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Creative people tend to have multiple projects in the works at the same time. They’re creating new ideas, trying to market their ideas, and often find themselves playing a management role as well. Packing every moment of your day might feel productive, but it harms your creativity. Here are 3 ways your busy schedule might not be as productive as you think. We’ll talk about how a busy schedule affects you before, during, and after a creative task.

Imagine you overbooked your day. You have a creative task ahead of you, plus another 5 or 10 problems waiting for you on the other side. The problem ahead of you might be relatively small, but it still requires some creative thinking. The question is, with your busy schedule, what’s going to happen to your creative process?

When you’re first starting a task, the longer you have to gather your thoughts the more relevant info you’ll have to solve the problem. If I asked you for relationship advice and didn’t give you time to think, you’d have to use any immediate advice you could think of. You’d have to take the first idea you thought of and run with it. But if I gave you 5 minutes to think about an answer, you’d be able to pull up more relevant information. You could think about different issues that you’ve had or the type of person your listener is and what might be the most useful for them. So spending a few minutes before jumping into a project gives you more relevant information to work with.

During the creation process, being stretched too thin makes you outcome dependent. If you only have 15 minutes to finish a task, you’ll put a lot of pressure on yourself to create a quick solution. You won’t focus on original ideas. You’ll only focus on the quickest path forward.

At the end of the process, if you’re spread too thin, you won’t have enough time to actually think about the lessons that you could have learned. You’l have to rush off to the new problem that needs solving and you’ll completely miss the underlying lessons that the problem was trying to teach you. You might have successfully put out the fire, but you failed to learn how to stop new fires from arising in the future. Spending a few minutes debriefing is a great way to ensure that you pick up the majority of the lessons in the minimum time.

So the takeaway here is not to rush through creative projects. If you’re schedule is so packed that this is impossible, don’t try to push through. That works temporarily, but it’s a long-term recipe for a stressful life. I’m a big believer in the idea that life isn’t suppose to be stressful, we just make it that way by demanding that things happen the way we want them to.

So you might have 10 tasks that are stressing you out. Not because the tasks are stressful, but because your schedule can’t really accommodate all 10 of them. The short-term strategy is to buckle down and get it done. But this just temporarily puts out the fires. Those fires will come back because nothing has fundamentally changed about your schedule. The long-term strategy is to simplify your life. To prioritize what’s most important to you and, most importantly, to let go of the things that are packing your schedule. That doesn’t mean you have to not do them, oftentimes it’s more about the way you do them. You can still complete all 10 tasks, but perhaps a few of them need a lower priority. You need to find a satisfactory answer to the problem, not a perfect one. You can’t find 10 perfect solutions to all 10 problems, but you can decide that 2-3 of the problems deserve a perfect solution and the rest deserve satisfactory ones.

Busy schedules takes away from the time you have to sit with ideas, to think your way through all the implications of an idea, to evaluate it. It silences your conscious. It forces you to continually run around, stressed out. It leads to superficial problem solving instead of a deep understanding and calm approach. The desire to make things happens pushes out all the ways you could let it happen. Your subconscious wants to help you, but you have to give it time.

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