Prime your brain with the ritual of preparation. You know that nothing can stop you when you’re cleaning up your mind and your environment to start doing creative work.
Finding the right preparation routine takes time and experimentation. You might start with one simple gesture and, since you have to repeat this for the rest of your life (right?), add, slowly, all the steps needed to bring you into the perfect creative environment.
What to do to get into a creative flow
This is non-scientific, personal, and maybe not suitable for you. It’s an example of how you could prepare yourself to do creative work.
Turn off all devices
Besides one using which you would be creating, of course. Do you work with rocks and scalpel? Good. Turn off all electronic devices emitting any form of sound, noise, or nuisance.
Warn your people. You’re not going to be reachable for the time you decide.
Agree with your important people that they can contact you for urgent matters. Like if that was needed to say. Define clearly what “urgent matters” means to you.
Turn off all notifications
What? Your phone is still on because it has a nuclear battery, and only specialists from Chernobyl would be able to switch it off? Then, put it in airplane mode. You can’t? Put it on mute, no vibration. (and explain to me, then, why you can’t turn it off)
Close all browser tabs
Why is your Web Browser open? If you need it for research, you are researching. You’re not writing. If, instead, you want to “be in the flow”, entirely concentrated on your productive medium, close all tabs. This would allow you to use an online text editor if any. Otherwise, use Notepad!
Minimize all user interfaces
So, I get it, your creating on your computer. Question: do you need all buttons, icons, menus, scrolling bars, toasters, pop-ups, reminders, notifications, slide-in menus, flying turtles, fighting Pokemons on your desktop? Remove, close, minimize, and hide anything not related, strictly, to your creative session.
Remove everything not strictly necessary for your creative task
I cannot think of anything else you might want to get rid of but, seriously, anything that does not answer positively to the question “do I need this to create?”, remove it.
Set a Pomodoro timer
It’s just a fancy way to say: set a timer to 25 minutes and start to do the freaking work.
Start to work
At this point, if it is the first time you’re going through this, you should have already spent quite a few minutes preparing for work. How do you feel in front of an excellent, shiny, blank page? Scary, uh? Isn’t it? You have no excuses. You have no distractions. It’s only you and your thoughts.
Listen to your thoughts
Waddaya say? You don’t know what to do? Shh, be silent for a second. Listen.
Can you hear it?
If you’re lucky, you can hear absolutely nothing.
Try again.
Wait now. Can you start to hear something more?
See?
Do you know what you are finally hearing?
Let me introduce you to yourself!
Did you prepare well?
If you are scrupulous and lucky: at this point, you can hear your thoughts.
That’s what we were looking for.
Now there are absolutely no other options than listening to your mind talking.
Let it talk.
Let it go.
Can you keep the pace?
Listen to it. Now.
And, finally, damn! Write exactly what you are thinking!
Verbatim.
Don’t tell me you don’t know what to write anymore.
I will link you here, my friend.
