To say I have a lot going on right now (our wedding in about a month, finishing book #2, writing book #3, working on other projects) is an understatement. For me this kind of busy-ness causes the kind of stress and pressure that tend to shut off the flow from the creativity well. It’s not that the well has run dry (although it feels like it sometimes), it’s really that the pump from the well has lost its prime.
Priming a pump is something a lot of you might not be familiar with, but it’s something I’ve had to do hundreds of times. When you want to pump water out of, say, a lake often the pump needs to have water in it in order to work (and not burn out). Usually this is done by pouring water into the priming hole in the pump to fill up the pipe between the pump and the water. Once there is enough water in the pump and some in the line you can turn the pump on. If you don’t prime the pump, the pump might either (best case) not draw water or (worst case) not draw water and burn out. The analogy here is that sometimes the pump to draw the creativity out of the well loses prime (this happens in real life too) and you need to give it a kick start.
Since my creativity pump has been losing its prime pretty often in the past while, I thought I’d share some of my tricks for getting the pump working again…
- Take a break. Yeah I know that I’m not good at giving myself a break, but pushing through just risks burning the pump out. Sometimes I try a walk, or make snack or a hot shower. Just moving away from the screen. It’s the screen…the screen sucks away my brain sometimes.
- Listen to music. My taste in music is pretty broad and sometimes I need to go through a few playlists to find the genre that I need for priming.
- Read. I’ll read RSS feeds, a book, a magazine…anything to get the brain going again.
- Watch a favourite movie. Yeah, I’ve watched Iron Man and Star Trek about 10 ten times each, your point is?
- Change gears completely. Yeah this might be like taking a break, but sometimes switching from coding to writing, writing to editing pictures or even trying to find a new solution to an old problem. The idea is just to shake the cobwebs loose.
I left off the standard over caffeinating (which is par for the course for me) and probably a few others (taking a nap…is that a break or just admitting defeat?).
Regardless, I’m sure I could prattle on with related suggestions, but I think you see where I’m coming from.
Oh and by the way, this was a “changing gears” pump prime before I try to work on a mindmap/outline for a document I need to draft up in short order.
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