230: What’s Your Ratio of Quantity to Quality for Ongoing Creative Work?

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” —Maya Angelou

Earlier this summer, I arrived late one day to the podcast studio, laying on the floor in lieu of actually recording anything. Should I take that as a sign to reduce my creative output?

Not necessarily.

Aside from big one-off projects like writing a book, where I pour incredible time and attention to detail into (that I tackle every five years or so), I seem to do better with ongoing creative work by sticking to a stretch-worthy production schedule. These days I’m running a Delightfully Tiny media company that produces the following on a monthly basis:

• 14 podcast episodes across Pivot, Free Time, and BFF Bonuses
• ~14 essays or newsletters: 8 ‘Doh posts, 4 Time Well Spent newsletters, 2 PivotList round-ups, and 1-2 BFF mailers
• This does not include guest appearances on other people’s shows

By stretching myself to show up in these ways, I have discovered that there’s not always an inverse relationship between consistency and quality—at least for me.

🌟 5 Key Takeaways

• Check your assumptions about causation vs. correlation. For example, more time doesn’t necessarily equal more money (or higher quality); maybe less time requires firmer boundaries, smarter systems, increasing delegation
• Keeping up with a stretchy level of creative output doesn’t mean caving into the downsides of quantity: throwing in the kitchen sink to keep up with shiny shoulds or client demands out of insecurity
• Nothing needs to be forever: Trust yourself to be creative and resourceful in the moment if/when you need to slow down or take a break.
• Align your production schedule with what you will be proud to produce, and look for secondary benefits of each creative output such as networking, catching up with friends, reading books
• Do beware of burnout: Look for alignments to make things easier (cross-posting bits of the same content across multiple places), and put a Delightfully Tiny Team in place who can help take the pressure off.

📝 Permission

Aim for consistency even over quality (knowing that “babysitting the work” doesn’t always help anyway), and permission to keep publishing even through energetic highs and lows.

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

Look back at your creative history: do you do better work with more constraints or fewer? What’s your sweet spot? There is no right answer. Bonus: Put a team and/or resources in place to help bolster accountability, take responsibility off your shoulders, and that raises the stakes (in a good way) of missing a deadline.

🔗 Resources Mentioned

• Articles: Emily McDowell’s Unqualified—Paid Subscribers: READ THIS!
• Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h: Mutually Assured Rejection Part One, Part Two; Morning Rush, Afternoon Crushed, The Business Yips & 51/49, Love That! For You 🙄
• Video: Ira Glass—The Gap Between Taste and Talent
• Podcast Production: One Stone Creative
• Apps: Substack

📚 Books Mentioned

• Free Time: Lose the Busywork, Love Your Business
• Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One
• Life After College

🎧 Related Episodes

• BFF Private Feed (with free preview): Substack Q&A with Linda Lebrun from the Writer Outreach Team
• Pivot: 123: Peeking Out From The Plateau — My Latest Pivots
• Free Time: 222: Why I migrated my three email lists to Substack (BFF Bonus Replay)
• 138: ⛵️Stop Sailing the Sea of Shiny Shoulds
• 060: Triangle of Tradeoffs
• 130: Day in the Life of a Podcast Episode

✍️ Check out Jenny’s personal business essays on Substack, Rolling in D🤦🏻‍♀️h

📝 Check out full show notes and share with friends: https://itsfreetime.com/episodes/230

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices