tell if you are staying too long in the creative cave:
Have the 3 P’s taken over? This is when things stop feeling so exploratory and creative, and instead start to feel like Procrastination, Perfectionism, or Paralysis. None of these things feel juicy and germinating. They feel yuck. I discuss the 3 P’s in much more detail in episode 4 titled How to Make Progress- so you can dive into that if you want to hear more.
Another slippery slope- and my very favorite one- is that it is so fun to be in the space of ideas and fine-tuning that you are staying in an entirely theoretical world. Eventually, you gotta do the thing! I also talk about the difference between being in action and being in motion in that same How to Make Progress episode- and this applies here as well.
In my case, I needed to launch my new website that combined HAPI and Simple Prospering. No more running 2 businesses with 2 different websites.
This also included coming out of the closet about my niche on Simple Prospering- I serve people in the healing arts! And their schools and orgs.
It’s the world I have been in for 23 years in private practice myself. I know how to help this group. No more generic “service-providing businesses” talk. I help people in the healing arts!
With that I needed to update my marketing and get much more clear on what relationships I want to foster and how. I did Michelle Warner’s relationship funnel bootcamp for this- so helpful.
And I learned some new tech for how I can make HAPI open all the time. I am still putting that in place… but I’m out of the cave!
What about you- is there something that needs some creative cave time in your business? Or is there a creative cave you need to crawl out of already and start trying out the thing that ‘s been germinating?
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