174: The Creative Power Hour

 

If you're always putting your creative projects on the back burner—whether it's writing, creating content, or some other creative hobby—this practice can help! Learn what a creative power hour is, how to customize it, and why it's so beneficial for writers and creatives.

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The Creative Power Hour

Happy April. I'm really excited to share about this process that I have kind of I don't I sent a video like I stumbled upon this process, but that doesn't feel accurate, because it was a lot of deliberate thinking and planning and implementing and tweaking. So this process that I've created, let's just say, because I think it's going to be super helpful if you're struggling to find time to do your creative stuff, writing, creating content, whatever it is. And it's also a really good, there's a really good mindfulness, like mindset, piece of it that I think is super helpful as writers and creatives too. So we've had kind of a social media run because we last week, we talked about a couple of social media questions on the Q and A episode, the March episode, and then next week, we're going to have a social media episode that talks about tips. And I, yeah, I the process we're gonna talk about in this episode is for writing, of course, but it's also for anything creative.

 

So if that includes creating content, maybe you can talk. You can take the things that we'll talk about in that episode, and if you want to start creating content, you can do that in this thing that is called I should talk about the name a creative power hour, real quick before we do that, novel, Jump Start is open for enrollment. This is my four week program for new writers. It's designed to give you everything you need to finally write the first chapter of your book. The program enrollment is open now, and the program officially starts on April 16, and it runs for Yeah, dates, right. Sorry. April 14, Monday, April 14, and it runs for four weeks. Get access to an online course. You get a discord group with the other writers who are in this small group program. You get a weekly coaching call with me, and more. You can also add on some feedback for me, if you would like me to review your first chapter. You don't have to, if you just want to get it done and and get a good foundation lead for your book. That's totally fine.

 

It's an extra if you want to get that feedback from me. But there's something really, really satisfying and motivating about getting a good foundation down for your story. It just indescribable, especially if it's your first book, to get that first chapter done. So that's why I wanted to focus on that, and also it's a lot more accessible and affordable than novel jumpstart has been in the past, when it was a longer program. So it's just 299 for enrollment, and you get to keep access to the online course idea to book, and if you were on the wait list, don't forget about your coupon code that you can use to get a discount off the enrollment price. But I'm capping it. It's going to be a small program, so we can really have a lot of kind of like high touch. You'll be able to get your questions answered. You'll be able to get accountability and help along the way over the four weeks. And if you want to write more than the first chapter, like you can absolutely do that. If you get your first chapter done in the first two weeks. Just keep going.

 

We'll support you in writing however much you want to write in the four weeks of the program. Okay, so I want to provide a little bit of a backstory, or, like, some context about, sorry, I just gotta let me get back to my screen. Okay, I want to provide some context about this idea of a creative power hour and how I came up with this. So if you have followed me on social media, or if you have been an OG fan of the podcast, you know I talk a lot about writing sprints, and writing sprints are a great way to have a short focus burst of writing, right? The idea is that you set a timer for 15 minutes, 20 minutes, no more than 30 minutes, for a true writing sprint. And while that timer is going, you are not also checking email. You are not doing research on something related to your book. You are doing nothing else. You're closing all your tabs. You're only writing. And the other piece of a writing sprint is that you're writing as fast as you possibly can, meaning you're just trying to get the words out. You're not thinking too much about it. You're not agonizing over your word choice or trying to really make your sentence is incredibly strong.

 

If you're in a first draft of something, you can let it be messy, just just get words on the page. That's why it's called a sprint and not a writing session. And the idea is you do this short burst of time, take a break, and if you want to do another sprint, you can, but you can also cap it right there. Uh, so that's a writing sprint, and you can really get into it. And you can do rituals right where you light candle, you do a moment of meditation, you always have the same drink, you sit in the same place every time to cool your brain in. Then it's time to write. It's time to focus. This is what we're doing, and it gets easier and easier the more that you do it. Um, a creative power hour is a little bit different. I was finding that for myself sometimes editing sprints, it didn't quite work the same way. When I have a first draft of something written and I'm going back into edit, I like to have a longer block of time to devote to it.

 

It's hard for me mentally to work up and open my manuscript and start editing and then just, you know, to only do 15 minutes. It just feels harder for me, as opposed to the rough draft, where opening up my Word doc writing for 15 minutes feels a lot easier, and that might be for me personally, because I like editing as opposed to writing. I always joke that. Or I have a writer friend, Lisa, who always jokes like, there's people who love writing and hate editing, and there's people who love editing but hate writing, and it's a joke, of course, because there's everyone's on a spectrum, and I don't hate writing, but getting the first draft out is really hard for me. It's like a love, hate thing, and then once it's rough, once it's on the page, I love going back to shape it. So I felt like I needed something a little bit longer to allow me to get into editing, because I can do a longer editing sprint. I don't know about y'all, but I when I'm writing after 1520 minutes, my attention starts to wander. I'm not as focused. I find that my rate of the words that I'm typing is really slowing down.

