Ep 143: The 79% Problem:

Why You're Over-Servicing Clients (And Losing Money)

SUMMARY

You have lots of active clients that you work with, each one with their different preferences, different approval processes and different communication styles. And your team keeps asking, "Wait, how does this client want it again?" And you keep answering the same questions over and over again.

This isn't just annoying—it's costing you money. According to Function Fox, 79% of creative agencies over-service clients without proper documentation of what's actually being included in the scope. But the real cost isn't just the free work. It's the cognitive load of having to remember these unique preferences for every single client without a system to capture them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️Undocumented client preferences create a bottleneck. When only you know how each client operates, you become the single point of failure for your entire team, answering the same questions repeatedly.

• ⚡️Context switching costs you 10+ hours per week. Every "quick question" about client preferences pulls you out of deep work, costing 5-20 minutes of momentum each time you have to mentally switch contexts.

• ⚡️A Client Playbook solves the documentation problem. Creating a simple 5-section playbook for each client (Communication, Scope, Brand Voice, Approvals, and Quirks) saves hours weekly and ensures consistent client experiences.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. When you force your team to guess at client preferences, you're being unkind to them, you're being unkind to your client who gets inconsistent service, and you're being unkind to future you."

• 💬 "Future you and future team members are forgetful. You won't remember client preferences six months from now because you have 12, 14 other clients that you're having to remember stuff for as well."

• 💬 "If you can document it once, you can reference it forever."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️Free Client Templates & Future You Framework - Download client onboarding toolkit and documentation templates

• ⚡️Dare to Lead by Brené Brown - "Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind."

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

You have lots of active clients that you work with, each one with their different preferences, different approval processes and different communication styles. And your team keeps asking, wait, how does this client want it again? And you keep answering the same questions over and over again. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives: designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs and agency owners who seek practical and actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency.

I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant and founder of Chief Creative Consultants. We help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together.

Now I want to set the tone for today's episode with this simple quote from Brené Brown, which I'm pretty sure it's probably been said way before Brené Brown, but she published it in a book, so we're going to give her props for it. It's this: clear is kind. Unclear is unkind. That means clarity is kind, right? And lack of clarity is not kind. And that's what we're going to get into today.

Look, when your client preferences live only in your head, you become the bottleneck for every decision, every question, every new team member who joins. All of that has to go through you and that can get really overwhelming. It creates this question trap, right? And it's a lot of the same questions over and over again.

Right? It's how does this client want these revisions handled? What's their approval process? Do they want weekly check-ins or not? What system are we using to upload their stuff on their platforms? Things like that, right? You answer these questions from memory and you're pulling from scattered sources, right? Because we have lots of things going on. We talked about this before that each interruption in our thought process can cost us anywhere from five to 15 to 20 minutes total a day of focused work time, right? And you multiply that throughout the week, and sometimes you're spending close to 10 hours a week just being a human database when you don't really need to be.

It ends up being hard for you to hire new team members effectively because you have to verbally download to them all the client knowledge, right? Onboarding can take you four to six weeks instead of maybe only one to two weeks. And these new hires that you do onboard, they end up making mistakes because they don't know the unwritten rules, right? Oh, this client has this little quirk. Sorry, I forgot to tell you about that, right? And then clients end up getting inconsistent experiences depending on who's working on their project.

And we've talked many times on this podcast before about context switching and it's something that we're going to come back to a little bit today as well. Every time somebody asks you or someone on your team, how does this particular client work? You have to stop and ask yourself. You have to stop whatever you're working on, right? You have to mentally switch to that client's context. You have to recall a bunch of scattered information from memory and then explain it, right? You have to upload it to them verbally, which isn't documented for next time. And so then you switch back to your original task and that's where you lose your 10 to 15 minutes of momentum that you have.

This is what we call a Future You problem, right? My Future You note-taking methodology enters here, right? Because future you and future team members are forgetful, right? You won't remember client preferences six months from now because you have 12, 14 other clients that you're having to remember stuff for as well. And it starts to get blurry because you're trying to keep it all right here.

So Client B comes back after a three-month gap. You're going to waste time relearning their workflow all over again. But the Future You methodology teaches that if you can document it once, you can reference it forever.

According to Function Fox, 79% of creative agencies over-service clients without proper documentation of what's actually being included in the scope. And we end up getting a little bit of scope creep in there, right? But the real cost isn't just the free work. It's the cognitive load of having to remember these unique preferences for every single client without a system to remember all of these things.

And that's what we're here for. That's what we use things like the Future You framework. And that's why today I'm introducing to you what you should have for every client is an individual client SOP. And if you don't like the SOP, 100% get it. I've been using the word playbook. How about we have a playbook for every client, an individual client playbook?

It's not a project management document, it's a client preferences playbook. It answers the recurring questions about the client over and over again about how this specific client operates. I'm going to break down some sections of this playbook for you.

First thing, let's start with communication preferences. How do they like to be communicated to? Is it Slack? Is it email? Is it comments on some other type of platform? Is it a phone call? Is it a text? What is it? How about response time expectations? Obviously we have our own response time expectations, but what are their response time expectations? When they reach out to you, are they expecting a 24-hour return turnaround? Are they expecting same day? Are they expecting weekly check-ins?

Who are the key decision makers? Who needs to be CC'd on communications? What's the meeting cadence that you have with them? Is it weekly? Is it bi-weekly? Is it monthly? What are the best times to reach them? Are they easier to reach in the morning, the afternoons? Do we avoid Mondays? All of these questions add up into our communication preferences in their playbook.

So for example, let's say a client prefers Slack for quick questions and email for approvals, right? So for example, in this communication preference section of the playbook, we can notate that the client prefers Slack for quick questions and email for formal approvals. Now, let's say let's call our Sarah as our primary contact over there, but let's call the owner of the company or the CEO, John. He needs to be CC'd in on all creative concepts. And we also need to remember not to schedule meetings with Sarah before 10 a.m. because she has kid drop-off.

These are all these little details that if we just had a playbook for the client that we could reference, then we could easily deliver with excellence and save us and our team so much time.

And the other section in the playbook I want to talk about is scope and deliverables, right? What's included in their standard package? What is it that they're paying us for? What's the actual deliverables? How many rounds of revisions are included in what they're paying us for? What are the file formats that they need them delivered in or file naming that they need them delivered in? What's not included, right? We don't want team members accidentally giving work away that's unnecessary. What's the change order threshold when there's a small tweak? How many of those before we start to go, okay, now it's billable, right?

So here's an example, right? A standard package might include three concept directions, two rounds of revisions and final files in a PNG or a PDF, right? We'll also notate that video edits beyond two rounds, they're going to be billed at $150 an hour. And we're also going to notate on there that they always need Instagram square format, even though they don't ask for it. Just go ahead and include it anyway, because they're going to want it. All of those things you can put in your scope and deliverables section of your playbook and make it easy for your team to find that information when they need to.

Next section, let's talk about brand voice and creative preferences. What is their brand voice, right? Is it playful? Is it corporate? Is it edgy? Is it conservative? Do we have brand guidelines for them? If so, let's go ahead and add them or link them into this playbook. Their design style preferences. Is it minimalist? Is it bold? Is it illustration heavy? What do they love? What do they hate? What's their past feedback patterns? Do they always want headlines shorter and they prefer blue over red, right? You can notate that type of stuff in here.

You could say things like, for example, this is a conservative financial brand, right? So let's avoid humor, keep copy really formal. They hate stock photography, right? Let's use custom illustrations only. And headlines should be under eight words and blue is the brand primary, the specific blue actually. So never use red. It's in their brand guidelines.

A fourth section for this client playbook is the approval process, right? Who approves what? Is it the designer to the creative director to the client or is it straight to the client? How long does their approval typically take? What format do they want to review it in? Do they want a PDF? Do they want a live link? Do they want a prototype? Do they batch approvals or do they review everything immediately as it rolls out of the production?

So for example, you can notate that the client reviews internally before giving feedback. So go ahead and allow three business days minimum. They prefer PDF mockups, not live links, and they'll give that feedback via email, never verbal only. Expect rounds of edits to be batched, not in real time. These are really good notes that you can include in your approval process section of your client playbook.

Now, this last one is kind of a miscellaneous section, but I do think it's needed for every single client playbook. And this is quirks and context, or you could just name it miscellaneous if you wanted to, but it's anything that's unique to this client that a new team member should know, right? Past project challenges and how they were resolved, client personality notes. Are they detail-oriented or are they big picture? Are they collaborative or are they hands-off?

So you can say things here like, the client gets really nervous about timelines, so always build in even more buffer than what we typically do and communicate that progress proactively, which we could do, obviously, through our pizza delivery system. Hit me up if you want information about that. You could also say, they're night owls. They're often going to send feedback at 11 p.m., but just don't expect, like, they're not going to expect responses until the morning they know that. They love being involved in the creative process, so invite them in as much as possible. These are notes that are all good in the quirks and context or the miscellaneous section right there at the end of your client SOP or your client playbook.

Now, there could be many other sections, but the idea here is what will future you or your future team wish that you had documented about this client? That's when you know that needs to go somewhere in that client playbook. You can save it in the client assets folder on whatever drive that you use so your team can easily access it at any time and it saves them from having to constantly bang on your door or call you or text you or interrupt you while you're trying to get your work done and ask you a question that has already been documented because like Brené Brown says, and I'm sure many others have said as well, clear is kind. Clarity is kind and unclear is unkind.

When you force your team to guess at client preferences, you're being unkind to them. And you're being unkind to your client who gets inconsistent service and you're being unkind to future you because they have to answer the same questions over and over again. You have to stop your work and then have to restart your work again.

So what are we going to do now? Three things I want to leave you with this week.

Number one, pick your most complex client. And this week I want you to identify that, identify the client with the most questions, most quirks, most unique preferences. This is going to be your pilot SOP or your pilot client playbook. It's going to save you the most time immediately. The most complex client. Let's go ahead and get that stuff documented. Use those five sections that I talked about and maybe more: communication, scope, brand voice, approvals and different quirks and context clues as well. Look, it'll take you 30 to 45 minutes documenting everything that's currently in your head about this client, but it's going to save you hours in the long run.

All right. After you do that, second thing I want you to do is start a client questions log. Over the next three days, and everybody on your team, every time a team member asks you a client question, I want you to write it down. Every time your client asks you a question, I want you to write it down. After 30 days, you're going to have a perfect list of what needs to be in these playbooks. You're going to get the answers, you're going to get, hey, these are the common questions that I'm getting from my team and my contractors all the time, and these are the common questions that I'm getting from clients all the time, and so I want to put those answers all in the playbook, right? And you'll have all that stuff just in 30 days. It'll be easy.

And once you do all that, then start creating playbooks for your active clients over the next 90 days, right? Set a goal. Hey, one new playbook each week or one new playbook every two weeks, whatever the realistic goal is for you, go ahead and set that. Don't aim for perfection, just getting it done, right? Documented is better than having it memorized every single time. Make a living document. You can update it whenever you learn something new about this client. Keep it as a Google doc, whatever, and store all of those in the client project folders right there on your drive.

And then if you're like me, if you use Asana or Notion or whatever other project management tool you use, go ahead and link that Google Drive link or that drive link into the client's profile or project. And that way we can easily access it because we want to be able to get these things at a moment's notice. If it's too hard to get to, your team, your contractors, they're going to skip it and they're just going to go ask you instead. So make it easy for them to find.

And when you onboard new contractors or new team members, you always reference these playbooks. If they're going to work with a client, you got a whole playbook for this client. Here's everything that you need to know about it.

So a couple of resources I want to call out to you. The clear is kind and unclear is unkind is from Brené Brown's book, Dare to Lead. I do have some client templates and things like that on my website. You can download at dustinpead.com/free and the Future You framework for documentation you can find there as well. Also have the client onboarding toolkit for you there as well.

Look, I'd love to help you build or grow your creative business. So if you're interested in that, head to dustinpead.com. Grab a spot on my calendar today and let's talk. You can connect with me as well on social media at dustinpead, P-E-A-D.

All right, next week, we're going to dive right into something that I actually learned the hard way. I'm going to talk about why I stopped using AI for my personal weekly planning for six months. I planned my week. It was super efficient. It was optimized and it was completely wrong for me. And I'm going to tell you all about why. I'll talk to you next time all about that on the Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 142: Why Your Team Hates Your New System

(And What to Do About It)

SUMMARY

You just spent weeks researching project management systems. You invested time and money into the perfect solution. You rolled it out to your team with excitement. And then... crickets. Nobody's logging in. Nobody's using it. Your "game-changing" system is sitting there collecting digital dust.

Sound familiar?

If you've ever experienced the frustration of implementing a new tool only to watch it fail spectacularly, you're not alone. But here's what most leaders miss: your new system isn't failing because it's the wrong tool. It's failing because you're leading systems instead of leading people.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ System failures are people problems disguised as technology problems. Your new tool isn't failing because it's wrong—it's failing because you forgot to lead the people who need to use it. Leaders get excited about shiny tools and forget about team habits, creating a graveyard of unused software.

• ⚡️ Proximity to natural habitat is the secret to adoption. Don't ask for radical change when incremental adjustments will work. The closer your new system is to their current workflow (10% adjustment vs. 80% overhaul), the higher your adoption rate will be. Work with existing habits, not against them.

• ⚡️ Implementation is a leadership journey, not a launch event. Involve your team in the decision, explain why repeatedly, identify champions for pilot launches, and work alongside them through the transition. Make it safe to struggle, celebrate adoption, and provide ongoing support even when they say they don't need it.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work." - Peter Drucker

• 💬 "Meet them where they are, not where you want them to be. The secret sauce to getting people to actually log in and use what you've invested in is proximity to their natural habitat."

• 💬 "Your new system isn't failing because it's the wrong tool. It's failing because you're asking people to change too much, too fast without their input and without remembering that these are real people you're leading."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️Download free frameworks and tools at dustinpead.com/free

• ⚡️Learn more about the "implement with you" philosophy at dustinpead.com

• ⚡️ Follow @dustinpead on social media for daily insights on leading creative teams

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

You just spent a lot of time and money on a project management system or a different software to solve your team's latest problem. But here's the thing. Your team hasn't even logged in once. Does that sound familiar? That's what we're going to talk about on today's episode. Why your team hates your new system and what to do about it. Let's get into it. Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity. This is a podcast for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, videographers, all creative entrepreneurs and agencies who are seeking practical, actionable strategies to grow their creative business. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant. I own and operate Chief Creative Consultants out of Atlanta, Georgia, and I help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams so they can create with efficiency as they scale together. I wanna start us off with this quote from Peter Drucker. He said, "So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work." Doesn't it seem like that? It seems like that if we have someone that we report to and it often will feel like that by the complaints that we hear from those that report to us. And when I started working with a client of mine, they were using Trello and we went and took them from the Trello project management to the Asana project management system. They started with Trello, right? We worked, it worked out okay for them for their solo work, but as the team grew, they needed better workflow for the video production. And so we made a shift to Asana. It wasn't totally radical. It brought them close to where he already was in Trello, but allowed room for the team to grow with them. And the result was that the team actually adopted it because it fit in the natural flow as they grew as an organization. So the real problem is that you're leading systems instead of leading people. System failures are people problems disguised as technology problems, right? We go after it and after it and after it thinking that every bit of technology and every piece of software is going to solve our problems, but they're actually people problems, right? And it's not technology problems. The leaders get excited about the shiny new tools and forget team habits. And that ends up creating this tool graveyard, right? Where you have all these systems and software piled up that you're never gonna use. And the reason is because they never consulted with the end users before jumping head in. They just thought, oh, this looks amazing. We have to have this. You think that as the leader and we jump right in. So you have to remember first before we solve this problem that your team works with people, not just with software. It's people that are running the day to day operations. So meet them where they are, not where you want them to be. We talk about this all the time in making our best ideas and best processes and systems come to life. The secret sauce to making them a success and getting these people to actually log in and use the things that you spent so much time and money on is proximity to their natural habitat, right? Don't ask for radical change or for some incremental adjustments, right? You need to be able to bring it as close as possible to where they are. You can do that, right? With things like an API integration instead of using a new platform, right? Instead of we could go from Trello to Asana, right? But we're not going to go from Trello to a full on AI, maybe even Trello to Notion, right? A full on system for them to use. And the old habits, obviously they die hard, right? So let's work with the habits, not against them. Ask yourself and your team, what are they already doing that we can build upon? But you can't just roll this thing out and expect everybody to jump in, even if you did bring it to them in proximity. Implementation isn't a launch event, it's a leadership journey. So before we roll these things out, we wanna involve our team in the decision. We wanna explain why this change matters. This generation more than ever needs to know why we are making the changes that we are making. They need to connect with why. And for the older generation, it may seem frustrating that we have to do that. But if you can take a minute to do that and consistently do that with consistent messaging throughout, you're going to understand that your adoption rate is going to be so much higher. So before we roll it out, we're going to have a discussion with our team and we're going to explain why, right? We're going to actually have a conversation, a two way piece of communication, not just us talking to them, but getting feedback from them as well. Right. We want to have some champions in that room, right? Who can champion that pilot launch, but you definitely want to have a conversation and hear them where they are. If you can hear where they're at and you can meet them where they're at, then you will have a whole lot more success in the long run. You can begin to celebrate that adoption all the way through completion. A great way to do this is to implement the "with you" philosophy where you can work alongside them through the shift of the new software. Look, the reason that your team hates your new software is because you never considered them and you forgot that you actually lead people, not just systems. So that's how we're going to change it moving forward. We're going to remember that we lead people and we're going to bring it closer to them. So what do we do now with this? The proximity test is number one. How close is what I'm wanting to bring in? How close is this to their natural current flow? And the only way to do that is to map out their current workflow first. Then we're gonna evaluate, is this a 10% adjustment or an 80% overhaul? It can be 10, it can be 80, but you have to know and prepare them adequately in order to have a successful launch with your software. And lastly, choose the tools that meet them where they are. Secondly, pilot this thing before a full rollout. So many times I see leaders that go, "This is it, we've done everything, this is research, boom, there's no turning back now, this is what we're gonna do," and they kind of bullhead their way through the whole thing. Start with just two to three team champions and gather some real feedback on a smaller scale before going out. That way you can work out all the bugs, you can work out, and now I know we need to step in more here, we need to lean out less here, and you'll have all that information at your fingertips, which is gonna create champions for you when you do the larger rollout.Lastly, just to remember, like we said, throughout this whole episode, lead people first, systems second. Communicate the why clearly and repeatedly all the way throughout until it becomes second nature for your team to use that system. Provide training and ongoing support at every opportunity, even if they say they don't need it. Provide it, provide it, provide it. And make it a safe environment for them to struggle with during this transition time. "Hey, we're all learning together. Yes, let's learn what you're learning so that we can all learn alongside you as well." Your new system, again, it's not failing because it's the wrong tool. It's failing because you're asking the people to change too much, too fast without their input and without remembering that these are real people that you're leading. So meet them where they are, involve them in the how you're gonna execute these things. Lead the people first and the system change will follow. Follow me at dustinpead.com and on social media at @dustinpead. Next week we're gonna get into the 79% problem. Why creative agencies are over-servicing their clients and losing money while doing it. We're gonna talk about boundaries and SOPs and how to stop giving away your work for free. I'll talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy.

Ep 141: The Priority Paralysis

How to Overcome Priority Paralysis and Actually Get Things Done in 2026

SUMMARY

Everyone's talking about what to add to their plate in January—new goals, new systems, new habits. But what if the secret to your best creative year isn't about adding more, but ruthlessly removing what's been draining your energy all year long?

Most creative teams start the year buried under last year's unfinished business while trying to add new goals to the pile. The typical pattern goes like this: survive December's holiday chaos, then magically expect January 1st to be a fresh start with new systems and goals. By January 15th, nothing has actually changed because the old mess is still there. And by February, it's back to chaos—but now with guilt about abandoning your goals so soon.

Here's why this doesn't work for creative teams: you can't build new systems on top of broken foundations and expect good results. Your team is already carrying the cognitive load from incomplete projects of 2025, every "someday" task from water cooler conversations, and all the digital clutter that's accumulated. This builds decision fatigue, so even with ambitious goals posted on the wall, you're exhausted by mid-January because you didn't shed the weight of 2025 first.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Addition without subtraction is just accumulation. You can't build new systems on top of broken foundations. Subtract first in December, then add in January when you have the capacity for it.

• ⚡️ Your calendar should serve your priorities, not control them. Every recurring meeting should justify its existence against your current reality, not historical circumstances.

• ⚡️ It's okay to give yourself permission not to move on good ideas. If it's not the right time or you don't have the right resources, archive it with intention and review it quarterly.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "If it doesn't actively serve your team, then it's actively draining them."

💬 "You advise clients to focus and prioritize things. But is your agency actually practicing what it preaches?"

💬 "The best time to declutter isn't January 1st when you're trying to build momentum. It's now in December when you can create space before the rush of the new year starts."

TRANSCRIPT

It's a brand new year, have 47 things on your to-do list, 12 of them are marked urgent, and goals that you need to prioritize, and you're paralyzed. You're staring at your screen, unable to start anything. So today we're gonna address the priority paralysis. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity for all creatives, designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs or agency owners seeking actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency. That's right. We're talking about processes and systems. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant, and I help creatives and their agencies know themselves, their processes and their teams to create with efficiency as they scale together.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas and an amazing transition into the new year. I hope you got everything that you asked for on your Christmas wish list, but it is a new year. We are back with the creativity made easy podcast and it is a whole new opportunity that's in front of us. And so when a whole new opportunity gets put in front of us, oftentimes we get paralyzed.

But for Christmas, I received in my read category—if you don't know this, maybe I've talked about it before, either on the blog or on this podcast—but in our immediate family, we give four categories of gifts. Everybody gets four gifts, right? Something you want, something you need, something to wear and something to read. And my something to read this year from my wife was a new bit of a memoir from Sally Mann. Now, if you don't know Sally Mann, she is a world renowned photographer who hails from my home state of Virginia.

And the book is called Artwork, which already you got me on the title, right? But it's her memoir on the creative life. It's just an incredible book. It's probably honest, raw look at the struggle of an artist's life. But I love this and I wanted to read this to you because I think it sets the tone for the topic today. And at the end of this episode, I'm going to be giving away a free copy of this book. So stay tuned to the end, whether you're watching or listening, stay tuned to the end to find out how to get your copy of this book absolutely free sent from me.

All right. Sally says this on page 97, if you have the hardback copy or you win the copy from me. She says, "The measure of artistic success is not money, it's time. And you must relegate it like the metronomic steps of the most unflappable beefeater on parade." She's got quite a vocabulary. "Let people make fun of my day timer, clutched to my breast like a rosary, but knowing what I have to do every hour of every day and every week of every month is what allows me to schedule. Yes, schedule creativity."

That's a lot of what we talk about on the show. It's pretty much the whole show. It doesn't drift down and lightly settle upon us like a gauzy visitation from the Muse. You have to clear a well lit and GPS coordinated landing strip for it, meaning for creativity. And that's what I want to talk about today. That's what I want to talk about this year. That's what I want to talk about each and every week on this podcast episode is the strategy of your creativity. Like it doesn't just happen, it takes work to go towards it.

And so when we talk about today specifically is this priority paralysis, right? We entered the new year, we have all these things, we have all these ambitions, we have all these goals. We also have some projects that were still lingering maybe from the end of last year that we still have to kind of finish to completion or we have clients who have rested over a couple of weeks and now they've come back with all sorts of new amazing ideas that they want your help executing, which is a great problem to have, but it can get really overwhelming really quick, right?

You might be a creative or an agency owner who's working like 60 plus hours a week and everything feels urgent and you can't distinguish from strategic or tactical. And the result ends up being that you're just spinning wheels, right? It's just busy work. You're not really moving forward, but your breakthrough moment is going to be realizing that the problem isn't time management like we read about. It's actually priority management. So it's a little bit even more micro into the big category of time.

Let's talk about the root cause of this priority paralysis, right? It's again, it's not a time problem. This is a clarity problem. All right. And there's three types of confusion that I want to address specifically that cause this type of paralysis. The first one is strategic versus tactical blur, right? So is this something that's going to move the business forward or is it just keeping the plates spinning? Is it strategic or is it tactical? That's one point of confusion that you need to clear up.

The other one is, is this task or project or priority mine or is it theirs, right? It's a mine versus their confusion. Should I be doing this or should someone else be doing this? Should I be delegating this? Is this really what my business does? Is this really what our department does? Is this really what I bring to the table?

The other one is, is it now versus later? This is the time, the time and confusion, right? Is this actually urgent? Or is it just the loudest thing right now? We've all been in a meeting where the loudest person who talks the most gets to dominate the conversation and no one else gets any input. And so you leave and you start moving towards whatever the loudest person talked about because they talked about the most and they hogged up all the time. Right. That's not necessarily the most urgent. It's just the loudest. Right.

Fifty eight percent of agency owners cite that revenue is their top concern. Trust me, I talked to agency owners all the time, every single week, and they're always talking about revenue, revenue, revenue. But listen, most agency owners and most creative business owners, they're working on urgent items, not important items, right? They're just spinning the wheel. They're not necessarily working on the strategic, they're working on the tactical. They're not necessarily working on what they should be working on, they're working on what someone else should be working on. And they're not necessarily working on what's actually the most urgent. They're actually just working on what's the most loud.

So let's get into one of the main tools that I use for myself and our clients to help them understand what is the most important thing for them to work on. We at Chief Creative Consultants combine two tools and merge it into what we call our priority framework, which you can get for free at dustinpead.com/free. Look for the giant button that says priority framework, but the priority framework is a combination of two tools. It's the focus funnel and it's the Eisenhower matrix. And I want to talk specifically today about the focus funnel. You can read more about the Eisenhower matrix on previous blog posts or even podcast episodes. If you just search my name and Eisenhower matrix, if you just Google that, you're going to find all sorts of stuff out there.

But what I do here is I start with the focus funnel. The focus funnel is this: ask yourself every task that you have, everything that's on your plate right now, there's 47 things, the goals, the urgencies, the things that are popping up already into the new year. You're going to put all those things through this imaginary funnel. Even if you need to kind of write it out and draw and move it through the funnel, you can. I've certainly done that before.

But you're going to ask yourself this. Number one, can this be eliminated? Can this be eliminated? Does this really actually need to happen? Or is it just busy work just spinning the tires, right? We don't even need it. Why is this even here? Coming off of a break like many of you have is a great time to look at it and go, what do we need this for? And we talked about at the end of the year, kind of cleaning up some of that stuff, but there still might be some residue of that coming into the new year. So can you eliminate it?

If you can't eliminate it, then it moves down to the next section of the funnel, which is automated. Is this something that we can automate? There's so many processes and system softwares out there, AI, all these different things that technology is endless these days, that we can take something that we think we needed to do ourselves or our team needed to do themselves and we can automate it. So can you automate it?

Now, if you can't automate it, then you move on to the next section. Can I delegate this? Is it actually me, right? Is it mine or is it theirs? Should I be doing this or should I be delegating it? Is this really what I need to be spending my time on?

And if it passes that and it's like, okay, I can't eliminate it, I can't automate it, I can't delegate it, it has to be me that does this, then you ask the time. Is it now or is it later, right? Because you can procrastinate. You can procrastinate, it's okay, right? The liberation of not now, right? It doesn't mean never, it just means not right now. It means that you can schedule it for later, right? Just like Sally Mann said in the book from the quote that I read earlier this morning, you can schedule that creativity. So that's the focus funnel.

Now, something else I want to talk about that we're gonna be talking about a lot this year is capacity. Now, I want you to think about when you're going through this focus funnel and especially when you get into the delegate portion of the focus funnel, I want you to ask yourself, is this something that you can actually or your team can actually take on? Do you have the capacity, right?

Priority paralysis happens because we say yes without checking ours or our team's capacity. And now we have too much on our plate and we have to decide what to do with it. So a little bit of a preview of capacity planning work. You can't prioritize it without knowing your actual capacity. It's a dangerous question: Can I fit this in? The right question is, does this replace something else? And if so, is that something else actually more important? That'll help you understand the priority in that capacity, right?

But we have a framework that I'm working on right now. It's going to be coming later on this quarter. The capacity planning framework, stay tuned for that. But essentially, it asks you to always understand that whatever your capacity is, you need to add about a 20% or subtract about a 20% margin in that, right? So if your capacity is, let's say the standard capacity is, you know, if we're talking time capacity, right? Standard capacity might be 40 hours a week. We're going to take 20% less than that and we're gonna say it's 32 hours not 40 hours, right? We're gonna say it's 32 hours not 40 hours because that would be 20% less than that, right?

So but in order to actually know that you need to start tracking your time on these tasks. How long does it take you to strategize for a campaign? How long does it take you to write copy? How long does it take you to edit in post-production? How long does it take you to pack up and tear down all your gear that you have to take to different shoots? How long does it take you to concept different logo designs? Understanding not just guessing but actually understanding that fact will help you every single time.

So in our "what now" I want to break it down like this for us this week. I want to talk about what to do today, what to do this week, what to do this month, and what you need to be kind of doing ongoing and then maybe like a next level portion as well.

So let's wrap it up this way all right. So today I want you to do an item purge or what I like to call a brain dump, right? Open up your task list right now. Run everything through the focus filter. Be ruthless, right? Eliminate, delegate, automate, defer it till later, procrastinate, be ruthless about it, right? And at the end of that focus funnel, I like to say this all the time, when you get to the end of the focus funnel, what actually ends up landing on your plate to do right now should be about 20% of what you started with. So let's say you started with 10 items at the top of the focus funnel. By the time you get down to the focus funnel and it's truly what you need to be doing now should really only be about two of those items. Not all 10 or not three, four or five, six. It's you really, if you're doing it right, you should really only have about 20%. So do that today.

This week, I want you to, in the next seven days, I want you to have a priority session for your weeks, whether it be 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it takes. You can do Sunday night. You can do Monday mornings. I myself do Sunday night so that I'm ready to hit the ground running on Monday mornings. Or if you're an early riser, you can get up early Monday morning and do this. And what you're going to do is you're going to identify your top three strategic priorities for the week. And everything else is either going to support those big three or they're going to wait, right? They're going to have to wait.

And so in that big three this month, remember that big three rule, right? No more than three major priorities active at once. Right. And if those three things happen to take all month, then those three things stay there. If one takes a month, one takes two weeks and one takes one week, then things are going to move in and out. But we're not going to continue to add and add and add. That's where priority paralysis happens every single time. And if you need help, you can go to dustinpead.com/free and download the DO versus DUE framework to help you work backwards and planning out your real deadlines. All right.

Ongoing. We're going to start working on this capacity check, right? We're going to start asking ourselves and finding out truly not just feeling. I feel like it takes—what is your actual current capacity? You're going to start tracking your hours available versus your hours committed. And you're going to see those times in real time data. And then you're going to build in 20% buffer for the unexpected. That's how we schedule our creativity. We're not going to live completely depleted at all times and maxed out. We're always going to allow ourselves for a buffer, whether we need it or we think we need it or not, because what's going to happen is it's going to get used up in some way, either inside of your work or outside of your work. It's going to get used up.

And the next level you can take if you want to after this episode is trying to figure out some kind of a decision delegation framework, right? You can start identifying these recurring decisions over and over again, like client requests and project scope questions and things like that. And you're going to start creating decision criteria for your team to use so that they can start finding out, they can start delegating and you don't have to even spend all your time or a lot of your time delegating. What it does is going to empower others to filter those things so that you can focus on the strategic and they can focus on the tactical.

Again, I want to remind you, you can find all my free resources, including the priority framework at dustinpead.com/free. You can find out more about me and Chief Creative Consultants and how we can serve you and your creativity and your organization at dustinpead.com obviously. And then you can follow me on social media at @dustinpead.

Next week, we're going to talk about why your team might hate your new system that you just rolled out or you're about to roll out. We're going to talk about change management for creative teams because implementing systems is not easy. And we're going to get people to actually use them. Imagine that—that's the real work.

I told you at the end of this episode, I was going to give you an opportunity to win this book. So just take one of the top five things that I mentioned here at the end of the episode, whether it be your focus funnel or weekly priority or your big three, or your capacity check, just tell me what you're going to do in the next week, in the next month and over the next quarter—something that you took away from this episode that you're gonna start implementing. And I want you to go to my YouTube channel. If you're watching on YouTube already you're already there. If you're listening to this, thank you for listening—hop over to the YouTube channel. You can just search Dustin Pead or Creativity Made Easy on YouTube and you'll find this episode.

And just comment on it. What are you going to take away from this episode? What are you going to start doing because of this episode? How did it impact you? If you comment on that, then I will run a random generator and I will pick one of you, reach out to you, and mail you your very own copy of Artwork by Sally Mann that just came out here recently towards the end of 2025.

And so I'll do that over the next week. So when this comes out on Thursday, January 9th, we'll close it the following Thursday, which would be January 16th. Let's say we'll close it January 16th at noon, because you never really know—is midnight the end of the day of that date or the beginning of the next date. I know it's like a 12:01 situation. Let's just be super clear. January 16th at noon, we're going to close it off. So you have until January 16th, 2026 at noon. If you're watching this much later, I'm sorry you missed the giveaway. Hopefully there's more coming. If you get caught up to live podcast episodes being released, but we're going to—if you comment on this episode on the YouTube channel, tell me what takeaway you're taking from this episode today. I'll give you until January 16th, 2026 at noon to make that comment. And then I'll random generator from those comments. And one person will win a copy of Sally Mann's book. And I will reach out to you for your details so I can send that book.

Thanks y'all so much for listening, for watching, for commenting, and for taking action in the new year. Let's get after it folks. I cannot wait to grow with you this year. It's gonna be our best year yet. I'll talk to you next week on Creativity Made Easy.

Ep 137: Decluttering Your Creative Systems Before The New Year

Why December Decluttering Beats January Goal-Setting

SUMMARY

Everyone's talking about what to add to their plate in January—new goals, new systems, new habits. But what if the secret to your best creative year isn't about adding more, but ruthlessly removing what's been draining your energy all year long?

Most creative teams start the year buried under last year's unfinished business while trying to add new goals to the pile. The typical pattern goes like this: survive December's holiday chaos, then magically expect January 1st to be a fresh start with new systems and goals. By January 15th, nothing has actually changed because the old mess is still there. And by February, it's back to chaos—but now with guilt about abandoning your goals so soon.

Here's why this doesn't work for creative teams: you can't build new systems on top of broken foundations and expect good results. Your team is already carrying the cognitive load from incomplete projects of 2025, every "someday" task from water cooler conversations, and all the digital clutter that's accumulated. This builds decision fatigue, so even with ambitious goals posted on the wall, you're exhausted by mid-January because you didn't shed the weight of 2025 first.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Addition without subtraction is just accumulation. You can't build new systems on top of broken foundations. Subtract first in December, then add in January when you have the capacity for it.

• ⚡️ Your calendar should serve your priorities, not control them. Every recurring meeting should justify its existence against your current reality, not historical circumstances.

• ⚡️ It's okay to give yourself permission not to move on good ideas. If it's not the right time or you don't have the right resources, archive it with intention and review it quarterly.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "If it doesn't actively serve your team, then it's actively draining them."

💬 "You advise clients to focus and prioritize things. But is your agency actually practicing what it preaches?"

💬 "The best time to declutter isn't January 1st when you're trying to build momentum. It's now in December when you can create space before the rush of the new year starts."

EPISODE RESOURCES

Books Mentioned:

• Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

• The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo (Yes, it applies to business systems too!)

Free Resources:

Visit dustinpead.com/free to download frameworks and templates, including:

• DO vs DUE Framework

• 12-Month Outlook Planning Tool

• Implementation guides and worksheets

TRANSCRIPT

You know what I've learned after years of helping creatives build better systems? The one area even the most organized creatives still wing it? Their money. And I get it. You don't start your business to become an accountant or a bookkeeper, right? You started it to create amazing work. But here's the reality. Financial chaos will kill your creativity faster than any other kind of overwhelm. And that's why I love what the core group does.

They're not your typical accountants. They only work with creatives like us and they understand that you need systems that work with your brain, not against it. Their profit first approach flips everything you think you know about business finances. Instead of paying everyone else first and hoping that there's something left for you, you pay yourself first and build your business around that. They've got three service levels depending on where you're at in your journey from basic tax support, all the way up to full CFO partnership, which is what I use and it's amazing. Stop letting money stress, steal your creative energy. Check out coregroupus.com and finally get the financial systems your creative business deserves.

Everyone's talking about what to add to their plate in January. New goals, new systems, new habits, but what if the secret to your best creative year isn't about adding more, but ruthlessly removing what's been draining your energy all year long? Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business without sacrificing their sanity. I'm your host Dustin Pead, Creative Consultant, and I help creative professionals know themselves, their processes, and their team so that they can move from chaos to clarity. So whether you're a freelancer, agency owner, or leading a creative team in a department, this show is absolutely about building systems that free your creativity instead of constraining it.

Now I've talked about rituals and rhythms on this podcast before, and I don't really do rituals because they're harder to change, but rhythms kind of ebb and flow with me as my life ebbs and flows as well and my business too. So every December I have a rhythm that's become a little bit of a year end rhythm. And before I even think about planning for the new year or goals, I have to first deal with what I'm carrying from this year into the new year. I don't want to enter into the new year with things that don't need to carry over.

So right now as I'm recording this, I'm looking at my own systems, right? Is my Asana bloated with some day projects that's been there since February? Is my Google Drive loaded with outdated documents? Is my calendar bloated, right? These are things that I'm asking myself because the best time to declutter isn't January 1st when you're trying to build momentum. It's now in December when you can create space before the rush of the new year starts. So that way we can start the new year lighter, not heavier with all of this must pressure that we've carried from 2025 into 2026.

It's kind of an addition without subtraction is just accumulation, right? If we add something without taking away something, it's just accumulation. And it piles on and piles on and piles on. And this is how most agencies or creatives end up with what we call like system or process overwhelm, tech overwhelm. There's too many things going on. Too much. They've built up layers and layers and layers of tape on these things that they've patched together over the years. And it weighs on them and their team as they try to trudge forward and they can't gain momentum that way.

So this episode is just as much for you as it is for me. So the conversation that I have with me and my team every December, we're gonna do this together because even the people teaching systems need to practice what they preach. And so now is the time for me and for you.

So we've talked about the problem with adding things in January, right? Most creative teams start the year buried under last year's unfinished business while they're trying to add new year and new goals to the pile, right? A typical new year pattern for agency owners goes something like this. In December, it's just survive the holiday chaos. Then January 1 comes and magically poof, it's a fresh start, new systems, new goals, new everything. And then by January 15th, they realized that nothing actually changed because the old mess is still there, right? We tidied up our glasses, but the room is still a mess. And so by February, it's back to chaos. But now you have the guilt in addition to the chaos, now you have the guilt about abandoning your goals so soon into the new year.

So here's why this doesn't work for creative teams. You can't build new systems on top of broken foundations. Let me say that again. You can't build new systems on top of broken foundations and expect good results from it. Your team is already carrying this cognitive load right in their brains from the incomplete projects of 2025 and every single someday task that you've had in conversation around the water cooler or over slack or text message or phone calls or drive time thoughts as you're processing things out loud. All of those things start to cloud up and then you also add on all the digital clutter, right? And all of these things, they actually build decision fatigue and so you get into the new year and you like put on the wall, this is what we're going to do, this is what we're going to be about, it's going to be the best year ever. But by January 15th you're exhausted because you didn't shed any of the weight of 2025 first.

So what we wanna do in December is we wanna subtract first and add second. Subtract what you need to subtract now during the month of December so that when you get to January and you're adding things on, you have the capacity to add those things on. You have the cognitive space to add those things on. So you create the space before you fill it. Otherwise, if you take a full glass of water and you try to add more water to it, it makes a giant mess. And that's what many of us are doing as we carry these new ideas, these new goals, these new systems into the new year.

Greg McKeown in his book Essentialism, which I recommend to every person really, much less business owner or creative to read, he says this, he says, if it isn't a clear yes, then it's a clear no. So when you're thinking through your systems, if you have a system that doesn't serve you or your team, and it's not clear that it's serving you or your team, then it's a clear no. It's gotta go, right? So if it's a clear yes, you can say, look, I can see the writing on the wall. I have the statistics, I have the data to back it up, I have the trends that I can see were more profitable, were more productive, yada, yada, yada. Those things are great. It's a clear yes. But if you can't say 100 percent clarity yes, then it's a clear no to go. If it doesn't actively serve your team, then it's actively draining them.

All right, so let's go through a little bit of a year end assessment here of the clutter that can build up. So I'm asking myself these questions this month. You ask you and your team these questions this month as well. So first, let's look at tools and platforms, the things we use every day. If you're watching on YouTube, I'm holding this digital pen because I use my Remarkable every single day. But what tools and platforms are you paying for, but not using? And I know that sounds ridiculous, like why would I pay for it if I'm not using it? We all have this, it's why there are companies out there who have dedicated paid apps to scrape your bank account, notice what you're paying for on a regular basis so that you can be like, I thought I canceled that gym membership like two years ago, why am I still paying for that? Right? It's a big problem in today's society because we're a subscription, digital subscription, swipe and forget about it type of society.

The same is true for your business. So what software tools are you paying for but not using? What integrations, right, created more complexity than clarity? Maybe you're like, hey, we're going to integrate this new app into our Slack workspace, or we're going to bring in this AI bot into this situation, this process. Did it create more complexity than clarity? And really don't just answer that for yourself. If you have other people that interact with it as well, ask them, hey, does this tool, does this platform, does this provide you with more clarity or does it just make it more complex?

Next thing to ask with your tools and your platforms is what are the helpful automations that actually needs some manual intervention. Maybe you automated a bunch of things. We talk all the time about the focus funnel that we can eliminate, automate, delegate, right, procrastinate. Maybe there's things that you automated throughout the year that you're like, you know what, that was cool in theory that we could automate that, but it actually just needs a little bit more manual touch on it because we're having to do more in the back end to fix the automatic thing that we set up earlier in the year, right? So all these things accumulate over time and December is time to clean house. Don't wait for January. Don't wait for spring cleaning. Do it now so that you're ready to launch into the new year with clarity.

All right, the second category is your calendar. Your calendar is like a huge source of like energy to suck, right? Meetings and recurring events. So scrape your calendar. I literally just did this with my virtual assistant and we looked over everything on my calendar from the last three months. Which meetings are still there that actually, which meetings are there that actually still serve their original purpose, right? Check that first. Then you're look for which ones were created for a specific project that ended months ago, right? You have these recurring meetings that you set up, which is a great thing so that you don't forget to follow up on things that you wanna follow, part of the future me method, right? But which ones are like outdated? Like, hey, we finished that project month ago, that contract is over, that client's not here anymore. We moved on to a different project, so we really don't need that anymore. So identify those things on your calendar.

And then ask yourself, are there update meetings in your calendar that could easily be a weekly email or a weekly Slack message or a weekly quick video message from your phone sent out or oh a quick weekly loom video that you could send to the team? Or do you really need that full 30 minute calendar meeting that's on there? Or could it just be something video wise that you could send out? So scrape that calendar as much as possible.

The other category you want to look at is different projects and initiatives, right? What's in progress right now that's actually in purgatory, right? We see in progress and we're going, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're moving, we're rolling, rolling, but is it really or is it time for it to let it die? And so look through those projects for that. What type of projects do you have someday written on, right? I know for me and several of my clients, we have different pieces, whether it be in our phone notes or a specific project that we've put into Asana or a project management system or a Slack channel or something like that, which we'll talk about here in a second, where we've kind of listed out some someday projects.

But what projects are on that someday list will realistically never happen. You got to get ruthless about this. It's same mindset of spring cleaning in your home when you're going through and you're going like, do I pitch this? Do I donate this? Do we put this on the garage sale? You have to get a little bit more thick skin on it as you go. And some of these someday projects realistically will never happen. Also with your projects and initiatives, what client work is dragging on beyond reasonable completion. Hey, we've beaten this horse to death. This has gone about as far as it needs to go. I'd like to kind of wrap a bow on this before we get into the new year with a fresh perspective.

Another category that you need to consider when you're auditing all of these things during the month of December is your communication channels, right? Number one, Slack channels that are active versus abandoned. I actually just had recently, and maybe you experienced this too, that Slack just kind of did like an update and I lost a bunch. I lost quote unquote lost a bunch of channels and conversation threads that I'm like, where did that go? Where did that go? Where did that go? I got so used to seeing them when I opened up that Slack workspace. What Slack did is like, hey, you haven't, it's kind of quiet in here. Like you haven't said anything in this channel for a long, long time. So it's still here, but it's not going to populate on your side profile to be able to see these channels all the time that are unnecessary. So it did that decluttering for us.

So now's an opportunity to go, there channels that Slack took away recently that you're like, you know what, we really don't need that Slack channel. So we can go ahead and abandon that and we can go ahead and communicate that abandonment as well. Hey everybody, just quick Slack, we used to have this channel, we're not gonna have it anymore, blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's why. Boom, done. Clean out the mess.

Second one, email. I have a client who lives and dies by inbox zero and he's taught me a lot and me and my virtual assistant, we try to keep my inbox at zero as well. My personal one struggles with that quite a bit, but my professional inboxes do a really good job of that and she helps me with that. But which email threads need to be archived or actioned? Are email threads archived or actioned. So do you need to take action on this email thread or can you archive it? You don't need to delete it if you're like, know, what if I need to reference it? What if I need to search it? Then you can archive it, put it in a folder, get it out of your inbox. And if it needs action, then take the action, add it to your project manager system, bring it up in your next meeting. That's when your calendar that we already talked about, go through those things.

Thirdly, when it comes to communication channels, what notification settings are creating interruption chaos? Are there times throughout the day that you get pinged that are distracting you from doing the thing that you're set focus on doing in that moment? So revisit your notification settings. Throughout the year we go, yeah, ping me, yeah, ping me, yeah, ping me, yeah, ping me. By the time we get to December, it's ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, you can't get anything done. So revisit your notification settings for yourself and your team on all of your devices.

So these are the honest assessment questions that you need to ask yourself during this December rhythm every year, right? It's not about what takes time. It's about what takes energy, right? Time is one thing. Yes, calendar is good thing, but it's about what takes the energy away from you so that as you move into January, you don't have things lingering from three months ago. Those are energy drains, right? There's that tool that might be useful someday. That's an energy drain. There's a project that's almost done, but it's been lingering around for too long. That's an energy drain. There's a client relationship that's been problematic all year long. That's an energy drain.

So look back at the last quarter. You don't even have to audit the whole last year. Just look at the last three months and be fresh in your brain and identify those top five energy drains, as well as all the other categories that we've talked about so far. Your communication channels, your projects and initiatives, your meetings and recurring events and your tools and your platforms.

So as you're going through these things, if you're like us when we do spring cleaning or we clean out our closet, my wife always says, is it a trash, treasure, maybe there's a third one I don't remember, but basically is it like trash, treasure, or transfer? That's what she says when we're going through our clothes. Is this clothes, is this clothing item complete trash? Like are there holes in it and no one would ever wear it in a world of any kind? Then it's trash, right? Is it something that's still wearable, but you don't like to wear it, you don't wear it, whatever, then it's a transfer. Let somebody else have it. Give it to the poor and the homeless. Put it in the garage sale. Donate it to Goodwill. Those are transfer items, right? And then there are the treasure items where we're like, no, I still wear this often and I'm going to keep it.

So in the same way, we have categories for these things that clutter our creativity and our agencies and our workspaces, if you will, every year. And so when we're doing this, going through these categories every single December, I want you to think about these kind of four buckets that you can put them in.

Bucket number one is dead weight, right? This is dead weight. This is projects that are never going to launch. This is tools that you haven't used in six months. It's processes that were replaced but never removed. It's documentation for systems that no longer exist. You're going to delete those. So if it's dead weight, you delete it immediately. There's no ceremony. There's no maybe someday. Just get rid of it.

The second bucket is incomplete business. So as first one's dead weight, delete it immediately. Second one, second bucket that could fall in is incomplete business. We won't want to carry over incomplete business into the new year because it just becomes another week, another day. And we're kind of bringing all of that baggage along with us into a new year in which we have a whole bunch of new hopes and new goals and new dreams. So this is projects that are at 90 percent that just need that final push. This is client deliverables that are just waiting on one last approval. This is internal initiatives that stalled out, but they actually could be valuable. So you have a decision to make here. Just finishing this project, does it take less energy than carrying it into next year? So go ahead and finish it up. You either do it by December 31st or archive it with a clear, hey, we're not doing this decision, which goes back into our first bucket of dead weight. So do everything you can to wrap a bow on all the business. It's good not only for your brain, but for your finances as a business as well before you move into January 1st.

Third bucket. I love this one so much. Hey, you know what? Great idea. Wrong time. Great idea, wrong time. This is when you archive it with intention. These are frameworks that you want to develop someday. I have a huge list of those. These are client opportunities that really aren't the right fit for where you are at and where they're at right now. This is team initiatives that require resources that you just don't have right now. So what you do with these with this bucket is you're going to move them to a designated future consideration space, one space, not many, one space. And quarterly, you're going to review these things into the new year. You're going to remind yourself every quarter, hey, go back and look at that future consideration list. Anything that we want to still keep in here. Do we want to trash it, transfer it, or do we want to continue treasuring it into something that actually comes into reality? So give your permission to not move on some good ideas. It's OK. It just not it might not be the right time, the right fit. You may not have the right resources for it in this moment. So great idea, wrong time, archive it with intention.

The fourth bucket is complete active misalignment. And on these, you're going to reevaluate or eliminate completely. This is clients that drain you more than they contribute, right? This is services that you offer, but you just don't want to offer them anymore. This is team structures that made sense six months ago, but they don't make sense anymore. This is systems that worked for a team of five, but now you're a team of 12, or maybe you're down to a team of one or two and that doesn't make sense anymore. So it's an honest assessment. Does this align with where we're going? And if no, you gotta plan the exit and you gotta get rid of it. You gotta reevaluate or eliminate it.

All right, so for agency owners or for the business owner, you teach your team all the time to manage scope creep with clients, but you, are you managing the scope creep in your own operations? You advise clients to focus and prioritize things. But is your agency actually practicing what it preaches? December is the right time. It's when you get to be honest about the gap between the vision that you have for the new year and the actual reality of your current circumstances. So get with your leadership team, get with your team, get with your contractors, whoever you need to bring them in this month and start going through those categories and start putting them in the four buckets so that you know what you need to do.

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a quick 15 minute project management purge, right? We're just going to set a timer for 15 minutes and we're going to go through all of our project management stuff, whether they're on Post-it notes or a notebook or a Remarkable or Asana or Monday or Trello or whatever they're on. We're going to go through those and we're going to go through all the someday projects. We're going to delete anything that hasn't been touched in over three months. And we're going to be ruthless. If you haven't prioritized it by now, you're just not going to prioritize it.

Second thing, I want you to go through your calendar, go through all these recurring meetings, do an audit of it, review every recurring meeting on your calendar and ask, does this still serve its original purpose? And if not, cancel or modify it. I almost guarantee you're going to find a couple of them in there that you don't need. And when you if you just deleted two recurring meetings, then you're gonna give yourself back probably an average about two hours every single week. Imagine what you could do with that.

Now you're gonna go through your tech stack. You're gonna pull up your subscription expenses. You're gonna identify any software that you haven't logged into this quarter. You're gonna cancel at least one tool before the end of the month and you're gonna redirect that budget to tools that actually serve you.

Now you might think this is a lot to go through, right? Just do one 15 minute project management surge this week. Tomorrow, I want you to do one, just go through your calendar, look at all the recurring meetings in your calendar and ask, does this still serve its original purpose? And then I want you to start the very next day, I want you to pull up all your subscription expenses and identify the software that you haven't logged into so that you can get rid of those. So ask your team, hey team, is there something that we're doing or using that you no longer do or use? Right, get that list, start there if you need to. You don't have to carry this all on your own, but what it's gonna do is it's gonna allow you before you move into 2026 to get rid of all those constraints before you plan what to add in January, you're gonna set those clear constraints and we're only gonna take on X new initiatives this year, right? And you're actually gonna stick to it so that when you get to December next year, it's a little bit lighter and you're able to move faster.

So check out Essentialism, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McCowen. Also check out The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo. Yes, it's for business systems too. Always you can check out DustinPead.com for frameworks and resources. If any of this resonates with you or your company, I would love to speak with you. Go on my contact page and click on my calendar, hop on my calendar so we can talk about leading your team through this decluttering process if you need help.

Look, we've been conditioned to think that January is about adding, but what if your best year starts with subtracting before you add? What if the secret to sustainable growth is creating space for that growth first? This is the work that I'm doing right alongside you right now. So join us in this revolution, make this a regular December rhythm.

You can connect with me on social media at Dustin Pead. Don't want to hear what you're eliminating before the new year. Shoot me a DM, comment on a post, whatever it takes on what has made your no longer doing list. I would love to see those so we can celebrate together.

Next week, we're going to be back with a brand new episode, episode 138. We're going to walk, I've been talking to you about this for a few weeks, but I had some other things come up that I wanted to get through first. But we're finally gonna walk through that 12 month outlook before we get into the new year. So this week we're focusing on what to get rid of so that we can make space and plan that 12 month outlook. Next week on next week's episode 138 Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 135: Stop Forcing Perfect Systems

Why the Path of Least Resistance Works Better for Creative Teams

SUMMARY

You don't need the perfect system. You need a system that works for you where you are right now. When implementing new systems, the further you and your team have to reach outside of your current habits, the less likely you are to use them.

After years of helping creative professionals build better systems, I've discovered something counterintuitive: the best systems aren't the most sophisticated ones—they're the ones your team will actually use tomorrow morning.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Meet systems where habits are: The gap between current habits and new systems determines adoption success—smaller gaps mean better results

• ⚡️ Start with Point B, not Point E: Create systems one step away from current practice, not five steps away from ideal state

• ⚡️ Gradual always beats overwhelming: Layer new systems gradually over time rather than launching everything at once

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "You don't need the perfect system. You need a system that works for you where you are right now."

💬 "The best system isn't the most sophisticated one. It's the one that your team is actually going to use tomorrow morning."

💬 "If you can't explain it on a napkin, then it's too complex of a system."

EPISODE RESOURCES

Books Mentioned:

• Atomic Habits by James Clear - Building systems through small incremental changes

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries - Minimum viable product applies to systems too

• The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron - Morning Pages journaling practice

Free Resources:

Visit dustinpead.com/free to download frameworks and templates, including:

• DO vs DUE Framework

• 12-Month Outlook Planning Tool

• Implementation guides and worksheets

TRANSCRIPT

You know what I've learned after years of helping creatives build better systems? The one area even the most organized creatives still wing it? Their money. And I get it. You don't start your business to become an accountant or a bookkeeper, right? You started it to create amazing work. But here's the reality: financial chaos will kill your creativity faster than any other kind of overwhelm. And that's why I love what The Core Group does.

They're not your typical accountants. They only work with creatives like us and they understand that you need systems that work with your brain, not against it. Their Profit First approach flips everything you think you know about business finances. Instead of paying everyone else first and hoping that there's something left for you, you pay yourself first and build your business around that. They've got three service levels depending on where you're at in your journey, from basic tax support all the way up to full CFO partnership, which is what I use and it's amazing. Stop letting money stress steal your creative energy. Check out coregroupus.com and finally get the financial systems your creative business deserves.

You don't need the perfect system. You need a system that works for you where you are right now. When implementing new systems, the further you and your team have to reach outside of your current habits, the less likely you are to use them. So today we're talking about the path of least resistance and why the best systems meet you where you are. Let's get into it.

Creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business without sacrificing their sanity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative consultant for agencies, and I help professionals know themselves, their process, and their teams so they can move from chaos to clarity. Whether you're a freelancer, agency owner, or leading a creative team, this show is about building systems that free your creativity instead of constraining it. So let's dive in.

You know, I've always wanted to be more disciplined in journaling and I've tried all kinds of different paper notebooks and different approaches. I've left notebooks by the bed to encourage daily use. Nothing stuck no matter what I did to remind myself. But I realized about a year or two ago that I really love gadgets and tech. So why not marry those with this desire to journal more? And so I bought a reMarkable digital notepad and it finally aligned with who I actually am, not who I thought I should be. Like I thought, if I'm gonna journal, I gotta be a paper person, right?

But now I journal most weekdays consistently. We've talked about it on this show that I use the Morning Pages from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. And being able to do that first thing in the morning really sets my mind free from all the overthinking and be able to focus on what's in front of me for that particular day and that season of life. So the lesson is that the system worked, right? It's not the ideal journaling system. This was the system that matched my actual preferences and habits. I knew if I had that piece of tech that I bought and paid money for, that I was gonna use it. So I met myself where I was instead of having to live in the "where I should be"—this traditional paper journaling. I said, you know what? I love tech, let's see if this works. And so I tried it and it worked.

So this principle here sounds so trivial, but it does apply to every system that we implement in our creative businesses. And what I'm talking about specifically here is this idea of the path of least resistance, which is nothing new. That concept has been around for a long, long time. And anytime we're trying to create new habits, the path of least resistance comes up somewhere along that journey.

So I want to talk about the gap between your current habits and a new system that determines the adoption success. What I've seen time and time again, myself and other creatives like us, is that these typical best practices that we pick up—we're constantly curating content, which is a great habit. Problem is when we pick up those habits and we learn about those things, we go, "Oh, I should do that." And that thing is so far out of reach. So we just go like, I tried to reach for it, but my arm is only but so long and it's twice as far away as my arm can reach. And so we try and try, and we talked about this in a previous episode about just kind of where your ideas—bring your ideas to you. This is the same concept. We're just talking about bringing these new systems to you.

The industry standards or whatever you see on social media doesn't account for you and your team's unique patterns. So what works for a 50-person agency may not work for a team of five. The wider that gap, the more friction in adoption. I hear from creative agencies all the time that say, "We've tried to implement new systems and people just don't use them." Well, the reason they're not using them is because they're too far out of reach.

Your team is sitting at Point A, and you created a system that's at Point E and you're trying to get them to go through B, C, and D just to use your system. What you need to do instead is, if your team is at Point A, create a system that's at Point B—the next natural step that's in front of them. That is the path of least resistance and that will get you more results for these new systems that you're wanting to implement.

The reason this works is because when I was researching change management, I found out that people need between seven and ten touch points with a new behavior before it becomes a habit. The same is said often of our sales—that people need seven to ten interaction points with us before they're willing actually to buy from us. Same is true with these new habits. And if you're implementing new systems, it's exactly what it is. I know it might sound like I'm talking new year forming new habits, but it's really more about implementing a new system as you're trying to create a new habit within your team. And so they need lots of touch points in order to become familiar with that new behavior.

If they're at Point A, they can touch Point B by reaching out and touching it, but they can't reach out and touch Point E. So again, the further from the current behavior, the more touch points are required. And we want to be able to implement the system with ease. So we're going to go from A to B, not from A to E. And that's why most teams give up before hitting the threshold—it's too far away from where they are.

So let's talk about meeting your team where they are. Successful system implementation starts with understanding your current reality, not some ideal state of where you think you might be. This is why talking to your team in these one-on-ones and these group gatherings is super important to really find out what are people actually doing, not what they're supposed to be doing, but what are they actually doing from a day to day?

You may have a system that is like, "Hey, it works great when we use it," but we constantly have to readjust people to use it. So if they're not using it, then what are they using? Find out what they're naturally gravitating towards. Which tools do they naturally gravitate towards? That'll help you understand how to bring the system to them. What are some communication patterns that already exist? How can you use the implementation or the rollout of this new system or software or whatever it is, process—how can you bring that into a communication pattern that already exists?

When I roll out a new system or process with agencies that I work with, we usually will do that inside of a meeting that they already have. We're not going to schedule this other meeting because now you've already taken up more of their time with another meeting and they're already mad about whatever you're going to talk about. And so they don't want to—they're already shut down to whatever the new idea is. But you want to bring it to where they are, same with communication.

Knowing where you're at now can also help you identify the existing pain points that you may not be aware of. And so if you really kind of dissect your situation with you or your team, no matter how big or small the team is, understand that current reality, then you can start to pinpoint: that's a pain point, that's a pain point, that's a pain point. And then you bring that new system to those pain points. If you scrape your arm and you go to put a bandaid on, you don't put the bandaid next to the wound, you put it on the wound. You're bringing it to the pain point. You're bringing the solution to the pain point. And that's exactly what we're talking about here.

So once you've identified those pain points, try to map out the smallest viable change. Identify one element that's closest to the current practice from your new system and bring that to that old way of doing things. Say, "Look, we're not asking you to change everything. We're bringing this to where you are, not expecting you to go over leaps and bounds to get to where the solution is that we're implementing."

And that comes with not over-complicating it. You need to be able to show people who are visual learners and visual thinkers and list makers and morning people and afternoon people—you need to kind of bring it to where they are, but don't over-complicate it. Simplify, simplify, simplify. If you can't explain it on a napkin, then it's too complex of a system.

So let's say we're implementing a new project management system. Let me just kind of give you a timeline here of how to roll this out simply and bring it to where you are. So you identified all the areas where their current pain points are at, and you're gonna bring this solution to them. And the very first thing you're gonna do is just create a simple, basic task list of the things that they already do. We're not adding new things. We're just creating a simple task list. Then after that, we'll add in our DUE dates—when the things are actually DUE—and then we'll put in our DO dates, and then we'll start implementing project templates, and we're kind of doing things a little bit at a time.

This can span—implementation can span over a long period of time. It doesn't have to be all at once, because gradual adoption beats an overwhelming launch every single time.

A way to make these new systems stick as well is when you start to see success from you and your team, you need to celebrate that success, because we know that what gets celebrated gets repeated. So it's highlighting the fact of like, "Hey, you see how we went from A to B and how great that was? Imagine if we kept going further down the line from B to C, how much greater that would be." And you start to build that confidence with each layer. Natural momentum begins to develop within your team and resistance begins to go down.

Remember your new systems should be simple and sustainable. They don't need to be overly complex and sophisticated. That kind of stuff will get abandoned because it's too far out of reach. The best systems are the ones that become invisible when you use them. It's not about the actual tool. It's about the outcome. And if your team has to think too hard about the system, it's way too complex. Friction in the system means friction in adoption, which means abandoned system.

So if you're wondering why you're implementing systems that your team isn't grasping and using the way that you envision they would, it's because there's too much friction in the system, which equals too much friction in the adoption, which means they're going to bail—they're not going to use it.

So before you implement these systems and you're doing the reality check of where you're at right now, I also want you to ask who is going to use this system? Also, who is going to maintain this system? Because those people, those unique people, those unique creatives on your team—they're gonna be the ones that are gonna have to figure it out on how to use it. So if you understand that this person is a thinker, then give them time to think. If you understand that this person is a visual learner, then give them the visual aids needed in order to be able to use the tool. Bring it to them.

So before you implement any new system, maybe you're thinking right now about implementing a new system on your team, or maybe you're gearing up for it in the new year. Here's the number one thing you need to do: you have to audit your current reality. Document what your team is actually doing right now, not what they should do, what they are doing. Which tools are they already using daily? If there's something that has an integration with it, perfect. So like when we started using Slack with our team and our clients, there's tons of integrations out there with Slack for communication tools. It works with Asana and it works with Google Drive and it works with all these different things already. So we're bringing that in to a system that they already use.

After you find their current reality, identify what step B is. You're at Point A. What is Point B? That's the smallest gap between the current habits and the new system that you are considering. It's the minimal change that you can make that will add value and create value in this new system that you're trying to implement. So you start with that one small change and then the last thing is just to layer it out gradually. Don't rush new systems. Don't roll out the whole system all at once. You can roll it out in phases and parts, but paint the picture full, sure. But just go, "This is where we're going right now. We're not worried about Point E. We're just worried about getting from Point A to Point B."

So a few books to consider on this topic that you should definitely check out: Atomic Habits by James Clear, amazing book—building systems through small incremental changes and habits. Also The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It's a minimum viable product—the MVP applies to systems too.

So here's what I want you to remember: The best system isn't the most sophisticated one. It's the one that your team is actually going to use tomorrow morning. So stop trying to force yourself and your team to reach for ideal systems that are miles away from your current reality. Instead, build a bridge from where you are to where you want to be. Start simple. Layer gradually. Meet your people where they are.

The creative professionals who scale successfully—they aren't the ones with the fanciest systems. They are the ones with sustainable systems that grow alongside their team as they grow as well.

So if you want more resources to help you build systems that actually work, head to dustinpead.com/free and download any of my frameworks or templates that are available for you. And if you found this helpful, we would love for you to share it with another creative or agency who may be struggling with system implementation.

Next week, we're going to be talking about some systems as well. We're going to meet you where you are. We're going to talk about our 12-Month Outlook. I'm actually going to walk you through—this is a free template on my website called the 12-Month Outlook. As we gear for the new year, I'm going to walk through step by step on how to use this 12-Month Outlook. It's one of my most-used planning tools for myself and all clients that I work with. And I'm going to show you exactly how to use it to get clarity on your entire year.

So when you're planning for 2026, or you're just trying to get Q4 finalized and organized, this walkthrough is going to give you some practical frameworks that you can implement immediately. So don't miss that episode next week. We'll talk to you then on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.

Ep 134: Bring Your Ideas to Where You Are

Stop Waiting for the Perfect Method

SUMMARY

What if the only thing standing between you and your next big creative project isn't time, money, or talent—but the method you think you have to use? In this episode of Creativity Made Easy, we explore why your dream project isn't out of reach if you're willing to meet yourself where you already are.

At the Salt Conference, I had dinner with a creative friend who'd been sitting on a book idea for years. When I asked what was stopping them, they said: "I'm just not really the sit down and type kind of person. I can't imagine spending hours at my desk writing chapters." But here's what I noticed—this person creates constantly. They're always on their phone making reels, creating amazing content, and verbally processing with their team. So I asked: "Why not just do voice memos while you're driving? What if you wrote the book in the way you actually create content?" Immediately, the energy in the conversation changed. The book wasn't an impossible mountain anymore—it was just their normal creative process applied to a different medium.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Your native creative language is the fastest path to execution. Stop forcing yourself to work in ways that don't match your natural patterns. If you're a verbal processor, dictate your book. If you're a visual thinker, sketch first and write later.

• ⚡️ The market doesn't care about your process—they care about the value you deliver. A book is a book whether you typed it or dictated it. A course is valuable whether you filmed it in a studio or on your iPhone. Focus on the outcome, not the "proper" method.

• ⚡️ The less you have to change your behavior, the more likely you'll actually do it. Bring your big ideas to your existing creative habits instead of trying to adopt completely new workflows. This principle applies to relationships, health, business—everything.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "That big creative idea that you've been sitting on, it's not out of reach. You've just been trying to reach for it the wrong way."

💬 "The less that you have to change your behavior, the more likely you are to actually do it. We know this is true in any area of our life."

💬 "Your method is the one that gets the work done. Use that."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• Website: dustinpead.com

• Social Media: @dustinpead

• Free Resources: dustinpead.com/free

• Getting Things Done* by David Allen

• Show Your Work* by Austin Kleon

• Steal Like an Artist* by Austin Kleon

TRANSCRIPT

Hey creatives, you know how I'm always talking about creative systems that work? Well, that actually includes your money too. If you're still shoving receipts in a shoe box and hoping for the best come tax time, we need to talk about The Core Group. They're profit-first certified accountants who actually understand the creative hustle. No judgment, just clarity. They help you build financial systems that create margin in your business instead of stress, and this is coming from me. I'm a loyal Core Group subscriber, so check them out at coregroupus.com. That's C-O-R-E-G-R-O-U-P-U-S dot com. Check out The Core Group today.

What if the only thing standing between you and your next big creative project isn't time or money or talent, but the method you think you have to use? Today we're going to talk about why your dream project isn't out of reach if you're willing to meet yourself where you are. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast for creative professionals who are ready to trade the chaos for clarity. I'm Dustin Pead. I help creatives build systems that free up their time, reduce stress, and let them focus on what they do best—creating their art. Whether you're running a creative agency, leading an in-house team, or building a creative business on your own, this show is here to give you practical strategies that you can implement today.

Now, before we dive in, I want to thank everybody for dealing with a replay episode from last week. Just to be candid with you, my daughter and I were involved in a pretty gnarly car accident. It was not our fault. We were on a two-lane road. I was on my way to take her to gymnastics, and a car going the opposite direction decided to make a left-hand turn in front of us. They did not see us. We hit them square in the side. All of our airbags deployed. The truck is totaled, and it rolled over two or three times. But by the grace of God, we walked away from that without really a scratch on us. I'm having some back pain, so if I flinch at any time throughout this episode, that's why. But we're very grateful to not have sustained any serious injuries. That was why we did the replay episode last week. So thank you for your grace. I hope you did rewatch that episode. Episode 90 with my friend Darren Cooper was one of our more popular episodes, and I wanted to share that with you again in case you missed it, in case you're new to the podcast.

So with that said, let's go ahead and dive into today's episode.

When I was at the Salt Conference a couple of months ago—I guess it would have been a month ago now—I was having dinner with a friend of mine, a creative who had been sitting on this book idea for years. When they were talking to me about it, they kind of mentioned it with this defeated tone, like it was some distant dream that they'd never actually reach. So when I asked them what was stopping them, here's what they said: "I'm just not really the sit down and type kind of person. I really can't imagine spending hours at my desk writing chapters."

In their mind, that's what writing a book required—sit, type, repeat for months. And yes, that is the traditional method. But what I noticed is that this person creates constantly. They're constantly on their phone creating different reels and really amazing content. So I thought, why not just do voice memos while you're driving or when you're creating your social media reels or verbally processing with your team? They're always writing anyway, right?

So what if you wrote the book in the way that you actually create your content? What if you drove and recorded your thoughts, dictated chapters into your phone, or captured ideas as voice memos? Immediately, the energy in the conversation changed. Suddenly this book wasn't this impossible mountain to climb. It was just their normal creative process applied to a different medium.

That's what I want to talk about today. The conversation made me realize how many of us are dismissing incredible ideas—not because they are truly out of reach, but because we're stuck in "the one right way" that we're supposed to execute them. Today's episode, I just want to talk for a few minutes to help us change that.

The biggest reason we dismiss some big ideas is this perfectionism trap. It's the "proper way" to execute things. We kill our best creative ideas before they even start because we assume there's only one proper way to execute them, and that is a form of perfectionism.

If you're writing a book, you think you have to sit down at a desk and type. Starting a podcast? You need expensive equipment and a studio. Creating a course? Oh, you've got to have professional video production for that. This perfectionism stops us before we begin. It distances ourselves from the ideas. They feel distant because we imagine doing them someone else's way, and we just can't see ourselves doing them that way.

But the beautiful part is that we are uniquely created. When we are uniquely created, we create uniquely. We forget that every successful creator started messy and found their own method. You see, it's not about the method. It's about the outcome. What matters is the end result. Yes, we talk a lot about process on this show, but it's not about the process having to be perfect all the time.

A book is a book whether you typed it or you dictated it. A course is valuable whether you filmed it in a studio or on your iPhone. The market doesn't care about that part of the process. They care about what value you are bringing to the table.

So what I'm saying here is: don't follow the tools. Follow ideas. Don't let the tool or the way that you're supposed to execute this idea dictate the idea. Start with what feels natural and then optimize it later.

We're going to be talking in upcoming episodes about how some of our processes are too far out of reach for our teams, and that's why we make processes but no one follows them. It's because they're too far out of reach. The same is true of our creative ideas. If the way that you envision having to complete that idea seems too far out of reach, then you'll just give up.

So many successful creators use what Austin Kleon calls "productive procrastination"—doing the work in an unconventional way that feels easier and actually moves the project forward. What makes a project successful is that it takes a step forward. Are we one step closer to the idea today than we were yesterday? And then tomorrow, are we one step closer and one step closer?

I love the phrase "get 1% better" or "suck 1% less." It's about the small incremental changes that you can make to get towards what you want.

Meet yourself where you are. This is the fastest path to execution: working within your natural creative patterns, not against them. If you're not a sit-down-and-type person, then don't sit down and type. Do use voice memos. What do you already do that naturally creates content? Bring the idea to your natural ability, into what you already kind of have the wheels in motion for.

Are there conversations where you explain things really well? Capture those conversations. These are your native creative languages, and you need to use those to actually take one percent and one more step closer towards your idea.

If you're already creating voice memos, that's your book draft. If you're already posting on social media, guess what? Those are blog posts. That's content. If you're already having great conversations, record them and have podcast episodes. If you're already sketching ideas, that's your visual course content.

Don't overthink it. Just make it better. The less that you have to change your behavior, the more likely you are to actually do it. That's what we're going to focus on over some of these next episodes when we're talking about our systems and processes as well. It applies 100% to your ideas. The less you have to change your behavior, the more likely you'll actually do it.

We know this is true in any area of our life—whether we're talking about relationships or our health, physical or mental, jobs, travel, vacations, any of that stuff. Meet yourself where you already are creatively. Let the idea come to you. Bring the idea to you instead of you trying to reach out to some far distant landscape for it.

So let's break it down for your unique creative style.

For my verbal processors out there—you have to process things out verbally. I hear you. Literally, I hear you. Use voice memo apps: Apple Voice Memos, Google Recorder, a Zoom recorder, whatever it is. Try dictation software. There's different built-in dictation software that you can have on your phone or your laptop if you need to. Start recording conversations about your ideas. If you're sitting down having a conversation about your ideas, just say, "Hang on a second. Do you mind if I record this?" Hit record and go. You can use Descript, Otter, Rev, any of those things like that to transcribe when you're done with those verbal processing sessions, whether it's just you or with a group of people.

For my visual thinkers: sketch first, write later. Use mind mapping tools like Miro or Whimsical or MindNode. Create mood boards before you're getting into detailed plans. Drive yourself visually because you are a visually thinking person.

For kinesthetic creators: use physical note cards that you can move around and walk through the ideas. Voice record while moving. Create physical prototypes or sketches. Use a standing desk or movement while thinking. One of my good friends just moved his stationary exercise bike into his office, has a little thing where he can set his laptop on there, and he rides while he has meetings. So anything, whatever it takes to motivate yourself through it.

If you're a social processor: talk through these ideas with a team or your friends and record it when you do. We've talked many times on this podcast about recording everything and why it's so valuable. It's because you're going to forget the things that you said, and you're like, "Oh, that's so good."

Songwriters are really good at this. They will record everything—every little thought, every little hook, every little melody line that comes in their head, whether they're in a writing session or not. They will record it so that future them can reuse that and not forget it. Turn those conversations into content. Post your ideas on social and let the engagement guide you. Is this getting any feedback?

All right, so what now? What do we do with all this? Now we're motivated to bring our ideas to us. What are we going to do? I want to just give you three quick action steps moving forward.

Number one: start identifying your native creative language this week. Start paying attention to where you are most creative or when you are the most creative naturally. Are you creative when you're talking? When you're walking? When you're sketching? When you're typing? That's the answer for how to capture your future ideas and bring your ideas to you so that you can start moving forward on them.

Number two: take that too-big idea and shrink down the method. Instead of worrying about the whole book, just write down one sentence, one paragraph. Write down one creative project that you've been putting off and ask yourself: What's the traditional method that I think I have to use? And then ask: How would I naturally create this type of content right now instead? Match the idea to your current creative behavior.

And lastly: just start capturing five minutes a day. Capture five minutes a day of your ideas in your preferred method. Everybody's unique and everybody has their own methods. So bring the idea to you. Voice memos, sketching, recording conversations, typing during your peak energy time—all of that stuff builds muscle before you have to worry about the polish of the idea being done.

There are some great books that talk about these things that I've mentioned on the show today. Obviously, David Allen's Getting Things Done is a great book. Show Your Work and Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon can help you focus on process over perfection and also help you kind of remix your methods a little bit and steal like an artist.

As always, you can go to dustinpead.com/free for some frameworks and tools to help you implement systems that work for you and not against you.

But here's what I want you to remember: that big creative idea that you've been sitting on, it's not out of reach. You've just been trying to reach for it the wrong way. So bring it to where you are. Meet yourself in your natural creative process. Stop waiting for the perfect conditions or the right tools or the right method. Your method is the one that gets the work done. Use that.

So this week, I challenge you: take one idea that you've been dismissing as way too big and ask yourself how you'd create it if you could only use the tools that you already use every day. You might be surprised about how close you already are to that idea.

Listen, I'd love for you to connect with me on this topic and this episode. You can follow me on social media at Dustin Pead. That's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D. I'd love to hear what ideas you are bringing closer to where you are.

Thanks so much for listening to Creativity Made Easy. Now get out there and create something today.

Your Capacity Is Never What You Think It Is

I've been having this nagging feeling about my consulting practice for months now. Something was missing. I help creative agencies build systems for everything—project management, client communication, team workflows—but there was this blind spot I couldn't quite name.

Then I watched some of our manufacturing clients at The Culture Base implement capacity planning.

And it hit me:

Creative agencies desperately need this, and almost none of us are doing it.

Creative agencies aren't like other businesses. You've got a myriad of tasks happening simultaneously—some requiring deep thought, others that are pure execution. Brand strategy sessions. Client revisions. Project management. Team meetings. Creative concepting. Production work. It's like conducting an orchestra where every instrument has a different timeline, but they all need to end in unison at the same DUE date.

And here's where it gets messy: we're making capacity decisions based on emotional toil rather than actual data. That complex brand strategy feels like it should take 20 hours, so we scope it that way. That "simple" social campaign feels easy, so we squeeze it into the margins. We're guessing. And our guesses are almost always wrong.

When you overcommit your department, your agency, or yourself, you rob yourself of the margin needed to be truly creative and experiment for the right solution. The DUE date arrives, and instead of crafting the perfect solution, you're rushing to produce something. The work becomes subpar—not because your team lacks talent, but because the system sets them up to fail. This is where our "Excellence" value crashes into reality. Good enough is not good enough, but how can we deliver excellence when we've already allocated 110% of our actual capacity?

For the past few months, I've been time tracking every task in my workday. Meetings. Writing. Project management. Coaching sessions. Content creation. Everything. I'm using Harvest, and I'm treating this as pure research—no judgment, no optimization yet, just data collection. Here's what surprised me: most tasks take significantly less time than I thought they would. I've been operating with way more margin than I realized. But I couldn't see it until I started tracking the facts instead of trusting my feelings.

When capacity planning feels right, it's factual. When it feels overwhelming, it's wrong.

We think we know how long things take. We've done this work for years. We're experts in our craft. But we're basing our capacity decisions on gut feelings and emotions that are consistently inaccurate.

The creative who says, "This brand refresh will take me six weeks" is guessing based on how emotionally draining brand work feels. The account manager who says "I can handle five more clients" is guessing based on their current stress level, not their actual available hours.

We're making business decisions—hiring, pricing, scoping, promising—based on guesses. And then we wonder why creative teams burn out, why projects go over budget, and why quality suffers.

Now what?

Start tracking your time. Not forever. Not with the goal of "optimization" or "productivity." Just for research.

Pick a time tracking tool—I'm using Harvest—and track every task for 30 days. Meetings, creative work, admin tasks, everything. Don't change your behavior, just observe it.

Then let's compare notes. What surprised you? What patterns emerged? What did you learn about your actual capacity versus your assumed capacity?

Because I'm convinced that once we start building capacity planning on facts instead of feelings, we'll unlock the margin that makes truly excellent creative work possible.

What are you discovering about your actual capacity? Reply or reach out—I'd genuinely love to hear what you're learning.

Ep 133: Why Story Matters in Your Creative Process

Our Most-Watched Episode Returns

Episode 90 Replay | Originally Released March 2024 | November 6, 2025

Some conversations are too valuable to only hear once.

When I sat down with my friend, business partner, and client Darren Cooper from 1898 Creative to talk about story, I had no idea it would become one of our most-watched episodes. But the response has been overwhelming—creative professionals keep coming back to this conversation because it solves a problem almost everyone faces but few can articulate:

Why does some creative work captivate while other work falls flat?

The answer is story structure. And not just for movies or novels—for your business narrative, your creative process, and every project you touch.

If you missed this episode the first time around, you're about to discover why thousands of creatives have already implemented these principles. If you heard it before, I guarantee you'll catch something new. I did on my third listen.

Whether you're running a creative agency, building a business, or developing your next big idea, understanding how to structure and tell your story will change how you work and connect with your audience.

⚡️ 3 Key Takeaways

⚡️ Story Creates Connection - At its foundational level, story is how we share ideas and connect with each other. It's not just entertainment—it's the framework that allows people to understand who you are, what you do, and why it matters. This is why this episode resonated: it reframes story as a practical business tool, not just an artistic concept.

⚡️ Conflict Is Non-Negotiable - Every good story needs stakes. Without risk, without the possibility of failure or success, there's no engagement. This applies equally to your business origin story and your creative process—what was at risk if you didn't succeed? Listeners told us this was the missing piece in their storytelling.

⚡️ Resolution Leads to Scalability - How you end your story matters. The best stories don't just resolve—they show what's now possible. When Marty McFly learns he can change his future, suddenly there are sequels. When your idea proves successful, it becomes scalable. This connection between story and business growth is why creatives keep sharing this episode.

Why This Episode Became Our Most-Watched

Since this conversation first aired, I've received countless messages from listeners who said this episode changed how they:

• Pitch to clients

• Structure their creative projects

• Talk about their business origin

• Stay motivated through difficult phases of work

• Communicate value to stakeholders

The 5-part story arc framework Darren shares (Hook → Backstory → Conflict → Resolution → Call to Action) has become a go-to tool for creatives across industries. It's simple enough to remember, flexible enough to apply everywhere, and powerful enough to transform how your work lands with audiences.

From Showing to Telling: Why Story Beats a Simple "Why"

We all know Simon Sinek taught us to start with why. But story takes it further—it shows your why instead of just telling it. When you structure your business narrative, your creative process, or even your individual projects as stories, you invite people into an experience rather than lecturing them on your mission statement.

This distinction alone has helped dozens of listeners finally articulate what makes their work different.

The Essential Elements Every Story Needs

The Hook: Capturing Attention Immediately

Think about James Bond or Mission Impossible movies. They always open with an action sequence—that's your hook. Before the credits roll, before you meet the characters, you're already invested. The same principle applies to your creative work and your business story.

In your creative process, the hook is the initial spark—the idea that makes you think, "I need to pursue this." Without that hook, you'll struggle to maintain motivation through the challenging middle phases of bringing an idea to life.

Real listener feedback: "I realized my client pitches were starting with background information instead of a hook. Restructuring based on this episode increased my close rate by 30%." - Sarah, Brand Strategist

The Backstory: Creating Depth and Context

Once you've hooked your audience, they need to understand the context. Who are these characters? What's the history here? Why should I care?

For businesses, this is your origin story. For creative projects, it's understanding the problem you're solving and why this solution matters. As Todd Henry says, creativity is just problem-solving, so knowing the root of your idea helps people care enough to see it through.

The Conflict: Where Stakes Get Real

This is the element that's easiest to overlook, especially in business storytelling. There has to be tension. The hero has to risk losing the girl, the ring has to make it to Mount Doom, or the business faces closure.

Darren points out that in B2B work, finding this conflict requires digging deeper. A thousand HVAC companies exist—what made yours uniquely different? What challenge did you have to overcome? That's what makes your story engaging.

Why this matters for your work: Listeners consistently tell us that identifying and articulating their conflict was the breakthrough moment. Once you name what was at stake, your entire narrative gains power.

The Resolution: Proving What's Possible

The best resolutions don't just wrap things up neatly—they show scalability. They demonstrate that if this worked once, it can work again. In business terms, this might mean: "We implemented X, Y, and Z, dug ourselves out of debt, and grew tenfold over the next few years."

But resolution also includes a call to action. Great stories spur you to action. Jesus taught in parables and then said, "Let it be so with you as well." When you walk out of a movie theater as a kid, you immediately start acting like the hero. That's the power of story—it moves people to do something.

💬 3 Notable Quotes

💬 "Story is this way to bring people in to who you are. Maybe it shares an idea with you or it proves a point that you're trying to get across. Story, when done well, just sucks us in." - Darren Cooper

💬 "I like to think of story as explaining the why to me without just telling me the why is. You're showing me the why, not just telling me the why." - Dustin Pead

💬 "Every great story should spur you on to action. Good story spurs you on to action for sure." - Darren Cooper

Applying Story to Your Creative Process

Here's where this gets practical—and why this episode keeps getting shared: your creative process is itself a story. It has a beginning (the hook of an idea), a middle (the challenging conflict of execution), and an end (the resolution and scalability of success).

When you structure your work this way, you're more likely to:

• Stay motivated through difficult implementation phases

• Communicate value clearly to clients and stakeholders

• Build systems that are repeatable and scalable

• Create work that moves people to action

Why We're Replaying This Now

As Chief Creative Consultants continues to grow and I work with more creative professionals, I keep seeing the same pattern: the ones who master story structure scale faster, communicate more effectively, and stay more motivated through challenging phases.

This conversation with Darren captures those principles in 19 minutes. If you're struggling with motivation, if your pitches aren't landing, or if your work feels flat despite your talent—story structure is probably the missing piece.

Featured Resources

• Learn more about Dustin's frameworks at dustinpead.com/free

• Check out Darren Cooper's work at 1898 Creative

• Read "Building a StoryBrand" by Donald Miller

• Explore Pixar's storytelling principles

• Study Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" framework

Ready to Transform Your Creative Chaos?

Story isn't just something you consume on Netflix or read in books—it's a practical framework for how you work, communicate, and scale. By understanding and implementing story structure in your creative process, you'll find yourself more motivated, your clients more engaged, and your work more impactful.

This is why this episode became one of our most-watched. The principles are timeless, the application is immediate, and the results speak for themselves.

Connect with Dustin at dustinpead.com or follow @dustinpead for more insights on creativity made easy.

Ep 132: Gaining & Sustaining Margin

How Creative Professionals Can Gain and Sustain Margin Without Burning Out

SUMMARY

Are you constantly racing against deadlines, working late nights to bring your creative vision to life, only to end up delivering something "safe" instead of spectacular? You're not alone. In this episode of Creativity Made Easy, I'm sharing insights from my keynote at the Salk Conference 2025, where I revealed why 74% of church creatives—and countless professionals across all creative industries—experience burnout, and more importantly, what you can do about it.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most creatives get to about the 80% completion mark on their projects and bail. Not because they lack talent or dedication, but because they didn't give themselves enough margin to execute their vision the way they originally conceived it.

You've been there. That brilliant opener you planned—the one with interpretive dance, live drawing, slam poetry, and the pastor lowering from the ceiling? It becomes an acoustic guitar and a tired worship song because somewhere between conception and execution, your margin disappeared.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Gaining margin requires upfront work, but sustaining it requires communication and discipline. You can't wish your way to better time management. Just like financial debt, the margin deficit you've accumulated happened gradually over time, and it will take intentional effort to recover it.

• ⚡️ Stop living in the land of DUE and start planning with DO dates. The DO vs DUE Framework transforms deadline-driven chaos into proactive work planning by building in 25-40% buffer time between when you need to DO the work and when it's DUE.

• ⚡️ Your energy patterns matter more than your time blocks. A time and energy audit reveals that many creatives spend their highest-energy hours on low-value tasks, while saving creative work for when they're mentally drained.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "In order to gain margin in your creative work, you're going to have to put in some extra work upfront. You didn't lose the margin to execute with excellence overnight—it happened gradually over time."

💬 "Margin isn't what's left after your work is done. It's what makes your best work possible in the first place."

💬 "If you have five tasks that take two hours to complete but eight hours of meetings and you're not prepared to work 10 hours that day, you've already messed yourself up."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• Do Vs Due Framework

• Time & Energy Audit Template

• dustinpead.com/free - More frameworks and resources for creative leaders

TRANSCRIPT

Hey creatives, you know how I'm always talking about creative systems that work? Well, that actually includes your money too. If you're still shoving receipts in a shoe box and hoping for the best come tax time, we need to talk about the Core Group. They're profit-first certified accountants who actually understand the creative hustle. No judgment, just clarity. They help you build financial systems that create margin in your business instead of stress. And this is coming from me—I'm a loyal Core Group subscriber. So check them out at coregroupus.com. That's C-O-R-E G-R-O-U-P-U-S dot com. Check out the Core Group today.

Did you know that 74% of creatives have experienced burnout? And the secret to breaking free isn't about working harder. It's about creating the right kind of space between your commitments. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast where we help creative professionals transform chaos into clarity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative consultant, and I'm on a mission to help creatives know themselves, their process, and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together.

Today's episode's a little bit different. I'm going to take you inside of a keynote that I delivered at the Salk Conference 2025 where I spoke to a room full of church creatives about gaining and sustaining margin. Now, while I was speaking specifically to folks in ministry, here's what I want you to hear: these principles apply to every creative professional, whether you're working in a church or an agency, a studio, or you're building your own creative business. Burnout does not discriminate and neither do the solutions.

So if you're not in the church world, don't check out. The DO vs DUE framework, the Time and Energy Audit, those 90-minute focus blocks—these are tools that work for everyone who creates for a living. Because at the end of the day, we all face the same challenge: too many ideas and not enough margin to execute them with excellence.

Thanks so much Ryan. Appreciate y'all sticking it out. Y'all are the troopers—last breakout session, post-lunch, Friday, Sunday's coming. I'm tired, let's just go home right now. No, I'm just kidding. I'm excited to talk to y'all about this.

I was telling them in the back before we were coming up here—I spoke yesterday. Was anyone in the breakout I did yesterday on effective one-on-ones? Cool. So when I gave that yesterday, I have been talking kind of one-on-one with a lot of people about that. But yesterday was the first time that I was able to talk to a larger audience about it. And today is a lot more opposite of that. The stuff that I'm going to be sharing with you today is stuff that I share every day of the week. This is what I do.

When you see Chief Creative Consultants up on there—I was in ministry for 20-plus years, for those who weren't in the breakout yesterday. So in ministry for 20-plus years, did worship, everything creative, production, communications. I was the one person that did all of those things. And then I was also the one person that oversaw the people that did all of those things. So I know the struggle that many of you may be in.

If you're in this room right now, it's probably for a couple of reasons. One, your flight doesn't leave till later and you're like, I might as well just hang out. Or you're like, I'm going to do the creative process track the entire week. I'm going to make Hudson Hall my home. There's a tent set up over there for me where I've been sleeping every night. And you're like, I'm here in the hall no matter what, no matter who gets up there to speak. Or you've been bouncing around quite a bit and you're looking at the topics and something about the topic of gaining and sustaining margin really hit close to you.

Now I do want to ask—last year's conference was in Dallas and it sounds like we're going back to Dallas next year. Did I hear that? Cool. And so I was there last year in Dallas. Was anyone in my breakout last year in Dallas? One person, okay. You're going to hear a lot of the same things. I love it. Thank you for being here and shout out to the Commander fan in the back right here. He's got his back to me right now. He's probably not listening. He's checking email or something, but Commander fan, I'm so glad that you're here. Go commanders.

Anyway, I saw him walk in and I had to shout him out. So anyway, this stuff is stuff that I talk about all the time. Creatives by our nature are idea machines. We're always having new ideas, whether it's we had bad pizza and went to bed, or we saw a video on YouTube or TikTok and we have these really great ideas. Someone says something, it sparks an idea. If you're a songwriter, you're like, that's a hook. Those are bars, I'm taking it. Do you want credit on it? Do you want to collab on it? Whatever it is, we have ideas like crazy.

What creatives are not very good at, historically—don't hiss at me—not very good at executing those ideas all the way across the finish line. Well, I know. We get right up to about the 80% mark. It's actually been statistically proven that most creatives get to about the 80% complete mark. And for a myriad of reasons, they bail on it.

And personally, what I think one of the main reasons is, is they didn't give themselves enough margin to be able to do it in the way that they had originally concepted that idea in their head. And they get to the 80% mark and they're like, you know what, this is not shaping up the way I thought it was going to be. I'm out. I'm going to bail. Or we're going to do something safe.

You ever been in a creative meeting for a Sunday? It's for a series that's, if you're lucky, eight to twelve weeks away. If you're normal, it's eight to ten minutes away, right? And you're like, we have this idea for this opener. It's going to be dope. We're going to have this person come out and do interpretive dance. And this person's going to be live drawing on things. And we're going to have a poet come out and he's going to do slam poetry. And then we're going to lower the pastor from the ceiling. And it's going to be incredible.

And then you get to Sunday and it's the worship leader with an acoustic guitar doing like, "Love You Lord," because hey, we haven't heard that one in a while, right? It's because we didn't plan our time and our energy well.

And the one point I want to tell you—and again, you may not like to hear this—in order to gain margin, and we're talking about margin here. If there's any finance majors in here, we're not talking about financial margin. We're talking about time here. In order for you to gain time margin in your creative work, church or not, you're going to have to put in some extra work upfront.

It's the same principle that our friend right here in the Brentwood Franklin area, Dave Ramsey tells us. He's like, you didn't go—you didn't get in the hole that you dug yourself into overnight. It happened gradually over time. You didn't put on the weight, right, overnight. It happened gradually over time and you lost the margin to be able to execute with the excellence that your soul craves. You lost that margin slowly over time.

And it's going to take some real hard work to get that margin back. I don't want you to hear anything I'm saying today is, this is easy, here's three steps to get your margin back. You better lace up and be ready to put in the work. It's going to take some extra effort to use a church phrase just for a season, right? Just for a season.

Now, once you get that margin, in order to sustain that margin, there's two key principles that I want you to hear today. Gaining margin is going to take work, but in order to sustain margin, it's going to take lots and lots of communication and it's going to take lots and lots of discipline.

And whether you're a one-person team or a 20-person team, you can only control yourself. So put in the work yourself. So many times I give this talk and they're like, yeah, I hear you. That's what I'm preaching to my team, but no one else seems to get it. And I'm like, but are you modeling it? Or are you just complaining about it? And how can we lead up and lead horizontally, what I talked about in our workshop yesterday? How can we do that to increase communication and increase the discipline that it's going to take to stick with the margin that we created?

Now again, to use that financial juxtaposition here—Dave Ramsey talks about having that emergency fund because it's not when it's going to rain, it's when it's going to rain, right? The washer and dryer are going to break down. To put that in our context, the pastor is going to have a crazy idea on a Saturday night. It is going to happen. And so if you don't plan for that and you act surprised when it does happen, you've completely blown the margin that you worked so hard to get.

So if you know that people on your team, people in your organization are last-minute people, and you're like, I've tried to change them, I've prayed for them, I've interceded, I've fasted and asked for them to change and they're not changing, then you know what you already know. So use that and go, well, I know this is going to happen. It's happened here, it's happened here, it's happened here, time after time. This is what happens. This is the rhythm of what happens. And it's out of your control completely, but what is in your control is how you prepare for that and how you build that time margin necessary.

So I want to ask, what if the secret to your best creative work isn't about working harder, but about creating the right kind of space between what you need? Now, I know I just said it's going to take a lot of hard work. It's going to take hard work to gain the margin. You've got to work extra hard to build that buffer in. But what if the secret is not necessarily after you get that, it's just about creating the right kind of space that you need?

Here's the current reality. 70% of media, marketing, and creative professionals reported experiencing burnout in the last 12 months. 52% of creators have experienced burnout this month. 30% have considered leaving their profession altogether. 74% of church creatives have experienced burnout. Only 10% of church creatives polled have said they've never experienced any sort of burnout whatsoever. They're at Elevation Church. I'm just kidding.

Calls for mental health support in the creative industry, church and not, have increased 35% year over year in the last decade. 35%. And it's because we long to change the things that are completely out of control. And we've got it wrong. We've got to flip that script and we've got to control what we can control and change the things that we can change.

So I want to talk about these three pieces. I want to talk about redefining margin as a combination of time, energy, and mental space. All right, so we're going to talk about a little time and energy here to start. So here's some things that I've just put in my toolbox over the 20-plus years of doing creative ministry that helped me manage my energy and gain and sustain the margin that we need. I'm going to walk through some of these with you. My friend here probably remembers this from last year.

Number one, we're going to talk about the DO versus DUE framework. Now, if you're listening to this in the future and you're not able to see the screen, you're like, the guy is broken. He said the same word twice. I'm saying D-O versus D-U-E. Like as many creatives, live in the land of DUE, just like they're in 11th grade all over again. That paper is DUE tomorrow, so I guess I should probably get it done in the morning.

But instead, what I propose with the DO versus DUE framework is that we build in the margin that we know it's going to take to get things done. We build in the crazy request margin. We build in, I forgot my kid had a gymnastics thing that I have to take them to and now I don't have those three hours to work on this project like I thought I had. We build in that margin to create DO dates instead of DUE dates.

And I'll give you the whole free system here when we're done, if you didn't already grab it last year. I want to talk about an energy mapping exercise. Has anybody ever read a book? It's not necessarily a Christian book. So if you just kind of want to half raise your hand—there's a book out there by a guy named Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time. Has anybody ever read Buy Back Your Time? Nobody, that's sad to me. Okay, so go read Buy Back Your Time.

Dan Martell has lots of really great things in there, but in that he talks about doing a time and energy audit. And he provided a free PDF for how to do that. And I was like, it's not good. So I created my own. And so I'll give that to you when we're done here today. But basically what you do is for about two weeks, you're going to write down every 15 minutes from your nine-to-five workday exactly what you did or what you're doing. You're going to write down next to it the value of that task.

Now I know in church world we're like, well, I'm worth a whole lot more than what I'm getting paid for. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about, is this something that only you can do? And be ruthless about that. Don't be prideful about that. Is this literally something that only you can do? Is it on your job description?

And then thirdly, did it give you energy or did it drain you of your energy? And after two weeks, you're going to be able to step back and you're going to be able to look at this thing and you're going to go, wow, I'm spending a lot of my time doing low-value tasks that take away my energy. Knowledge is power. And so we can't really do anything with it. We can't really gain this margin until we know what's eating up our margin.

And a lot of times in the church world, we love to blame the senior pastor. I've already made jokes about it already. We love to blame our boss, our senior pastor, the executive pastor, this person, and that person. I have to do because they have—they're my boss. But at the end of the day, you know what you spend your time and energy on is completely up to you.

It's completely up to you. No matter what you may think in your mind, like you don't understand, I have 18 meetings to be at. Do you really have 18 meetings to be at or do you have 18 emails that you need to send? Think about that for a moment.

Creativity killers. Let's talk about some creativity killers. Speaking of meetings, unnecessary meetings. I spoke yesterday in the one-on-ones about having an agenda set ahead of time before you walk into that one-on-one meeting. And the reason is, yes, it's polite. Yes, it's kindness. Yes, it's kind because it's clear, right? Clarity is kindness. But the real reason is so that when you get to the end of the meeting, you know if you actually did what you said you wanted the meeting to do. Imagine that.

Imagine we actually went into a staff meeting or a department meeting, and we had a clear—these are three things we're going to knock out while we're in this meeting. And when we knock out those three, we know that we did what this meeting was supposed to do. But instead we get in the meeting and we talk for—it's a 30-minute meeting—and we talked for 10 to 12 minutes about what we saw on TikTok or Netflix over the weekend and how something didn't go your way on Sunday morning. And then you might have time to get to like half of one of the things that you actually need to talk about.

That is a creativity killer and it's a margin killer. Commitment overload. Commitment overload. Now again, you may say, it's not up to me what I have to do. You don't understand. And again, I will say you are the only person that can control your actions. If you're a person that says yes to everything, then be ready to be burnt out. Be ready to have no margin. Be ready to have zero room for any extra creative ideas.

And that leads me to my third creativity killer, which is unrealistic time projections. Unrealistic time projections. Now this goes both ways. I've been in creative meetings before and we have the executive pastor in there, the senior pastor in there, and we have that idea for that big opener. And someone inevitably goes, great, how long is it going to take us to pull that off?

That's a great question to ask. Someone in the room should be asking that question and someone better be ready to give an answer. But eventually, usually what happens is one person in the room will say, I think we can get that done by this weekend. Another person in the room will say, I need a solid six months of doing nothing else in order to get that done. And realistically, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

The person that said it's going to take six months to get it done is burnt out. The person that said it's going to take six minutes is naive to what it actually takes to get the things done. And that's okay. Not everybody has to understand what it takes to get it done. But you can in that moment be realistic about your time projections.

Let me speak lastly here about the buffer principle. The buffer principle is basically you're creating purposeful space between time commitments. If you're like me, I'm a slave to my calendar. I put it on my calendar and I forget about it. And I open up my calendar for the week or for the day and it says to be here at this time, I'm there at that time. But what kills my margin is when I have no buffer between every little single stack on the calendar.

Now, if you're a people person or an extrovert, you look at a full calendar and you go, yeah, my kind of day. If you're an introvert, you look at it and you go, I'm calling in sick. I don't want to do this today. Either way, if you have five tasks to do that day and those five tasks take you two hours to complete, but you have eight hours of meetings and you're not prepared to work 10 hours that day, then you've already messed yourself up.

And so understanding that you need some buffer time in between meetings, in between calendar items, so that you have the brain capacity to be fully present and so that you have the capacity to knock out some things in between meetings. I know people love—churches are really—they love to do this a lot. They love to say, look, we're going to have all of our meetings on Monday and then we'll have no more meetings the rest of the week.

I think it's a great idea. I think the problem is when they're back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back with no in between. Because whoever has that two o'clock meeting, like we're in right now, you're not getting the same mental energy from the people in that room that there were in the nine o'clock meeting. They just—they can't process it all. There's been too much to process.

So gaps between meetings, purposeful space between commitments. And then I love this—is a 90-minute task reset. A 90-minute task reset is basically there's a $6 timer that I bought on Amazon. It's like a little round dial. A lot of people use them in their kitchens. And I set that on my desk and I go, okay, I'm going to focus on this one task. And I set that thing to 90 and I hit go. And I don't stop to check my email. I try not to get up to go to the bathroom if I don't have to. I don't surf the web, I don't pick up my phone. I got focus mode turned on and those 90 minutes I'm locked in.

And the creatives that I know in the church and not in the church who can commit to doing at least just one 90-minute block a week will tell you that it was the most productive week they've had in a long, long time. And if you can't afford to take 90 minutes out of your week to have some real heads-down work, then you need to seriously look at what's on your plate and re-prioritize some things.

All right, so let's talk about prioritizing some things. Sustainable margins—these are some tools that I've used over the years. The weekly preview is introduced by yet another Franklin, Tennessee person, Michael Hyatt and the team at Full Focus. Any Full Focus users in here? Couple of them. So you know what I'm talking about when I say the weekly preview.

The weekly preview could be Friday afternoon, could be Sunday night, could be Monday morning, whatever. You're looking at your week and you're going, I understand the commitments that I have this week. And I'm flushing out every single thing that I have to do and I'm handwriting it because I want to make a real physical connection to what I have on my plate this week. Anybody can just add stuff to a digital thing and forget all about it. And then they open up the digital thing and they go, wow, I have more tasks than time today.

And you could still use those. I use Asana—if you were in my workshop last year, I use Asana every single day of the week. But I also look at it and I go, I'm going to handwrite these things out. And when it's going from Asana to me handwriting these things out, yes, it might create extra work, but what I'm doing in that weekly preview is I'm filtering out what's really important to get done that week and what maybe is not so important.

Some things are just busy work, things that you think that you need to do, but you really don't need to do. Some things are handed down to you that you think you need to do, and they do need to get done, but you can delegate those things. You can have a volunteer do it, right? So the weekly preview—you set up your—you look at the week, you're looking at your time commitments, you're looking at all the stuff that we've talked about thus far, and looking at those things, you're saying, hey, you know what? There's three things that have to get done this week.

The Full Focus weekly preview, they call it the big three or some churches call it the frog or the elephant or whatever animal you want to eat. There's three things that would have to get done this week. And if I get those three things done at the end of the week, then I can call it a successful week. All right, so that's the weekly preview.

Daily boundary rituals—what I mean here. I worked at a church in the Baltimore area for a couple years. Anyone from the Baltimore area in here? Awesome. I worked at church there for a couple of years. Loved my time there. And we, as a creative team, came up with this—you know how your phone has airplane mode and in the airplane mode, nothing can really come in or out. So we decided to basically create airplane mode for the creative team for one 90-minute block a week. And we called it our no-fly zone.

And because we're creative, we made a little graphic for it. We stuck it on our office doors and we let the whole staff know, just give us this 90 minutes this week and don't interrupt us. And we promise that we'll be more productive and more efficient because of it. And we were, and we were. And you have to get buy-in obviously all across the board, but having some type of daily boundary ritual, whether it be a no-fly zone or your actual availability.

If you're in control of your calendar and you're looking at that time and energy audit, when I look at that time and energy audit—and I do those about once a year—I was able to look at it and say, look, if I take a meeting before 11 AM, then I'm using my best brain power of the day. Carey Nieuwhof calls it "At Your Best." If you haven't read that one, add it to your reading list—Carey Nieuwhof, At Your Best. He talks about your energy levels throughout the day and knowing when you're at your best.

And for me, I'm at my best from like 7 AM to 11. You're like, so you're not at your best right now? I'm not at my best right now. I didn't get to pick when my time was. If I had got to pick when my time was, I would have put it like earlier, 11, whatever that session was. So they call that my green zone. So I try my hardest within the power that I have. I try my hardest not to schedule any meetings between seven and 11, because I know that's my most productive time when I'm going to be naturally the most productive, naturally the most locked in. So have some sort of daily boundary ritual.

Monthly audit of time spent—we've talked about this already. You can use the time and energy audit or if you're not into that, you can use a free like Harvest time tracker. Harvest is an online tool, you don't have to pay for it. You can just track your time. I still use the Harvest time tracker because as I'm developing what I'm doing, I want to know how long on average it takes me to do a certain task so that when someone asks me, can I write a talk or can I do this? And I can go, yeah, okay, I know from my research of knowing myself, it's going to take me about a half a day to really get a good feel on that. So I'm going to block out a half a day for that. But if you don't know that you can't do that. So you have to know it.

And then lastly, the quarterly ideal week. Ideal week is also a Full Focus thing. Some other people have brought it in as well, but basically it's super fun and also super sad because the ideal week—you get a blank page to look at your calendar from Monday through Friday and you get to map out like, man, it would be great if I could do this from this time to this time, and then I had this from this time to this time. And you do that for Monday through Friday.

Now, it's called ideal for a reason. It seldom happens because there's things that enter into your world and enter into your schedule that are naturally—that you didn't plan for, right? It's not, hey, this isn't ideal, but I have to be there for this person in my church. I have to be there for this part of my job. I have to be there for my family member. And so it enters in. So it's ideal for a reason. It's not the perfect week. It's the ideal week.

But I change those quarterly for me. I update them quarterly for me because seasons of life change. In the summertime, we have a lot more flexibility in our family. But right now, our calendar is a hot mess. There's just thing after thing after thing in the fall. In October to December, me and my wife just look at each other and we're like, don't move. No one add anything else to the calendar. Maybe if we're still, no one will know we're here, right? That's how it is. And so you have to understand that and how it ebbs and flows quarterly for you.

Weekly preview, daily boundary rituals, monthly audit, quarterly ideal week. I want to wrap up with this. Margin isn't what's left after your work is done. It's what makes your best work possible in the first place. If you are not protecting the margin for yourself and for your team if you have one, you are setting yourself up for consistent failure after failure.

And if you really want to execute those amazing dreams, those amazing creative ideas that you have in your head each and every week, if you really want to execute those, you're going to have to put in the work to gain that margin back, and you're going to have to lock in on discipline and communication in order to sustain that margin.

So a couple of free resources for you. Yesterday's QR code didn't work. This QR code does work. Thank you to my wife, graphic designer. So I have the DO versus DUE framework implementation. If you're like, hey, what's this whole DO, D-O-D-U-E thing? And then the creative energy audit template that I created from Dan Martell's book as well.

So today went a lot faster. I've got like 15-ish minutes open for Q&A. If anyone has any questions, we can do those now. You just shout them out and I'll repeat them back to us.

[Q&A Section follows with questions and answers about ideal week implementation, moderating time estimates between team members, dealing with scope creep, intake forms, handling last-minute leaders, and whether to skip intake forms for direct meetings]

I'll stick around afterwards. I know there's one final main session for y'all as well. Thank you so much for your time. Grab the free resources. If there's a resource that's not there that you need, you can contact me on the website. I'm here for you, I believe in the local church creative, and I want to support you as much as I can. So feel free to reach out. Y'all have a great day.

Ep 131: The Creative Leader's Guide to Transformative 1:1's

Most Leaders Miss This

SUMMARY

Most creative leaders sacrifice their people on the altar of excellence without even realizing it. But what if the key to better creative work wasn't pushing harder on your team, but actually investing 30 minutes a week in genuine conversation?

In this powerful episode, Dustin Pead shares insights from his talk at the SALT 2025 conference, revealing how intentional one-on-ones transformed his leadership approach after 15 years of prioritizing product over people. Whether you're a creative director, worship pastor, agency owner, or team leader, this episode provides a practical roadmap for conducting one-on-ones that actually work.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ The 3:1 Question Ratio Changes Everything. Modern psychology shows that effective leaders ask three questions for every one statement they make. This simple ratio transforms one-on-ones from broadcasts into genuine conversations that build trust and unlock creative potential.

• ⚡️ Consistency Builds Trust in Pennies, Loses It in Dimes. The number one complaint from creatives about their organization is lack of consistency from leadership. Canceling or rescheduling one-on-ones speaks louder than words—it tells your team they don't deserve 30 minutes of your time.

• ⚡️ Personal Connection Precedes Performance. Your first one-on-one with each person should be 80% personal check-in. Great creative work comes from teams who feel genuinely seen, heard, and invested in—not from those who only discuss projects and performance.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "For the first 10 to 15 years of my 20-year ministry career, I cared more about the product that showed up on Sunday than the people that I led to help create it."

💬 "Your introverted creatives have brilliant ideas that they never share in a group setting, but they may do it in a one-on-one."

💬 "Maybe excellence is more about the people than the product. Maybe the best creative work comes from teams who feel genuinely seen, heard and invested in."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• The Creative Guide to One-on-Ones - Free download with templates and worksheets

• "How to Lead When You're Not in Charge" by Clay Scroggins - Essential reading for middle leaders

• Fathom AI Note-Taker - Tracks talk percentage and takes meeting notes

• dustinpead.com - More frameworks and resources for creative leaders

TRANSCRIPT

Hey creatives, you know how I'm always talking about creative systems that work? Well, that actually includes your money too. If you're still shoving receipts in a shoe box and hoping for the best come tax time, we need to talk about the core group. They're a profit first certified accountants who actually understand the creative hustle. No judgment, just clarity. They help you build financial systems that create margin in your business instead of stress and this is coming from me. I'm a loyal core group subscriber so check them out at coregroupus.com that's C O R E G R O U P U S dot com. Check out the core group today.

Most creative leaders sacrifice their people on the altar of excellence without even realizing it. But what if the key to better creative work wasn't pushing harder on your team, but actually investing 30 minutes a week in genuine conversation? Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, where we help creative professionals move from chaos to clarity through their processes and systems. I'm your host Dustin Pead and I'm here to share practical systems and processes that will transform how you lead your creative team. Whether you're a creative director, worship pastor, or you're leading volunteers, this show is designed to give you actionable strategies that you can implement today.

Now what I'm about to share with you is a regurgitated version of my talk at the SALT 2025 conference. We set everything up to record and we listened to the playback and the microphone didn't work. This time you're gonna hear me kind of like give the talk again on a podcast form. Understand that when I was talking at the Salt Conference that it was a conference for local church ministry creatives, which if you don't know what that means, most local churches have some sort of creative person on their staff. Usually it's a musician, sometimes a designer, whatever the case may be, they have a live, basically a live event that they have to produce. Often in cases multiple times a week, they have to pull these things off. And so the Salt Conference is an opportunity for church creatives to come and just kind of decompress a little bit, learn some things, be challenged a little bit and be encouraged along the way.

So what I'm going to share with you today, I gave the talk to church creatives. But I really do think that this is applicable no matter where we're at and it's something that I walk all of my clients through no matter what sector they're in and how to have these effective one-on-ones.

So before we get into it as well, I need to be honest with you about something. For the first 10 to 15 years of my 20-year ministry career, I cared more about the product that showed up on Sunday than the people that I led to help create it. Now I would have told you that I loved my team and I would have said that I valued them, but my actions told a completely different story. I was so focused on excellence and making sure that everything was perfect, that I was literally sacrificing people on the altar of Sunday morning. Maybe that's you, maybe you're sacrificing your team on the altar of your creative endeavor or your business.

Now here's the thing, I didn't realize that I was doing it. It wasn't until I started having intentional, consistent one-on-ones with my team that had discovered what was really going on in their lives and their struggles and their creative blocks and their burnout. So that shift from product focus to people focus changed everything, not just for my team, but for the quality of our creative work. It turns out when you invest in people, they actually create better work. It's a revolutionary concept, right?

So today I want to share with you what I learned about making one on ones actually work, not just another meeting to check off, but a genuine tool for transformation. And we're going to go through the who, the what, the why, the when, the where, all of that today.

But let's start right out the gate with the who. Who should you meet with? Well, a one on one by definition is two people, right? But I think there's multiple different avenues that you can take here. Yes, you may have direct reports like volunteers or different staff or contractors that report to you. That one's obvious. But what about cross-department leaders? Maybe there's another department within your organization that you need to meet with. When's the last time you sat down with the director of another department just to understand their world? And doing that regularly helps a ton.

What about meeting with promising young talent? There are different people in your community that are ready to step up to the plate and the things that you are doing. So why not meet with them? Or how about if you aren't the boss or you aren't the top dog leader at the top of the chart, why not request to meet with them? Why not request to meet with your own leader and model the behavior that you want to see carried out throughout the rest of the organization?

So obviously, like I said, the critical rule is that one on ones must be between two people. If you add a third person, it fundamentally changes that dynamic. So don't necessarily invite your admin or anybody like that to just sit in on it because then it kind of feels like a two against one even before a word is ever spoken.

All right. So that's the who. Now let's move on to the what. What are we actually trying to achieve in these one on ones here? I would say a few things. Number one, alignment. This is to ensure that creative work meets our strategic objectives. Number two, unblocking. This is an opportunity to identify and remove obstacles before they derail creative projects. Development. This is kind of the discipleship in the church world or the development or the growth and opportunities in the secular world that we need within the work context. How are you growing? How are you developing in your skill here?

Relationship building is another one to strengthen the trust bond that enables creative risk taking to inspire change during these one on ones, right? Your introverted creatives have brilliant ideas that they never share in a group setting, but they may do it in a one on one. And then lastly, early problem detection. You can begin to catch burnout, personal struggles and performance issues before they explode in your face.

Andy Stanley, who is a well-renowned leader in the local church world teaches that effective ministry, I would say effective business in general, requires you to replace yourself. But here's the hard truth, many of us don't want to replace ourselves. We like being the person who everybody depends on. And a one-on-one forces us to invest in developing others, which is exactly what our business is and what the church world should look like.

All right, let's get into the when and the where. All right, so when to schedule one-on-ones. There's three kind of categories here or three different kind of timeframes that I recommend when we talk about when to schedule one-on-ones. First off, if we're direct reports, like they directly report to you, I'm going to suggest weekly, 30 minutes, set a timer, honor that time. Both of you need to honor that time, create that expectation. We'll talk about that kind of here in a little bit.

So direct reports, I think you need to be meeting weekly for 30 minutes. If it's a cross department situation, like we talked about, someone else in the organization, I think you need to be meeting monthly for 30 minutes. And then if it's a freelancer or a contractor, you need to be meeting at the beginning, the middle, and the end of every single project.

But the key is consistency. The number one complaint I hear from creatives about their organization is a lack of consistency from leadership. If your boss keeps getting a new fresh vision or a new fresh idea that changes every single quarter, you know what that does. It destroys trust sometimes and it pivots and there's lack of consistency there. So if you set up a one-on-one schedule and constantly cancel or postpone, just save everybody the trouble and don't start it anyway. Canceling or rescheduling speaks louder than words. It tells your team that they don't deserve 30 minutes of your time, that there's something else that's more important than them.

All right, so that's the when. Let's talk about where. Where do we do these one on ones? Look, creative people, you know this, are influenced by their surroundings, not the windowless office with gray paint. That's not ideal for inspiring conversation. So consider places like a coffee shop or a walking meeting, which is great for 30 minutes because people get tired and they want to wrap it up naturally. Galleries or museums are a great place to be visually inspired anywhere that sparks creativity.

But I would say try at your best. If you're to have four one on ones a month, I say three of them probably need to be in the same place, but all of them need to be in the same time. So pick one consistent place as much as possible, one consistent time and do not waiver.

All right. So now we're in the one on one, what do we need to do when we get in on that one-on-one? The very first thing I tell every leader is that they have to master the art of questions. Your one-on-ones have historically been terrible because you're not asking the right questions. Listen, great leaders ask more questions than they make statements, period, right? So if your one-on-one sounds like this, how are you? Fine. Things good? Yep. You love your job? Sure. Then you're doing it wrong.

Right? So you need to be asking great questions. And there's a rule here when we're asking great questions. Modern psychology shows us that effective leaders ask three questions for every one statement they make. It's the three to one ratio. So I would actually get someone on your team to track this for you. Or ask the other person say hey, I'm gonna work on asking more questions. Can you make a little hash mark on your paper every time I ask you a question? Just so at end of this meeting I know that I'm asking a good amount of questions. Or you do it yourself and you go I'm asking you a question and you hash it down whatever it takes but just track that stuff because seeing where that actually tracks out for you. It's humbling, but it's also transformative.

Something else to consider when asking questions is to consider personality differences, right? If you have like an Enneagram 5 on your team and you spring a question on them without warning, you're probably not gonna get an answer. They're probably gonna say, after a long period of silence, they're gonna say, let me think about that. And you'll both forget to ever revisit it. But if you send those questions two or three days ahead of time to someone like that on their team, then they can be prepared to answer and you can actually have conversation.

So let's get back to that question phrasing, right? So bad example of question phrasing is to say, give me an example, right? This feels defensive and pushy, but instead tell me about a time when, right? Feels more collaborative and open. It's the same information, but a totally different emotional response.

Resist the urge to solve every problem. If your creative comes to you and says, my leg is broken, you're going to go, well, go to the hospital. And they're going to go, but it hurts so bad. And you're going to go, yeah, I can see the bone. It's sticking out. Go to the hospital. Right. It sounds really familiar. And it's a dramatization of some of our conversations with creatives. But creatives often want to know that you're with them in their struggle before they're ready for solutions. So ask instead, hey, what solutions have you considered already at this point? And the transformation inside of them will go from problem-oriented to solution-oriented, and that's how you build a great team.

One of the top three people that I've learned about asking great questions from is Oprah Winfrey, right? You go back and watch any of her interviews, become a student of how to ask really great questions. Dan Patrick is another sports broadcaster. He has a regular show that I watch just about every day. Also great interviews, great questions. And then David Letterman is the other one. David Letterman, I think he has a show on Netflix. My next guest needs no introduction, incredible questions in that show. Become a student of how to ask really great questions. Leaders, regardless of industry, they excel when they master the skill of asking those great questions.

All right, let's get into the four part structure and some common mistakes to close this out. What's the four part structure of every single one on one? A simple structure will prevent wandering and conversations and help you understand common pitfalls that can keep you on track.

So number one, you have to start with personal check-in. Personal check-in, don't jump straight into business, right? What's giving you energy right now on a scale of one to 10? What's your creative capacity feel like inside of you right now? What's inspiring you outside of work? How's your family? How's your spouse? What hobbies did you do this weekend? And tell me more about that and how did you get into it, right? Spend a good significant amount of time. Don't rush this personal check-in process because if you rush it, everything else will suffer.

So number one, personal check-in. Number two, progress review, right? What progress are you most proud of? Where do you feel stuck? What roadblocks can I help remove for you?

Progress number three growth planning. What skills are you excited to develop next? We should always be growing and encouraging our creatives to grow as well. So what skills are you excited to develop next? That implies that they actually have something that they're thinking about, right? It's leading that question. How does your current work align with where you want to grow? And what resources would help you level up? Again, solution-oriented, not problem-oriented questions.

And then lastly, number four, end with some creative inspiration. Share something cool that you found. In larger group meetings that I used to lead with the whole creative team, we actually did show and tell and you had to come show something cool that you found. Show and tell is actually something really good. And I want one as well where you can say, I found this. This is why I think it's cool. Now you bring something. So show it to me why you think it's cool. We can watch a video together. You can ask what they're seeing in the creative landscape. Or on social media, we're constantly dropping stuff and sharing stuff into people's DMs. And so, hey, you should see this, you should see this. This time you're just doing it in person. That's the only difference. But ending with creative inspiration, ending on a high note, an inspiring note, is a great way to wrap up the one-on-one.

Now I want to talk about the agenda. You should send an agenda about two to three days ahead of time with the key three to five discussion points. It doesn't need to be the personal topics that we're going to talk about, but the key three to five discussion points that you're going to focus on. Send those ahead of time, include both standing items and meeting specific topics. Hey, every time we meet, we're going to ask about this and this and this. But then also in this meeting, we're going to talk about this and this and this. So it's critical to include those things. And also when you send that agenda, ask them because you're sending it in advance. Ask the one that you're meeting with, is there anything that they would like to add? Right. Because otherwise it's not a conversation, it's a broadcast and it could be shared in an email.

But we're trying to have conversations here, which leads me to my final portion of today's episode in this talk, which is the five fatal mistakes of one-on-ones.

Number one, number one mistake of one-on-ones is to turn one-on-ones into status updates, right? That's what email and Slack is for.

Number two, dominating the conversation. Aim for 50 percent or less of talk time. I love it when I have meetings online because I use my Fathom note taker and Fathom will actually tell me how long I've been monologuing and I can see that percentage. It'll pop up in the corner and then it'll adjust throughout so that I can step back and be a good conversationalist, not just an informationalist, just putting all that stuff out there.

Number three mistake, inconsistent scheduling. They shouldn't have to ask when the next one is or where it is. They should have all that information already because you're being consistent with it.

Number four, focusing exclusively on problems, right? This is not the principal's office. This is not a time to just focus on what we could be doing better. It's also time to celebrate wins and to figure out how did we win so that we can replicate it again.

Lastly, number five mistake, failing to follow through, right? Trust is earned in pennies, but it's spent in dimes. If you fail to follow through with what you said you were going to do or what you said you were going to talk about next time, then it will lower the trust factor between you and the person that you're meeting with.

So what now? This week, number one, this week audit your current practice, right? I want you to list out everybody who reports to you, whether they're contractor, volunteer, staff, whatever it is. And I want you to honestly assess when's the last time that you've had a real conversation with each of these people and identify the three to five people that you need to start weekly one-on-ones with immediately. That's your audit.

Secondly, block the time. Choose one consistent time and one place for each person, send calendar invites for the next 12 weeks. Name those invites correctly, right? We're gonna use both names on it. And then don't ask permission, just do it and explain the value when you meet. You're gonna show up and you're gonna give them the value of what this 30 minutes can bring.

Number three, download the creative guide to one-on-ones. This is on my website, absolutely free for you, dustinpead.com/1-on-1. Go ahead and grab your copy, it includes everything that we've discussed here today plus some question templates, some meeting structures and some practical worksheets as well. You can customize it for your specific team dynamics. You don't have to follow it word for word. Just use it as a guide or as a roadmap for the next 12 weeks, the next 90 days.

Number four, practice the three to one ratio. In your next team meeting, have someone track how many questions versus statements do you make. Just start paying attention to that. Be honest with yourself about the results. Commit to improvement, not perfection.

And lastly, start with personal, not with business. Your first one-on-one with each person, each person should be about an 80 percent personal check-in because you're really trying to create some trust there, right? So ask about their creative journey. What brought them to the team? What energizes them? Resist the urge to dive right into projects and performance and build relationships and set that foundation first.

There are several resources that I mentioned today and in the talk that I gave at a salt conference. If you're in ministry, actually, if you're not, if you're in ministry or not, this is a great book by Clay Scroggins. If you find yourself kind of leading from the middle, it's called How to Lead When You're Not in Charge. Definitely check that out. My free resource, the Creative Guide to One-on-ones, you can get at dustinpead.com/1-on-1. And then I mentioned the Fathom AI Note-Taker that I use to record, note take, all that stuff from my meetings, but also tracks the talk percentage in my meetings as well.

So in conclusion, here's what I want you to remember. If you hear nothing else from this entire episode, hear this. In order to have effective one on ones, you have to genuinely put people over performance. You cannot fake it. I spent over a decade caring more about what showed up on a Sunday morning than the people who created it. I'm asking you today, don't make the same mistake that I did. Maybe excellence is more about the people than the product. Maybe the best creative work comes from teams who feel genuinely seen, heard and invested in. Right. 30 minutes a week. That's what we're talking about. Just 30 minutes to transform not just your team's performance, but their lives. 30 minutes to model what leadership actually looks like.

The trust that you build in pennies of investment, it will compound over time. But the trust you lose by canceling, postponing or half listening, it will evaporate in time. So here's my challenge. Pick one person on your team, schedule that first one on one, show up prepared, ask great questions, really listen and watch what happens.

Remember, helping creative scale with efficiency starts with helping them know that they matter and that happens one conversation at a time.

Next week, we're gonna be back and I'm gonna share my other talk from SALT 2025. Actually gonna share the live recording from it because the microphone did work in that one. Where it's all about gaining and sustaining margin in your creativity. And I'll wait to share that talk with you next time on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.

Ep 130: You Are Not Your Art

5 Essential Mental Health Truths for Creative Professionals

SUMMARY

The creative industry has a mental health crisis. Two-thirds of creative professionals report work-related health issues, and artists are 10 times more likely to suffer from depression than the general population. If you're a creative struggling to believe in your own value, this message is for you.

World Mental Health Day serves as an annual reminder of struggles that don't end when the day passes. The statistics are staggering: 57% of musicians have experienced suicidal thoughts, 64% of film and television workers have considered leaving the industry, and creative professionals are 18 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population.

These aren't just numbers—they represent our friends, colleagues, and community members who are struggling to reconcile the beauty of what they create with the pain of how they feel.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Your creative output does not determine your human value—you existed before you created anything, and your worth doesn't change based on what you produce.

• ⚡️ Asking for help is not giving up, it's refusing to give up—reaching out when you're struggling is the bravest thing you can do and multiplies your strength.

• ⚡️ You matter right now, exactly as you are—your presence creates ripples you'll never fully comprehend, independent of your creative achievements.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "Your art, your creativity flows from you, but it is not you. You existed before you created anything and your value doesn't increase or decrease based on what you produce."

💬 "The people who love you don't love you because of what you make. They love you because of who you are."

💬 "This feeling is not permanent. This too shall pass. The lie that you don't matter, that no one cares, that the world will be better without you—it's not true. It's never been true."

EPISODE RESOURCES

Crisis Support: Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 (24/7, free, confidential)

Connect with Dustin:

• Website: dustinpead.com

• Social Media: @dustinpead

• Free Resources: dustinpead.com/free

TRANSCRIPT

Hey creatives, here's the thing. You can have all the creative systems in the world, but if your money is a mess, you're still stuck in chaos mode, trust me. And the core group gets this. They understand it. They work exclusively with creatives. And they know that financial overwhelm kills your creative energy faster than anything. Whether you need basic tax help or full CFO level strategy, they will meet you where you are and help you build sustainable financial systems. The profit first approach means that you actually pay yourself first instead of hoping that there's enough money left over at the end, right? So head to coregroupus.com and let them help you create financial clarity today.

Today's a very special episode of Creativity Made Easy, one that I felt could not wait another week. So if you're a creative professional struggling to believe in your own value, this message is for you. Let's get into it.

Welcome to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business with systems and processes that actually work. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative agency consultant. And my mission is simple, to help creatives know themselves, their process and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together. And today's episode is going to be about knowing yourselves for sure. Whether you're a solo creative running an agency, leading an in-house team, you're in the right place.

Each week we dive into systems and frameworks and mindsets that transform creative chaos into sustainable clarity. Like I said, today's episode is going to be different. I had planned to share one of my talks from the SALT 2025 conference this week, but when I sat down to prepare, I realized that something more important needed to be said. Now, last Friday, six days before the release of this episode was World Mental Health Day. And while that day has passed, the struggle has not.

The statistics around mental health in creative industries are staggering. And I know many of you listening right now are carrying the weights that feel impossible to bear. So I'm going to push the salt content to the next couple of weeks because some of these truths cannot wait.

Now I want to give a couple of disclaimers right up front. Number one, I'm not a mental health professional. I'm just someone who has gone through it, is walking through it and want to encourage other people like me along the way. Number two, I did write out this episode transcript pretty much word-for-word because I wanted to be very intentional about what I say and how I'm going to approach this topic today. So with that in mind, let's dive right in.

Let's start with some numbers that are not meant to overwhelm you, but just to let you know that you're not alone in what you're experiencing. Two-thirds of creative professionals, roughly 67%, report work-related health issues. Artists and writers are 10 times more likely to suffer from depression than the general population. Creative professionals are 18 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. 57% of musicians have experienced suicidal thoughts. 35% of screen workers rate their mental health as poor or very poor. 64% of film and television workers have considered leaving the industry due to mental health struggles.

Now again, these aren't just statistics. These are our friends, our colleagues, our community. These numbers represent real people, maybe even you, who are struggling to reconcile the beauty of what they create with the pain of how they feel. The creative industry has a mental health crisis. This world has a mental health crisis. Hence why we need things like World Mental Health Day, because we can't keep pretending that everything is fine.

Now some of my story, I know this struggle personally. I've been there. I've been in the dark places where you wonder if you're enough, if your work matters, if anyone would even notice if you disappeared. And I wrote a book about my story, about walking through depression and anxiety and spiraling thoughts through that, learned to separate my identity from my output as best I could and discovered the process that my value isn't determined by what I produce. And the journey nearly cost me everything, but it also taught me the truths that I'm about to share with you. Truths that literally saved my life. And if you're struggling today, I need you to hear them.

So here are five truths you need to hear today. No frameworks, no systems, no productivity hacks, just truth.

All right. Truth number one, you are not the sum of your art. Your creative output does not determine your human value. Listen to me carefully. The work that you create, no matter how brilliant or how flawed, is not who you are. You are not your last project. You're not your portfolio. You're not the approval or rejection that you received from that client.

We live in an industry that constantly confuses our work with our worth. And when a project succeeds, we feel valuable. But when it fails, we feel worthless. But that's a lie that will destroy you if you let it. Your art, your creativity flows from you, but it is not you. You existed before you created anything and your value doesn't increase or decrease based on what you produce. On your best creative day and your worst, your fundamental worth as a human being remains unchanged.

The client who rejected your work didn't reject you, right? The project that failed doesn't mean that you failed. The creative block that you might be experiencing doesn't mean that you're broken. You're a person with infinite worth who happens to create things, not a creative machine that happens to feel things.

All right, truth number two, you are more valuable than you think. You're more valuable than you think. Your presence, not your productivity is what matters the most. You see the lie we believed is that our value comes from what we produce. So we hustle harder, we work longer, we sacrifice more. Thinking that if we just create enough, achieve enough, succeed enough, then maybe we'll finally feel valuable enough. But here's what I've learned. The people who love you don't love you because of what you make. They love you because of who you are.

Your spouse doesn't love your portfolio, they love you. Your kids don't need a creative triumph, they need your presence. Your friends don't value you for your accomplishments, they value you for your friendship. And beyond all that, your value is intrinsic. You matter because you exist. Not because of what you do, but because of who you are. If you never created another thing, if you walked away from this creative life tomorrow, you would still be valuable. You would still matter. You would still be worthy of love and respect and dignity.

Right? It's not motivational fluff. That's foundational truth. That's what God has created in us. And when you start living from that place, when you truly believe that you're valuable, regardless of your output, it changes everything.

Truth number three, you are capable of hard things. I say this to my kids all the time. Surviving is a strength and asking for help is courage, right? If you're listening to this or watching this right now and you're battling depression, anxiety, burnout or worse, you need to know something. You are already doing hard things. You got out of bed today, you're still showing up. You're still here. It's not a weakness. That's remarkable strength.

The creative journey is hard and the mental health struggle is real. Doing both simultaneously takes a kind of resilience that most people will never understand. And here's the truth. And I love this is from one of my favorite movies of all time, a short film. Asking for help doesn't diminish that strength. It multiplies it. The quote in the movie is that asking for help is not giving up. It's refusing to give up.

The bravest thing you can do when you're struggling is to tell someone, reach out, to admit that you cannot do this alone because you are capable of hard things. You've already proven that by surviving this far and you're capable of the hard thing of reaching out for help too. That's not giving up, right? It's refusing to give up.

Truth number four, you matter. You matter. Your existence has impact that extends far beyond your work. You see, in our dark moments, our minds lie to us. They tell us that no one would notice if we're gone. The world would be fine without us and that we're a burden, not a blessing. And those thoughts are not truth.

You matter to people in ways that you can't even see. That encouraging word that you spoke last week, someone's still thinking about it. That project that you collaborated on, you made it better with your presence. That friend who texts you randomly, you're more important to them than you realize. Your life creates ripples that you'll never fully comprehend. A student that you mentor, the junior creative you encourage, the person who sees you at work and thinks maybe I can do this too. You matter. Not matter someday if you achieve enough. No, no, not could matter if you could get your life together. No, you matter right now, today, in this moment, exactly as you are.

And lastly, truth number five, you are loved. You are loved. Love for you exists independent of your performance. We used to attend a church outside of downtown Chicago in our first year of marriage. I was back in 2006 and they ended every church service with the same statement. You are loved. Remember as you leave and go out this week, you are loved.

Now this one's hard for creatives to believe because we're used to conditional approval, right? Clients love our work when it meets their expectations. Audiences love our output when it resonates with them. And our industry loves us when we're producing, but that's not love. That's transaction. Real love exists whether you create or not. Whether you succeed or fail, whether you're having your best year or your worst, someone loves you. God loves you. Maybe your family loves you. Maybe it's your friends. Maybe it's people in your creative community. Maybe. I believe this deeply.

Like I said, it's the God who created you with the creative capacity in the first place. You are loved not for what you do, but for who you are, not for what you accomplish, but because you exist, by you existing is proof that you are loved. And that love does not disappear when you're struggling. It doesn't fade when you're not performing. It's in the darkness. It's waiting for you to reach towards that light. You are loved. Believe that, receive it. Let it be the foundation that you build from.

So what now? We end every episode with some action steps and I want to give those to you today as well. If you're struggling with your mental health right now, here's what I'm asking you to do.

Number one, reach out to someone you trust today. Not next week. Not when you feel better today. Go ahead, text a friend, call a family member, email a mentor, email me. Tell someone what you're experiencing. You don't have to do this alone.

Number two, share this episode with a creative friend who needs it. That's not for self promotion of anything that I'm doing. It's just that you may know someone who's struggling and maybe they've mentioned it. Maybe you just sense it. Send them the episode with a simple message that just says thinking of you. Right. This episode meant something to me and I wanted to share it with you.

Number three, take one self care action in the next 24 hours. Not a productivity action, a care action. Right. Take a walk, exercise, pray, journal, rest, do something that nurtures you as a human being, not as a creative professional. Right. You're not a machine. So stop treating yourself like one.

Number four, use the resources at the end of this episode and in the show notes. Right. If you're in crisis and you're having thoughts of self harm or suicide, please use the mental health resources that I'm about to share. These are free, confidential and available 24 seven. There's no shame in reaching out. It's the bravest thing that you can do.

And number five, sit with these truths. Come back to this episode. Write these five truths down. Remember them and read them when the lies get too loud. You are not the sum of your art. You're more valuable than you think. You are capable of hard things. You matter. You are loved. These aren't motivational platitudes. They're foundational truths that can anchor you when everything feels uncertain.

So for mental health crisis, the suicide and crisis lifeline, you can call or text 988. It's available 24 seven, completely free and confidential. There are trained counselors available for everyone experiencing any emotional distress. The rest of the resources I will put in the show notes for you. But again, text 988 if you're having any kind of suicidal thoughts or crisis in that regard.

So in conclusion, listen, if you're in a dark place right now, please hear me. This feeling is not permanent. This too shall pass. The lie that you don't matter, that no one cares, that the world will be better without you. It's not true. It's never been true because you're not the sum of your art. You're more valuable than you think. You're capable of hard things. You matter and you are loved. Those five truths stand whether you believe them right now or not. And I hope and I pray that they reach you in whatever darkness you might be facing and remind you that there's still light ahead.

So reach out. Ask for help. Take the next small step. You don't have to figure everything out today. Just take the next breath. Make the next call. Send the next text. Your story is not over and the creative world needs you in it. Not for what you create, but for who you are.

So if you found value in this episode, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Connect with me at DustinPead.com or on social media at DustinPead because you are not alone in this.

Next week, we're going to return to the content I originally planned for this episode. My talk from one of my talks from Salt 2025 on transforming your one on one meetings from status updates into strategic conversations that actually move your creative work forward. But today we needed this. So thanks for listening until next time. Keep creating. But more importantly, keep believing in your own value.

Ep 129: Why Your Best Ideas Disappear

(And How to Capture Them)

SUMMARY

You're in the shower when brilliance strikes. A perfect solution to that client problem you've been wrestling with suddenly appears crystal clear. But by the time you dry off and get dressed? Gone. Vanished into the creative ether.

Sound familiar? You're not alone. As creatives, we experience these moments of insight constantly—during client calls, while driving, right before sleep, in the middle of a workout. But without a system to capture them, these brilliant ideas become nothing more than wasted creative energy.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Choose ONE capture system and commit to it completely – Multiple capture locations guarantee your ideas will be lost. Pick one place that goes with you everywhere, whether that's Apple Notes, a physical Field Notes journal, or a voice recorder app.

• ⚡️ Give Future You the context needed to act – Don't just write "client portal idea." Write "Automated onboarding sequence that sends welcome video and checklist from day one." Future You won't remember the context without your help.

• ⚡️ Schedule a weekly 15-minute review to process ideas – Set the same time on the same day every week to review captured ideas using the four-question filter: New for now, new for later, add to existing now, or add to existing later.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "Your best creative ideas aren't lost because you're not smart enough to remember them. They're lost because you haven't given future you a fighting chance to find them."

💬 "Write ideas like you're leaving notes for a team member who needs to execute it without asking any questions."

💬 "Don't let your idea capture system become a museum of ideas. Use it as a filtration system and put those ideas where they belong."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ The Future You Method

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Your best creative ideas aren't lost because you're not smart enough to remember them. No, they're lost because you haven't given future you a fighting chance to find them. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast where we transform creative chaos into clarity through systems and processes. This is a podcast for all creatives—designers, photographers, writers, all creative entrepreneurs who are seeking practical, actionable strategies to grow their creative business through efficiency.

I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process consultant, and I help creatives and agencies know themselves, their process, and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together. I would love for you to subscribe, rate, and review this episode. If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit the thumbs up button as well. Check out dustinpead.com/free for all sorts of free resources I have for you. And you can follow and chat with me on social media at Dustin Pead. That's D-U-S-T-I-N-P-E-A-D.

The Scattered System Disaster

All right, so let's talk about this scenario, right? You're in the shower and a brilliant solution appears, right? But by the time you dry off, it's gone. It vanishes. Maybe you were in the middle of a client call and an idea strikes. The call continues, the idea evaporates. Maybe it's while you're driving—you can't write it down, so you just say, "I'll remember this," but you don't, right? Right before falling asleep, there were breakthrough moments that are lost during the morning fog. Maybe it's during exercise when the endorphins are flowing and ideas are flowing, and then later—nothing.

This is a scattered system disaster. I want to talk about some ways that you can collect ideas so that you have them when you need them. This is what Todd Henry calls being an "accidental creative"—being brilliant at a moment's notice because you have collected ideas.

Some creatives decide that they're going to write them down so that they don't forget, right? And so what they do is they might create an ideas Slack thread that they're never going to find again. Maybe they email themselves, but those end up going down and down further in your inbox. Maybe you have different random notebooks or sticky notes or napkins—all things that you can't find. Or maybe you have voice memos that you never actually transcribe.

Look, this fails because Future You has multiple six, seven, eight, nine, ten places sometimes to have to go find those ideas and ultimately ends up giving up. Thus the idea is gone.

The Solution: One Capture System

But listen, brilliant ideas don't have to become wasted creative energy. So I want to suggest something to us today, and I talk to all my clients about this: have ONE capture system for your ideas. One capture system that goes with you everywhere. If it doesn't go with you everywhere, it's not your system.

So you can choose your one place. Maybe it's your iPhone Notes app—it's always in your pocket. Maybe it's a digital notepad on your phone like Notion or Evernote. Maybe it's a physical Field Notes journal. I did this for many, many years so I wouldn't be attached to a screen, and I would carry around the little Field Notes. Field Notes are those little notebooks that are about the size of your hand. You can carry them around in your pocket. I loved it because when I put my hands in my pocket, I would feel it there and I'd be like, "Oh yeah, I brought this around to write down some ideas. Maybe I should think about what ideas I have right now," and then I would pull it out and have it.

You can use the voice recorder app for when you're driving or exercising, but if that's the place, that needs to be THE place. The key to success here is to pick one place and commit. No exceptions. If you're going to do the voice recorder thing, do the voice recorder thing. If you're going to do the Field Notes thing, do the Field Notes thing.

And the reason that this is important is because if you don't have one place, like we talked about earlier, you have all these different places to go back and find. Where did I put that idea?

The Future You Framework

I love Seinfeld—the show, I love Seinfeld the comedian. I used to watch that show religiously all the time, and there was an episode where he woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down this concept or a punchline to a joke or whatever. And the next day he woke up and he's like, "I don't know what this means. Is this anything? I have no context as to what this means."

And so that's where the Future You framework is applied. When you capture an idea, if you leave out the context of that idea, then you're setting yourself up for failure.

So if you have an idea about a client portal, don't just write "client portal idea." Write: "Hey, client portal idea looks like this—it's an automated onboarding sequence that sends a welcome video and checklist from day one." You go, "Oh, well, that's an idea I can get around." But if you just had an idea written somewhere on a voice memo somewhere that said "client portal idea," you'd be like, "I have no idea what the context is."

The Future You framework or methodology that we talk about is specifically designed for context because you're not expected to remember the context of all these things. You remember little bits and pieces. You remember "client portal idea," but later you want to know what that idea actually was, fully fleshed out. And so you give Future You enough details to act on it without having to reconstruct your thinking.

It's the same principle that applies to our project task methodology, where we have a clear verb, specific outcome, and all of the necessary context.

The Weekly Review Process

All right, so now we've got our ideas in one place. What do we do with that one place? What I suggest is a weekly review. Now you can do a daily review if you'd like. If you're in a high-idea environment where you constantly need to be pumping out ideas, you can do that. I found for me and most creators that I know that doing that daily gets exhausting because there's a lot of things to start and not a lot of things to finish. And there's really no time to marinate on the idea.

We have ideas as creatives—sometimes we just need to sit on them for a little while and kind of marinate through those ideas and kind of stew on it. Maybe we add a little bit more context as we begin to stew on it. But I like the weekly review because it gives us time to marinate on it, but not so much time like a monthly one where we begin to really kind of lose passion for that idea. It's not that we're losing context for the idea—we're losing passion for the ideas, usually if we wait longer than a week to review those ideas.

So I like to have the same time, the same day, every single week. Usually for me, it's Friday afternoons where I'm going through and I'm looking back at the week of all the ideas that I wrote down in my one spot. For me, it's my Remarkable notepad that I use, the digital notepad that I use. I write all my ideas down in that. And so every Friday afternoon, I go through and I look at that.

The Four-Question Filter

And when I do that, when you review these ideas, I want to give you four questions to filter through each idea. Because you need to—when you're looking at these ideas weekly—you need to ask yourself the question, "Well, what do I do with this idea now?"

And there are four questions that I want you to filter through each idea that you wrote down, and the four areas are this:

1. It's either a new idea for now

2. It's a new idea for later

3. It's add something to an existing idea now

4. Or it's add something to an existing idea later

And then as time goes on, you may look at that and you go, "You know what? That's actually just creating more work. We really don't need that." Or "That actually belongs a little bit more with this other idea"—you're adding something, adding to an existing idea.

So new for now doesn't need immediate action? Then you move it to your task list immediately. New for later? Maybe this is a future project. You're going to create a project placeholder in Asana or wherever you create project placeholders, and you're going to go, "That's where this is going to go and I'm going to come back to it." And put a date on it, obviously, so that you remember to come back to it.

Thirdly, maybe it's adding to something new now. Maybe you're adding to a new idea and you're going to add it right now. Does this enhance a current project? We've all had that—you get halfway through a project and we go, "Man, you know what would make this project great? You know what will really take this to the next level?" That's this category. You're adding to something. You're adding to an existing idea and/or existing project that already exists.

And the fourth category is you're adding something later. Still, you're adding to it. Does this fit maybe a planned future initiative? And so you add a note to that future project going like, "Hey, I had an idea for later that we might do something, and when we do, it's going to be like this."

And so your one place is to be the place that you capture the ideas and you review the ideas, but then after that you send the ideas where they belong. You send the ideas where they belong.

What Now? Your Action Steps

So what do we do with this now? It's a pretty short episode, but I wanted to get it out there for you. What do we do?

First thing you do is choose one place for these notes today. Don't research this out the yin yang, right? Just pick something that you already have access to. Because if it's a new—if it's too far of a reach of a new thing that you have to incorporate, a new tool that you have to incorporate—you won't do it. Resistance will set in and you'll go, "You know, it's just out of arm's reach, and so I can't really get to it, so I'm not going to use it."

So make sure you have one place to decide that's within reach of you already, within your grasp, within your world, within your realm already, so you don't have to create a new habit around this. It's something that's going to be super easy and natural for you to do.

Number two, set up your weekly review—literally 15 minutes every, the same time on the same day, every single week. Go ahead and create it on your calendar. Open your calendar right now and create that recurring 15-minute block every single week when you know that you're going to have the time and the mental energy to review those ideas.

Thirdly, now it's time to build the habit. Now we have the tools that are in our midst. We've scheduled the thing to happen. We have the tool, we have the time and date and the place, and we're just going to show up. So now we have to start building the habit.

So in the first couple of weeks, maybe the habit is that you just need to capture the ideas. Just work on building a habit of writing those ideas down wherever you decided to write them down or verbally speak them into. After a couple of weeks of doing that, then you can start to go, "Okay, now I'm going to work in this weekly review that's on my calendar, and I'm going to really start to get this flow going."

And as you do that, track your wins when you're looking through it like, "Man, I had that idea. I came back and revisited it. I added it to the thing, and the project was so much better because we actually followed through on an idea."

Imagine that, creative. Imagine you actually follow through on some of your ideas. Doesn't that sound amazing? I want that for you so, so badly.

Fourth, make sure when you're writing these ideas down, make sure that you're giving Future You the context that it needs. Write ideas like you're leaving notes for a team member who needs to execute it without asking any questions. And we've talked about this multiple times in the Future You methodology shows that we've done, so you can go back and listen to those things. But essentially it boils down to, like I said, writing ideas like you're leaving notes for a team member who needs to execute without being able to ask any questions. What's wrong? That is Future You context.

And then lastly, get your ideas into action. Use the four-question filter every single week. Don't let your idea capture system become a museum of ideas. Don't let it become a museum of ideas. Take it, use it as a filtration system, and put those ideas where they belong and get them into action today.

Resources to Help You

So a couple of things you can find on my website to help you with this is the Future You methodology framework. It's dustinpead.com/free. You can find that there. You can also find the DO versus DUE framework for scheduling those weekly reviews and what to do with your ideas afterwards.

Check out Field Notes—it's a great option for analog. Apple Notes, Notion, Evernote (if that's still a thing, I'm not sure—I used to use Evernote like crazy back in the day). There are some great digital options, and of course Asana or any other type of project management system to be able to move your ideas into completion.

Your Ideas Deserve Better

Listen, creative, your ideas aren't the problem. It's not that you don't have good ideas or have enough ideas. It's your system for capturing those ideas. And Future You and your future business and your future team deserve better than the scattered sticky notes and the voice memos that you've lost.

So choose one place today. Schedule the weekly review and start treating your ideas like the valuable assets that they are. So stop by dustinpead.com for the Future You framework and methodology. Click on the free resources section and find other tools to help you as well.

Next Episode Preview

Next week, we're going to be talking about one of the most underutilized leadership tools in creative business—the effective one-on-one meeting. I'm going to share the exact talk that I taught at the Solk Conference this year, this October. Actually, as this episode releases this Thursday, October the 9th, I will be at the Solk Conference in Nashville giving the talk on how creative leaders can have effective one-on-ones with their team.

So if you've ever wondered what to talk about in a one-on-one meeting or you feel like they're a waste of time, next week's episode is going to change everything for you. I cannot wait to talk to you then, next time on Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 128: The Priority Framework

How to Decide What Actually Deserves Your Creative Attention

SUMMARY

Your to-do list might be the biggest creativity killer in your business and you don't even realize it. Most task management systems are designed like grocery lists—just a random collection of stuff to check off. But creative work doesn't work that way.

In this episode, I'm sharing why traditional task management fails creative brains and introducing you to the Priority Framework—a simple method that will transform how you decide what actually deserves your attention.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Not everything deserves equal attention: When everything feels equally important, nothing is important. The Priority Framework combines the Focus Funnel and Eisenhower Matrix to ruthlessly filter what truly matters.

• ⚡️ Creative work isn't linear: Unlike traditional task management systems that assume linear progress, creative work ebbs and flows. Your task management system needs to account for this reality.

• ⚡️ Protect your creative energy like the finite resource it is: Schedule high-impact creative work during your peak hours and eliminate decision fatigue by knowing exactly what deserves your focus.

NOTABLE QUOTES

💬 "When everything feels equally important, then nothing is important. When everything is at the same status, there's no differentiator of what you actually need to do next."

💬 "By delegating it and ensuring that it gets done, you are helping actually see that thing through. Whereas if you hold on to it and it never gets done, then you're not the hero anymore. You're the villain."

💬 "Your creativity is your most valuable asset along with your time. Stop treating those things like they're unlimited and start protecting them like the finite resources they really are."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ The Priority Framework

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey creatives, you know how I'm always talking about creative systems that work? Well, that actually includes your money too. If you're still shoving receipts in a shoe box and hoping for the best come tax time, we need to talk about the Core Group. They're Profit First certified accountants who actually understand the creative hustle. No judgment, just clarity. They help you build financial systems that create margin in your business instead of stress, and this is coming from me. I'm a loyal Core Group subscriber, so check them out at coregroupus.com. That's C-O-R-E-G-R-O-U-P-U-S dot com. Check out the Core Group today.

Your to-do list might be the biggest creativity killer in your business and you don't even realize it. So today I'm sharing why traditional task management fails creative brains and introducing you to a simple method that will transform how you decide what actually deserves your attention. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Well, everyone, welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast for creative professionals and agencies who want to scale their business without sacrificing their sanity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, and I help creative professionals and agencies know themselves, their process and their team so that they can move from chaos to clarity in their systems and processes. Whether you're a freelancer, agency owner or leading a creative team, this show is about building systems that free your creativity instead of constraining it. Let's dive in here.

Here's the problem that I see consistently time after time, no matter how big the agency or how early into the startup phase a freelancer may be: creative work requires deep focus and mental energy. But most to-do lists are designed like grocery lists. They're just a random collection of stuff to check off, right? And checking off feels really, really good. And we need that system to propel us moving forward. But this approach is actually killing your creativity and keeping you stuck in reactive mode.

So let's talk about first define this: creative brain versus traditional task management, right? The key difference here is that creative work isn't linear like most task management systems assume that it is. It ebbs and flows. Sometimes it goes forward, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it repeats, right? It doesn't just go from start to finish. So how do you know what's most important?

We often feel overwhelmed by this and we sit down and we look at our to-do list, if we have a to-do list even, or even if it's just a to-do list that's in our head of all the things that we need to get done and it's not actually down on paper, which is a totally separate problem. But when we have this sense of overwhelm, everything feels equally important. When everything equally feels important, then nothing is important. When everything is at the same status, there's no differentiator of what do I actually need to do next.

And so what ends up happening is you, your team, your project managers, whoever you have with you, or just you, just you and yourself—you begin to get decision fatigue because you're constantly choosing what you need to work on while worrying about what you're not working on. And then there's this context switching between creative and administrative tasks. What mindset do I need to be in?

So what I want to share with you today is what I've been dubbing the Priority Method or the Priority Framework, because not everything on your list deserves the same level of attention. And most things that ended up there might not even deserve your attention at all.

So I want to just kind of walk you through what I've put together in this Priority Method or Priority Framework. And it's a combination of two things that we've talked about on this show a lot. We've talked about the Focus Funnel, which is not original to me and has been around for many, many years. And the Eisenhower Matrix, where we decide what's urgent and important or neither. Right? And that also not from me. It's obviously called the Eisenhower Matrix for reasons because President Eisenhower created this and that's how he decided what he would put his focus on.

But I like to combine these two aspects of the Focus Funnel and the Eisenhower Matrix, and what I do with my clients in our coaching and as we're working and building systems together and understanding what we need to put our attention to, we combine these efforts and say let's take the Focus Funnel. We're going to put everything through that and we'll talk about that. And then on the other side of it, then we're going to talk about when it comes out the other side, is it actually urgent and important. And if not, maybe we put it back through the Focus Funnel again. So you see again, creative work, not linear, it kind of cycles around.

So let me walk you through this real quick if you've never heard of these things before. So the Focus Funnel starts, obviously, it's a funnel shape. So it starts big at the top and narrows down at the bottom. And so you can see here on your screen, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see that everything that's on your task list goes into this funnel.

Now I'll pause right there for a second and say, how do I not even know what to put in the funnel? That's great. Understanding that is a huge deal. So first thing I tell everyone to do is to mind dump or brain dump everything, every single task gets out of your head and onto paper or digital lists somewhere. And what you're going to do is you're not going to think about it. You're just going to go, if it's something in my head that I feel like I need to be doing or I need to get done today, this week, this month, this year, whatever, then I'm going to jot it down and I'm going to keep writing until my brain is completely empty of everything that I feel like I need to do, all the pressures of what I need to get done.

And now we're gonna put it through the Focus Funnel. So you can see at the top of the Focus Funnel, it says tasks go in here, right? So tasks go in there. And the first thing we're gonna ask is, does this really need to be done at all? That's the eliminate phase. Does it need to be done at all? Is it not just you or someone else on your team, just in general? Is this actually going to move the needle forward in what we need to do right now? Or is it just busy work that's distracting us? If it is, eliminate it.

If it passes the test of, actually, it does need to be done right now, and you want to get real ruthless with this. And if you need to bring in outside help like ourselves at Chief Creative Consultants or anyone else on your team or a friend or a mentor and just kind of have that second brain to say, does this need to happen? Does this need to be done at all? So if it passes that test, then you move on to the automate question, right?

So if it can't be eliminated, that's not a problem. Can it be automated? And this is where we talk about systems, right? Are we scheduling automatic tools? There's so many resources at our disposal here in 2025 where we can automate so many things digitally or we can automate it by building a system and the system keeps us from having to think about it over and over again, which burns up mental energy. So can it be automated? Can it be systematized? Can it be scheduled?

If the answer is yes, then great. Then you know exactly what to do with that task next. If it can't, and you're like, no, this is like a phone call that I need to make, or this is like something where it's a little bit more—there's no way I can build a system around this. I would venture to say that you probably still could, but let's just say for the sake of this podcast episode and the Focus Funnel that you've gone through the automate section and you say, you know what, I can't automate it, so it's going to continue through. We've already determined that it needs to be done. We've already determined that it can't be automated.

So the third section in the Focus Funnel is can it be delegated? Can someone else do this? Someone else on your team, some other agency, some third-party app or situation that you can hire or delegate to and say, hey, this needs to get done and it can't be automated, can you do this for me? Can someone else do it? Does it have to be you?

And the struggle I see with creative entrepreneurs and agencies all the time is they always, even in a team of 10 to 20 people, everyone thinks it has to be me that does this. It has to be—I have to be the hero of this project. You don't. You don't have to. In fact, by delegating it and ensuring that it gets done, you are helping actually see that thing through. Whereas if you hold on to it and it never gets done, then you're not the hero anymore. Right? You're the villain. You're the one that stopped the progress from happening.

So can it be eliminated? No, we have to do it. Can it be automated? No, someone has to do this. Can it be delegated? If yes, delegate it. If not, you can see at the bottom of the Focus Funnel here, this is where it ends up going. Okay, well, it can't be eliminated. Can't be automated. And it can't be delegated. That means I have to do it. Okay, so now the question becomes now or later, right? Can we procrastinate this on purpose until it really matters? Or do we need to concentrate? So is it procrastinate or concentrate? Concentrate meaning it must be done and only I can do it and you do it right then as soon as possible, right?

So most people end right here. I like to take the things that come out of the bottom of the Focus Funnel and I like to put them onto the Eisenhower Matrix. And we've talked about this many times before. There's the four categories. There's urgent and important, there's urgent but not important, there's important but not urgent, and then there's neither important nor urgent.

Now, if it's neither important nor urgent, that means if you're using this Priority Method that I use combining the Focus Funnel and the Eisenhower Matrix, if once you get through everything on the Focus Funnel and then you look at what's left and you ruthlessly categorize what's left, if anything ends up in the not urgent or important category, that means you missed something in the eliminate phase, right? So you need to go back and go, hey, this actually just needs to be eliminated because it's not urgent and it's not important. It's not going to move the needle forward. And yeah, I thought it was. And yeah, I thought I had to do it. And I thought we couldn't automate it. But you know what? At the end of the day, like it just doesn't need to get done.

The Eisenhower Matrix in this case, whether you use it at the beginning, like before you use the Focus Funnel or after you use the Focus Funnel, it doesn't matter either way. These are both running double filters. And the reason we double filter this whole process is because we as humans need that second act of accountability and creatives love to hang on to things. And we have this huge amount of pride that we accomplished it. Like I said, that we're the heroes.

But we have this double filter system where it's hey, we're gonna use the Eisenhower Matrix first and then we're gonna put it through the Focus Funnel. I particularly like to go through the Focus Funnel first because I feel like it's a little easier to kind of quickly categorize things as gravity takes it from the top to the bottom. And then when we get to the bottom then we can look and say is it urgent, is it important, is it urgent and important or is it neither urgent nor important?

So we've gotten to the bottom of the Focus Funnel now. We're looking at the Eisenhower Matrix and we say you know what, everything that came out of the bottom of the Focus Funnel is gonna go into one of these four boxes. Again, if you're watching on YouTube, you see it on your screen now. One of these four boxes, all right?

So if it ends up being, like most things that come out of that list, you're gonna think that it's probably urgent and important or one of the other. This is—you have to get really ruthless. Which one of these things deserves the top 20% or less of the echelon of all the things that are on your plate? Urgent meaning like this has to get done as soon as possible or else, right? And be realistic about the or else. Don't imagine the or else. Be very realistic about the or else. And then important—is this really going to move the needle, right? So timing and weight. Is it important? Is the weight of it? Is it urgent? That's the timing of it.

So if it meets both of those categories, then it goes into your urgent and important category. And now you don't have to choose between now and later. You know that those are the things that you have to do today or this week.

Now, if it ends up just in the urgent category, but not in the important category, this is where I advise you and my clients to go back through and go, okay, but maybe we missed something here. If it's urgent, but not super important, to me, that means it probably could get delegated, right? And we missed that when we went through the Focus Funnel in the first pass of this Priority Method.

So if it's just urgent, but not important, then I think that's something that we could delegate. Same thing as if it's important but not urgent. I would say this category, if it's important, not urgent, would be something that you have—actually, you know what? I have time to build a system or to figure out a way to automate this because it is important. It does need to get done. It doesn't need to get done right now. But what I can do right now is delegate creating the system to automate the thing later. Right? Like you see how all the parts start to work together.

So those are what fall into the urgent category. Urgent means you should probably just delegate it. Right. If it's not of super importance, but it does kind of need to happen soon, I would say delegate that. If it's in the important category, but not urgent, then I would say, yeah, you could probably delegate it. But more importantly, what I would look at is can you automate it? Can you automate it? And then lastly, obviously, if it's neither important nor urgent, like I said earlier, that just means that we missed it at the top of the funnel and it needs to be totally eliminated.

So what do we do with all this information? Let me just kind of walk you through everything one last time. So number one, you're going to mind dump everything. You're going to get every task out of your head and onto paper or some kind of digital capture.

Secondly, you're going to run it through the Focus Funnel. You're going to ask all these questions in order. Can it be eliminated, automated or delegated? And you're going to take everything that came out of the bottom of the Focus Funnel and you're going to chart it out on the Eisenhower Matrix.

Now I know this seems like it's taking a ton of time, but really once you get in the flow of doing this, it should take less than 10 minutes, right? We're running through the Focus Funnel. We're asking can it be eliminated, automated, delegated. If it comes out the bottom of it, then that means you feel like in that moment that it should be used. And now we're going to take that batch of things. We're going to plop it onto the paper. I love, honestly, I love to print out the Eisenhower Matrix because I can see it and I can start to kind of hand write the things in on all four of the quadrants.

We're going to go through the Eisenhower Matrix. We're going to run things back through the Focus Funnel if we really need to. But at the end of that 10 minutes or less, you're going to be able to understand where you need to protect your creative energy, which is the next part of our what now—protect your creative energy, meaning you can schedule the high impact creative work during your peak hours. We've talked about this many times on the show before, so I won't go back into it now, maybe for another, we'll revisit it in a future episode.

But then you're gonna review and adjust. At the end of the week, see what worked, see what didn't. See what things you're like, you know what, I thought I needed to be the one to do it, but actually we could delegate it. Or you know what, I thought this was urgent and important. It turns out it was only urgent, not super important. And so we learn from that every single week, every single day, every single time you go through this Priority Method, you learn more and more about it.

So I have this Priority Method for you on the website. If you go to dustinpead.com/free, you can download this Priority Method framework from me. You can also grab the Time and Energy Audit, which is from Dan Martell. I just created a little bit better spreadsheet to use it. Also, my DO versus DUE framework is on there as well. It stops allowing the fake urgency to drive your schedule. So you can get all of those at dustinpead.com/free.

Listen, your creativity is your most valuable asset along with your time, right? So stop treating those things like they're unlimited and start protecting it like the finite resource it really is. The Priority Framework isn't about doing more. It's about doing what matters most and giving your best creative energy to the work that actually moves your business forward.

Remember, a shorter intentional list that you actually complete beats a long list that overwhelms you every single time.

If you want to dive deeper into the systems that protect your creative energy, go to dustinpead.com and connect with me there on the connect page or the contact page. You can also find me on social media at Dustin Pead. Your future creative self, well, thank you for reaching out. Trust us. We'd love to work with you.

Next week, we're going to dive into why your best ideas disappear and how to capture them. And I can't wait to share that with you on next week's episode of Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.

Ep 127: Take The Leap

Why Now Is Always The Right Time For Creative Growth

SUMMARY

Sometimes the most profound truths come from the simplest statements. Last night, I heard something that stopped me in my tracks and challenged everything I thought I knew about timing in creative business. Author John T. Edge shared a truth that every creative professional needs to hear: "Every time I took a chance, a leap that scared me in my career, it was always the right thing to do."

This statement hit me like a lightning bolt because it perfectly captures what I see holding back so many talented creatives and agencies every single day.

The "Perfect Timing" Myth That's Killing Your Growth

Here's what I hear constantly from creative professionals: "I just need to get a few things in line first." Sound familiar? Whether it's waiting for more sales, recovering from team expansion, or organizing existing processes, there's always something that needs to happen "first" before taking the leap into better systems, new opportunities, or necessary changes.

But here's the reality check: if you're waiting for everything to be perfect, you'll be waiting forever.

When my wife and I found out we were having our first child almost 15 years ago, I didn't feel ready. Honestly? I still don't feel ready. I still feel like a kid myself trying to figure out what to do with my life. But waiting for perfect readiness would have meant missing out on one of life's greatest adventures.

Why Fear Is Your Creativity's Biggest Enemy

Fear will crush creativity and destroy businesses faster than any other force you'll face. It's not the market conditions, the competition, or even lack of resources—it's the fear that keeps you paralyzed in your current situation instead of moving toward growth.

I experienced this firsthand when I changed careers in 2023 to start Chief Creative Consultants. I had no idea what I was doing, no guarantee anyone would see value in what I offered, and no clear path to paying the bills. It was terrifying. But looking back, I wish I had taken that leap sooner.

The Backwards Thinking That Keeps You Stuck

Here's where I see creative businesses getting it completely backwards: they think they need to have all their systems perfect before they can handle growth. They say things like, "We need more sales first, then we'll work on our processes."

This is like saying you need to be stronger before you start exercising. Your systems ARE what enable you to handle growth efficiently. Without them, more sales just means more chaos—more of the same problems you're already dealing with, just amplified.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Fear-based timing is never perfect timing - If you're waiting for all conditions to be ideal before making necessary changes, you're letting fear make your decisions instead of wisdom.

• ⚡️ Systems enable growth, not the other way around - Don't wait until you have more clients to implement better processes. Implement better processes so you can effectively serve more clients.

• ⚡️ The leap you're avoiding is probably the one you need to take - That scary decision you keep postponing? It's likely the exact step that will unlock your next level of creative and business success.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Fear will crush creativity and crush businesses and crush families more than any other thing that will come up against you."