 

So it's just it's like my effectiveness and my productivity goes down the longer than I write. That's just the case for me right now. I would love if that wasn't the case, but that's just how it is. But that's fine. I'm fine with that, because I know if I just take 15 minutes and really hustle, I can get a lot of words out. But again, I just was feeling like I wanted something a little bit longer. But the problem with doing a longer sprint, I'm doing air quotes with it, is that if you do 45 minutes or an hour, that's not a sprint, because at 45 minutes of something or 60 minutes of something, you're not sprint. Not sprinting anymore. It's just like a focus session. So, um, yeah, I just started thinking about, okay, how can I give myself a longer block of time, but also keep some of the same principles from a writing sprint, a true writing sprint, the way that I do them, the way that I talk about them the way that I teach them, and the creative power hour was born. I also was I share more about this in the upcoming social media episode, but it's been a struggle for me over the years that I've been posting content where I feel like I need to get a lot more disciplined and organize in planning out my content and structuring things and organizing everything, because there are a lot of content creators who are that way, and I really admire that, and I want to be like that, but I'm not.

 

So initially, when I was coming up with this idea of having a longer block of time, I thought, Okay, perfect. This is this can be writing or editing, but it can also be creating content. It could also be editing videos. It could also be coming up with ideas for content. It could also be something with the podcast. And then once I had ideas rolling about what I could do during this hour, then it's like it expanded and I stepped back and I realized, wait, I could use this for brainstorming, like brainstorming a new book idea. I could use this for getting into a character's head and just like playing out a scenario in my mind, I could use this for, it sounds kind of or maybe it sounds funny, I don't know. I have these adult coloring books, and I got some markers and and I have, well, yeah, markers that I use, and I just like, will put on a podcast or watch something, and I will color, and it's relaxing and it's fun to color. So I was like, Oh, I could do this in my in my hour that I'm setting aside. Um, so I wanted to call it Creative Power Hour, because I think that's a punchy, catchy title, yes, but it also really encompasses what it is.

 

It is an hour. And if an hour sounds overwhelming, this is how I'm breaking it down to feel more accessible. The structure of a power hour, the way that I do it is five minutes of meditation at the beginning, then I do my creative acts, whatever it is, and you can split it up, right? It can be for me, let's say it's 30 minutes of editing a particular scene in my book, and then 2020, minutes of coloring, awesome. That's my creative power hour. And then I close with five minutes of meditation. So five minutes of meditation, it's always book ended by the five minutes of meditation. We're going to talk more about that in a second. But something. Having breaking it down this way, where it's not like, Okay, I have to write for a full hour. You can't see the YouTube video. My eyes are why? And I'm like, Oh, God, that sounds terrible. You don't have to do it. You don't have to do that creatively.

 

Creativity can look like whatever you want it to look like. You can work on multiple things. I even I got a little cross stitch thing, like a little needlepoint thing kit that I want to try doing like that's something I can do in my creative power hour. The idea is setting aside intentional time to focus on writing, yes, but also creative things that bring me joy, hobbies that I want to pursue. And yeah. So that's, that's the structure of it. This is not something you have to do every day. I'm not regimented with it. I'm not disciplined with it. I think two weeks have gone by and haven't done a creative power hour, but I'm going to do one tomorrow because I want to work on editing my book. So I'm going to set it up. I'm going to do it that way, five minutes of meditation, edit my book for all 50 minutes of the actual work part, and then do a five minute meditation to close. Sometimes it looks different.

 

Sometimes I mix up what I'm doing. Sometimes I'm even like doing something else, like I'm doing some stretching while I'm brainstorming. I don't know. You can get creative pun intended with Your Creative Power Hour and do it to suit you. That's what this is, and I'll share one more thing about the reason for this. I feel like so many of us, okay, let me just talk about myself, because I always hate to generalize, but I do. I do feel like a lot of struggle with this. I have been paying attention to how much time I spend on my phone, and not just the time that I spend my phone on my phone, but the time that I'm spending my phone while I'm doing something else, the way that it's so autopilot for me to grab my phone and check social media or check email or check the weather or like Google something stupid without even being aware of it. And I really want to improve this.

 

I want to improve my attention span, improve my focus and make sure that I'm not just like wasting three hours every single night scrolling Tiktok, because that doesn't feel good to me. I don't feel like I'm at my best. I feel like my energy is low, my mental health gets worse. Everything's worse when I do that. And I was spending a lot of time in the evenings. I've been spending a lot of time in the evenings lately doing that and just watching something, but also scrolling tick tock, and also like, I don't know. So I decided, you know, if I think about my evenings, the structure of my evenings right now, Audrey goes to bed at seven, seven ish, depending on the day. Uh, Sam and I alternate bedtime. So he will do bedtime one night, I will do it the other night, we switch.

 

So even if I'm doing bedtime, I'm done with Audrey duty by 715 and she's in bed, and then I have until probably 10, just free. I don't. I rarely ever work in the evenings unless I have something I need to do and I don't. It's hard for me to write in the evening, so I don't ever do that unless I absolutely have to. But I'm like, Okay, I have this time, like, I have about three hours where I could just watch Netflix for three hours, I could scroll TikTok for three hours. But maybe there's a way that I can, I can build in some time to focus on things that I want to prioritize, while also still having time to scroll Netflix and watch or to watch Netflix and scroll TikTok, because I still do those things. You know, it's gradual. I'm working my way down to not be so addicted to things like that. But this might look totally different for you. Maybe your creative power hour is in the morning before your kids get up or over your lunch break from your nine to five.

 

Everyone's got a different schedule. You can figure out how this is going to work for you, but I really do recommend taking the full hour to do this. Now let's go back to talk about the mindfulness and the meditation piece of it, how you open with five minutes and you close in five minutes. If you're someone who does not meditate, I know that this probably feels like a lot and like you can't do it, but I want to encourage you to try, if it's too overwhelming to think about just not doing anything and sitting in silence for five minutes at the beginning and the end, you can do a guided meditation if you want to start to just pick a five minute meditation on YouTube for something, go for it. But the point is to have that moment of pause to have that moment of mindfulness, of getting back into your body, grounding yourself, getting centered, especially if, well, I was going to say at the end of the day, but really it's it's anytime, because if you're doing this in the morning, it helps set the tone for the rest of your day.

 

If you're doing this over your lunch break, it's a little bit of a reset in the evening. It helps you decompress. So it's good anytime, um, and you can and you can use it so you can do they're kind of options like I mentioned. You can just sit in silence, focus on your breathing, do like a traditional meditation. You can do a guided meditation for five minutes to open and close. You can do the same one or. Ones, or what you can do is think about the creative power hour ahead. This is something that I do in the beginning of writing sprints. If I close my eyes for 60 seconds, I will sometimes do deep breathing, but I'll sometimes think about the scene that I'm working on. So if you take five minutes and you just, let's say you're editing your book or or you're writing, if you want to do this with writing awesome, think about the scene that you're working on. Think about the thing that you're going to cross off your list. What are you focusing your efforts on during this Creative Power Hour? Maybe it's a bit of brainstorming.

 

Maybe it's just kind of setting an intention, like visualizing it going really well, but just thinking about the creative power hour ahead and how you're going to use that hour. And then at the end of five minutes, when your timer goes off, then you can start your creative thing, whatever it is you're going to do, and then you can do something different for the last five minutes, or just do the same thing you did to open lately, what I've been doing is just a silent meditation, because it just feels nice to have that moment of quiet. My mind rebels against it, my, my, my brain does not like the fact that I'm sitting in silence and I'm always tempted to not do it when I've been doing a creative power hour lately, my brain always wants to skip it, but if I just think about it as okay, this is the hour, this is the activity that you're doing, the exercise that you're doing, and part of it is closing with this bit of meditation and mindfulness. So I do it, and then, of course, I always, I never regret it. I always feel good after I close with that little bit of meditation. And then I feel relaxed, I feel calm, or I feel like excited and energized, I guess, if I'm you know, if I was doing it earlier in the day.

 

So that's really the structure of Creative Power Hour. And I encourage you to try this and tweak it and see how this can work for you. Again, I do think it's helpful to take a full hour and to bookend with the opening and closing meditation. Otherwise, how you do this is up to you. If you want to implement something else in your creative power hour that I haven't even mentioned, awesome. If you only want to do two minutes of meditation at the beginning and the end, try that this is, this is something that can be flexible, but just having this set idea of what it is is helpful to go off of. Again. I'm going to do this tomorrow during work hours, actually, because what I found I set a deadline for myself to have a new draft done in two weeks, not like finalized. I don't need to have, like, my complete book done and polished in every respect, but I do want to get a new draft out in two weeks, so part of that is me setting aside some time in the morning on a work day to just focus and knock it out and get as much soon as I can in that hour.

 

So yeah, I think that's everything I want to say about creative power hours. Power hours. I have some social media content that goes into this, and examples of kind of like vlogs, I guess, where I do them and we can do them together. So you can check that out if you want. I'm also gonna do, I think I was thinking about this yesterday, actually doing a longer YouTube video where it's like a creative power hour hour with me. So the video will be an hour, or probably over an hour, if I'm talking at the beginning and the end. But, um, I have that on my my to do list to think about recording a full video so that you can, you can do it like in real time with me. I've never done a video that long on YouTube, but I think that would be fun.

 

Okay, so try out a creative power hour. Let me know how it goes. You can tag me if you are on social media and posting about it. I would love to see I'm @KatieWolfWrites, and again, we'll have an episode next week that talks more about social media and the content creation piece. So that would be a great thing if you want to get back into posting, or you want to start posting on social media, then setting aside some dedicated time in a creative power hour is a good way to do it, even if you don't take the full hour to work on your content, even if you just take 10 minutes, setting aside time is going to be a good use I think of Your Creative Power Hour. So go forth and enjoy your creative power hour and let me know how it goes.

Katie Wolf