• 💬 "Now is the only time. We are not guaranteed tomorrow. Yes, be wise about what you do today, but make the most of the day."

• 💬 "The world needs what you have to create. And we all want to benefit and enjoy what you have to create as well."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ House of Smoke, John T Edge

• ⚡️ dustinpead.com/contact

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

You know what I've learned after years of helping creatives build better systems? The one area even the most organized creatives still wing it? Their money. And I get it. You don't start your business to become an accountant or a bookkeeper, right? You started it to create amazing work. But here's the reality. Financial chaos will kill your creativity faster than any other kind of overwhelm. And that's why I love what the core group does.

They're not your typical accountants. They only work with creatives like us and they understand that you need systems that work with your brain, not against it. Their profit first approach flips everything you think you know about business finances. Instead of paying everyone else first and hoping that there's something left for you, you pay yourself first and build your business around that. They've got three service levels depending on where you're at in your journey from basic tax support, all the way up to full CFO partnership, which is what I use and it's amazing. Stop letting money stress, steal your creative energy. Check out coregroupus.com and finally get the financial systems your creative business deserves.

Last night I heard something that stopped me in my tracks and I knew I had to share it with you today. Sometimes the most profound truths come from the simplest statements and this one's going to challenge everything you think you know about timing in your creative business. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Well, everybody, welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is a podcast for all creatives who are struggling to actually get the work done that they want to get done. My name is Dustin Pead. I'm a creative coach and consultant, and I help creatives know themselves, their process and their team so that they can create with efficiency together.

This episode today is going to be a little bit different. I know last week, if you're a listener of the podcast I talked about what today's episode was going to be about and we are going to do that. That's going to be probably next week or maybe even the week after. But I really just felt like I wanted to kind of share a little bit of raw process out loud with y'all. If you know me, I'm an Enneagram Four and sometimes I just need to do that. In fact, there's a lot of things going on in my life right now that I would love to be able to share with you. But there's one in particular that I really want to share with you last night.

I went to the Atlanta History Museum to see one of my favorite authors, John T. Edge, talk about his new book right here. His new book is called House of Smoke. It's a memoir. It's a southerner goes searching for home. John T Edge is the co-producer and host of a show on the SEC network, which is owned by ESPN. The show is called True South and it's a beautifully cinematic and well-crafted storytelling 30 minute per episode type of show.

He does focus a lot on food because he's been a food writer in the past and still is a food writer. But just beautiful, beautifully told stories. And so if you want looking for something to be inspired, go look at True South. Look that up on whatever cable network or cable provider you have. There may be some stuff on YouTube as well, but True South is amazing. So he was there last night at the Atlanta History Museum talking about this book. Francis Lamb was actually interviewing him, who's a James Beard award winning food author as well.

And during the night he said so John said so many profound things last night, but there's one that he said in particular that I wanted to share with you today because it's what I really wanted to get into with today's episode. He said this he says every time I took a chance, a leap that scared me in his career, it was always the right thing to do.

When he took a leap, he took a chance, even if it scared him, it was always the right thing to do. Now I'm not saying do something every day that scares you. Maybe that's a great motivational poster. But my immediate reaction was, yeah, if I look back to anything in my life, when I moved away from the home that I grew up, born and raised in, to go, you know, several hundred miles away to pursue a career that I felt so passionate about and just kind of leaving behind everything that I knew and having to make friends all over again and set up community and things like that. That was super scary in the leap, but that leap set a trajectory for my entire life and career.

And then if I fast forward to 2023, when I changed careers and I started this business, Chief Creative Consultants, it was a giant leap. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no idea how we were going to pay the bills. I had no idea if anyone would even see value in this. And now we're a thriving business and we're bringing on team members. And it's just incredible to see, frankly, how God has pulled all this together. And so I wanted to just kind of share with you about like, I think sometimes we just wait for everything to be perfect timing. There's a lot of creatives and creative agencies that I speak with and their number one kind of response to me when I start sharing here's what we do at Chief Creative Consultants and here's how we help is I just got to get a few things in line first. I just got to get a few things in line first. We just got to have more sales. I've just got to rebound from bringing on these team members. I just have to, I have to, I have to first.

It reminds me of when I found out that we were gonna have our first child. And in that moment, I didn't feel ready. And I'll be honest with you, going on almost 15 years later since we had our first child, I still don't feel ready. I still would go, wait, we gotta get some things right first before we can have a kid. Like we still have stuff to figure out. We're still kids ourselves. I was just sharing with a friend recently about how mentally I still feel like I'm fresh out of high school trying to figure out what to do with my life in a lot of ways. But this idea of just taking a risk and understanding that the fear that is in front of you is stopping the progression of the life that you could have. And I don't think it's any different when it comes to our creative businesses and agencies or even the solo thing that you're doing.

I think what might be holding you back right now is that you're scared to take a leap and fear friends will crush creativity and crush businesses and crush families more than any other thing that will come up against you. And so I just wanted to share with you in a few minutes today that we're not saying to be reckless, right? We're not saying to make unwise decisions, but when you wait...

I was just having this conversation with my aunt who lives back in Virginia. And we were catching up on life and what she's got going on and what I have going on and how our family's doing and her family's doing. And what I realized is that, and I tell people all the time, when I stepped out and changed careers in 2023, like I wish I had, I tell people all the time, man, I wish I would done it sooner. Now I will say, in the consulting world, like it's hard to be able to say let me consult you on something if you don't have experience and so I firmly believe that God was building up my experience over the 20 years of ministry before he had me do this thing that we're doing now. And I was scared to death and I wish I'd had done it sooner.

I just want to encourage you friends, creatives. Whether it's a business decision you need to make or it's a creative direction that you need to take or it's a new skill that you need to learn that you're afraid to learn or it's a conversation that you need to have that you don't want to have. I promise you that having that conversation, doing the hard thing, taking the leap will pay off in the long run. I do think in the immediate as well, you're going to feel some immediate relief, right? It's like the hard conversation that you keep avoiding when you are finally able to have that conversation. It may not be immediately resolved, but you feel better for getting it out. I talking to one of my clients just yesterday and he was having some frustrations and he was sharing with me and I said, is there anything I can do? And he said, honestly, it just feels good to get it out.

And that might be the first step is to just say out loud what it is that you're afraid of, that you need to do now than later. And so I'm not saying creative processes and systems are the answer for you right now. But if you're sitting there wondering, and this is not a sales pitch by any means, this is genuine me coming to you and saying, I care about what you're creating in this world and the world needs what you have to create. And I would love for you to stop making excuses about why now isn't the right time. Now is the only time. We are not guaranteed tomorrow. And yes, be wise about what you do today, but make the most of the day. And sometimes, making most of the day means I need to take this leap.

And so my challenge to you listeners today is what leap are you avoiding? What leap do you feel like you need to take right now that it's super scary, but you can't seem to shake that that's what that's the leap you need to make? Is it bringing help in to help tighten up your systems before you have the sales. I struggle with people that say they have to have all the things together before they work on the systems because I'm like, your systems, they have it backwards, right? Your systems are the things that help you do the things that you need to do. Hey, I need more sales. Well, what's gonna happen when you get more sales? It's just gonna be more chaos than it is right now. It's not gonna be any different. It's just gonna be a lot more of it.

Which you might be I would welcome a lot more of it, yeah financially you probably would but mentally and physically and emotionally you probably wouldn't. And so maybe this is a little bit of a sales pitch. Maybe it's not. I don't know. I just felt like when I heard that quote last night for John T, I thought that is a message for creatives. And that is a message that I want to share on this podcast. And most weeks I have a pretty tight kind of not really a script, but have a pretty tight kind of outline of like, here's what I want to walk you through today.

I know we went raw a couple of weeks ago with the episode in which I had PJ on and we were walking through some clunky processes. But I really just want this podcast at the end of the day to be helpful. I want it to be encouraging. And if it's helpful or encouraging for you, then I'm going to keep doing it I'm to keep pressing on. And I'm so very thankful for people like the core group who have come alongside and say, I see what you're doing. I believe in what you're doing. And we're going to sponsor your podcast. So when you hear the ads at the beginning of this podcast, just know that these are people that believe in you as creatives enough to be able to support businesses like mine because businesses like mine are here for you. We're here for your creativity, for your art to be released into the world in a big way that is hard to do alone.

And none of us at the end of the day, I think really want to be alone. There might be some introverts that go, no, no, no, I really love being alone. But when it when it all shakes out, like we want someone to walk through this thing with us. And I'm recording some client testimonials now, and I'm sure you'll see those on different things over the over the coming months as we start to drip those out. But I really just want to walk alongside you. So if you're a creative business, an agency, an agency owner who's listening to this right now. I just want to walk alongside you so that what you have in your heart to create, we can create it and we can create it with more efficiency and we can create it in a way that doesn't burn you out and doesn't leave you stressed out at 11 p.m. at night trying to figure out how you're going to finish projects. I want to help you finish what you started.

Let me help you. But most of all, just take the leap. If it's with me, if it's with someone else, if it's any other endeavor at all, whatever is stopping you right now, now is the time to take the leap. So I know it's super clunky and a little bit kind of all over the place, but I just wanted to when I heard it last night and I'm listening to John T. who is such an incredible storyteller, such a poet with his words. I just thought I need to share this and I had it on my calendar to record another podcast episode for you today and I thought today's the day.

So I wanted to share with you this idea of taking the leap. So I'm committed to taking the fearful leaps, right? And I encourage you creatives, I encourage you artists to do the same. Take the leap. Whatever is in front of you that you're scared to jump into with wisdom. But take the leap. Take the leap. The world needs what you have to offer. And we all want to see what you have to create. And we all want to benefit and enjoy what you have to create as well. In the words of my good friend and client, Darren Cooper, go out and create your art. Take the leap.

I don't know what next week's episode is going to be. Maybe it'll be more like this one. Honestly, I'd love to hear your feedback. If you made it to the end of this episode, just let me know. You sometimes I create these podcasts and I send them out there and I'll get a little thing kind of six weeks down the road. Oh, hey, that podcast episode, you know, but if this kind of raw conversation is helpful or encouraging to you, let me know. We're definitely going to get back into the practical takeaway elements of how to use, you know, processes and systems and your creativity to, you know, create with efficiency. We're always going to do that. But, you know, I've done some things like the front porch conversation and things like things like that. I just be curious to know, is this type of format for the podcast? Is this something that you like?

Is it annoying? Is it too clunky or is it helpful? And I hope it's I hope it's a genuine reflection of my heart and what I'm trying to build this business on as we grow together, as we all grow together. I'm growing and I want to help you grow, too. So, yeah, that's it for this week. I would love for you to tune in next week to the podcast. We're going to drop these every single Thursday. Again, thank you to the core group for sponsoring this episode. So very thankful for them and I'm thankful for you listeners and watchers and I would love to hear your feedback. Drop me a line. You can go to dustinpead.com and contact me there. You can go to Instagram. I think maybe LinkedIn handle is the same, but it's at dustinpead. P E A D. You can reach out to me. D P at dustinpead.com is my straight email. I would love to hear from you as well, but until next time, get out there, take the leap and create your art today. Talk to you next week.

Ep 126: There’s A Process For That

13 Essential Systems Every Creative Business Needs

SUMMARY

Most creative professionals are drowning in chaos because they're trying to wing it in areas where successful agencies have bulletproof systems. The difference between agencies that scale smoothly and those that burn out their founders isn't creativity—it's having documented, repeatable processes for everything they do on a regular basis.

You don't have a talent problem or a creativity problem. You have a process problem.

Why Creative Businesses Need Systems

According to Harvard Business Review, companies with well-documented processes are 67% more likely to successfully scale their business. The creative industry is not exempt from this—it's just been slower to adopt it because we feel like systems constrain us. But they don't. They free us to have more time and mental energy to be more creative.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Start with your biggest pain point: Where do you find yourself repeatedly answering the same questions or fixing the same problems? That's your first process to document.

• ⚡️ Use the "next person test": Could someone else follow your documented process and get the same result? If not, it needs more detail.

• ⚡️ Build in small batches: Don't try to systemize everything at once. Pick one or two areas and build, test, refine, then move to the next.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "The difference between agencies that scale smoothly and those that burn out their founders isn't creativity. It's having documented repeatable processes for everything they do on a regular basis."

• 💬 "Systems don't constrain creativity—they free us to have more time and mental energy to be more creative."

• 💬 "When you and your team know exactly how to onboard a client, manage revisions and deliver projects, then you can focus your mental energy on doing great creative work instead of figuring out logistics."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ dustinpead.com/free

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Hey creatives, you know how I'm always talking about creative systems that work? Well, that actually includes your money too. If you're still shoving receipts in a shoe box and hoping for the best come tax time, we need to talk about The Core Group. They're profit-first certified accountants who actually understand the creative hustle. No judgment, just clarity. They help you build financial systems that create margin in your business instead of stress. And this is coming from me—I'm a loyal Core Group subscriber. So check them out at coregroupus.com. That's C-O-R-E G-R-O-U-P-U-S dot com. Check out The Core Group today.

Most creative professionals are drowning in chaos because they're trying to wing it in areas where successful agencies have bulletproof systems. Today, we're exploring the specific processes that separate thriving creative businesses from those that are constantly fighting fires. And I'll show you exactly where to start building your own. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business without sacrificing their sanity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, and I help creative professionals know themselves, their processes and their team so that they can move from chaos to clarity. Whether you're a freelancer, agency owner or leading a creative team, this show is about building systems that free your creativity instead of constraining them. So let's dive in.

I've had countless discovery calls with talented creative professionals over the years, and there's a pattern that I see again and again. They are incredibly gifted people who can create amazing work, but every day feels like they're having to reinvent the wheel. Client onboarding is different every time, project kickoffs are chaotic, and their teams are constantly asking, "What's the process for this?" And their response is usually some version of, "Just figure it out, I guess."

Here's what I've learned: The difference between agencies that scale smoothly and those that burn out their founders isn't creativity. It's having documented repeatable processes for everything they do on a regular basis. You don't have a talent problem or creativity problem. You have a process problem.

Today I want to walk through several key areas where every creative business needs processes and I'll give you some starting points for each one. So let's dive in.

Let's start from the very top of onboarding a client. A client onboarding process is super important because first impressions set the tone for everything. Your process should feel personal but be completely systematized because you want it to be able to fire off without using your brain energy just for client onboarding. From contract signing all the way to the project kickoff needs to be a documented process that you use every single time.

Next one: a project briefing and kickoff process. This is where scope creep gets prevented or invited in. Clear expectations, roles, deliverables defined up front. You can use the DO versus DUE framework. When you brief properly, you can set realistic DO dates before the client's DUE dates. This is an opportunity to lay out all the logistics and having a process for this is super important. My clients and I recently have been using an AI process for project briefing that I would love to share with you if you hop on a call with me.

Next one: a client journey process or a client journey defined. A lot of creatives lose their clients at about the 80% mark. They're really good at starting and they get a lot of really good energy all the way through until about the 80% mark of the project or the life of the client. Then it starts to fall off really quickly—their energy and their deliverables. Understanding each next step in your client journey, knowing where it's going next is going to be super important. Every touchpoint to take them from just a one-time client to a loyal advocate.

You're going to identify where clients typically get confused or frustrated or have the most questions. Those are opportunities for you to checkpoint in with them every step of the way. So build the processes to address those friction points.

Part of that client journey is client onboarding like we talked about, but the other part of the client journey is offboarding. Are we asking for feedback? Are we asking for a referral? What is it that we're asking of the client at the end of our journey together? A lot of you hope that there is no offboarding process because you don't want to be offboarded. But having a really solid offboarding process increases the likelihood that that client returns and that that client refers you to other potential clients as well. How you end matters just as much as how you begin. File handovers, final invoicing, relationship maintenance, getting feedback, referral processes—all that stuff. Setting up the potential for more business from that client is super important. That's why you need a client offboarding process.

The 4D creative process is a big one too. Now you don't have to use these 4Ds, but somewhere along the journey of how you actually create needs to involve these four. I'm not going to go super deep into it because I've done several episodes and blog posts about it before. But the 4D creative process is basically saying every creative process needs to have a moment that you define the problem, that you dream about solutions, that you design those potential solutions, and then you develop the actual solution to your problem. Every creative process needs to have those four parts, whether you name them something differently or not.

It gives structure to the inherently massive creative journey. When you're like, "I got all these ideas and I don't know where to go next," that means you're in the dream phase. The next thing you need to do is to design. You're like, "I've got the design and just don't know what to do next." What you need to do next is actually put in the work. And this is where the grunt work comes in. That's the development part. Each phase has specific deliverables internally for your team and approval points along the way. Having that defined process will keep you moving from start to finish.

Next thing you need is not only a content creation process, but a review process. All of us as creatives, we're creating some kind of content. We're creating audio content, video content, visual design content, whether it be for us internally, for our business, and most importantly, for our clients. But who creates what and when do they create it and how do they create it? And what are the review cycles to get clear feedback? What are your protocols centered around? "Hey, this is going to be our first draft, then we're going to review it." What does that review look like? How long does it take? Who's involved in it before a first draft ever reaches the client?

So content creation process, but more importantly, a content review process. The next one is a part of that as well for feedback and revisions. Think about Pixar and how they would get together and they would poke holes and ask questions throughout their process of writing a story. They call it their brain trust meetings. So how feedback gets collected, how it gets consolidated and how it gets implemented are super important things to have consistency throughout.

If you have a team under you, even if they're just contractors, if you don't have a system for this, you're going to burn them out because they're going to get super frustrated that it's different every single time and they can't anticipate your needs. Every creative wants to be able to anticipate the needs of who they're working for, whether it be their boss or their client. This prevents the whole "death by a thousand cuts" revision cycle where we're just constantly, constantly editing. We don't know when to finish painting. This feedback and revision process will help you understand—you, your team, your clients—it'll help everyone understand fully when is this process done. Paint "done" for your projects and how you get to done matters most.

Let's talk creative asset management. This is file structure. It could be digital assets, it could be physical assets, but having a straight file structure with the way that you name your things, you name your files, your naming conventions that everyone follows will make it easier for you to find the file that you're looking for when you're looking for it. It'll make it easier for you to upload to the correct place, make it easier for you to find where to download. Having version control and backup systems are super important. So what does that look like for you?

You may be thinking, "Well, I just kind of throw it up there and hope that I remember the way that I named it or hope that I can find it when I need to." You're wasting brain energy when you're doing that. Whether it be a digital asset like file types and things like that, or it be physical assets—maybe you're a video agency and you have all sorts of equipment that comes in and out of your office or your basement or your garage or your studio space constantly—having some type of inventory of how those things are going in and out. Who has them? When does the proper maintenance need to be done on those things so they don't break down on you in the middle of a shoot? Do we have SD cards on this shoot or do we not? Little things like that go a long way. So having a creative asset management system in place is huge.

Next is team and I would also add client communication protocols. When are we using email versus text versus Slack versus a project management tool? How are we communicating? What are our meeting cadences and how do we actually set an agenda for that? We don't have to have this full-on documented agenda for every meeting, but there needs to at least be three or four bullet points sent in a Slack message where people know they can go and go, "Ah, this is what I know we're going to be talking about." You can add it even to the calendar notes section of that meeting.

When do we email a client or when do we email internally? When do we use Slack? When do we use text messages? For example, I always tell my team we use Slack for business and we use text messages for personal things. So if I text you a business-related question, you are more than welcome to haze me for sending you that and remind me to send the message on Slack and not on text because it's work-related. But if someone sends a message in Asana or Monday or whatever tool you might be using, how do you know to check there? Understanding when and where and how to check those communication pieces is going to be vital not only for your team, but for your client as well.

Next up, let's talk about project management. This is where I see creatives get the most stuck. They get super excited about the project. They dive headfirst in. They get all the way through probably the first three phases of define, dream and design. And now it's time to develop. And we don't know what's supposed to be what. We don't know where things are happening, when things are actually supposed to be DUE versus DO. So you need a consistent approach regardless of the project size.

Some people are like, "Oh, this is just a quick little thing." You need to have a consistent approach because if you start scaling back off that approach, you lose consistency. You lose consistency, you begin to lose excellence. You lose excellence, you start to lose clients, which means you start to lose money. So we all want to get better at our project management process. Status updates, milestone tracking, resource allocation, the integration between tools and team workflows—all super important things to remember.

Next up, since we're talking about our teams here as well, how about performance review process? How often are you regularly getting with your team or if you just have contractors or even volunteers? How often are you getting with them regularly to give feedback cycles, not just to give them feedback, but to get feedback from them as well? We're not talking about just annual reviews here. If the only time you have a one-on-one with someone that you lead, whether it be a paid team member, a paid contractor, or a volunteer, if you're only doing that annually, you're missing out. You're missing consistency. You're missing the opportunity to be able to grow throughout the year instead of just every January.

Clear expectations should be a part of it. And what are the growth pathways for both sides? How can we grow as a business? How can you grow as a part of this team? Documenting that protects both you and the team so that if things work out, you can celebrate it. And if things don't work out, you can point back to it and say, "See, we talked about this. This is why we have to move on to another situation."

Speaking about our talent and people that we work with, how do you acquire talent? How do you hire? How do you bring on new contractors? How do you decide who to work with and who you don't? There needs to be a systematic approach to finding and not just finding, but also integrating great people. Do you have an onboarding process for a team or for a contractor?

You've sent messages out there: "Hey, we're looking for an editor. We need a junior copywriter. We need a production assistant." Whatever the case is, you put it out there. But how do you know that you're onboarding them and you're setting them up for success? Because those first 90 days for any position—volunteer, paid contractor, doesn't matter—are super important. So what's the process for onboarding them, setting them up for success? Because when you set them up for success, you set your business up for success as well.

I would highly encourage you if you're like, "Well, I don't have a ton of money to do that," look for apprenticeship programs in your area for you to be able to help develop talent, but also get some really affordable labor as a part of that as well. It's a win for everybody. They're getting experience. You're getting the help that you need at a fraction of the cost.

Let's talk invoice and payment collection. This is definitely more of a financial process and I'm more in the operations. But if we don't have a process for this, then how do you know you're gonna get paid on time? We all get to the end of the month and there's a reward. We all get to the end of the money and there's more month left.

Creating some automated systems are really huge. How you can automatically send out the invoicing and payment collection would be a great thing. I know many people are already using that, but just make sure that they're consistent and that they're being updated regularly as much as possible. Clear payment terms. Make sure you have your sequences to have follow-up processes. How long are you going to give them to pay? Are you going to charge late fees or not? All of that needs to be up front, because if you talk about it up front and you set those processes in place for invoice and payment collection, then you can avoid all those awkward money conversations with clients in the future.

You also need to have systems in place for your marketing strategy and lead generation. Now, I'm not the expert when it comes to these systems, but you do need to have a systematic approach and you need to build the process and then trust the process for every single one of these things. So content creation, relationship building, networking, referral systems—all of that will help you get predictable pipeline instead of the feast or famine cycles that you may be stuck in. We can help build those systems for you alongside some really good sales coaching and we can make sure we set that up for you.

Speaking of sales, another one that I make sure that all my clients have in place is some type of offer development or package offerings. You need to be able to clearly say, "This is our standardized service offerings that are not only profitable, but scalable." So when you have a discovery call with me and you ask me, "What does it look like to work with you?" then I'll tell you, "We have four service packages. There's a coaching package and then there's three different consulting packages where we help implement these processes and systems with you." Each one has a price point and it's very easy to identify throughout the way. That keeps the clear scope being defined between client and business relationship, which is going to prevent the dreaded scope creep. When you have these offers and packages easily defined, it makes it even easier to delegate and train your team members on them because they're so defined.

So that's a quick run through of a bunch of different things that I always recommend any clients that we work with—some of the processes that they need to have at their disposal. Let me just tell you this: According to the Harvard Business Review, companies with well-documented processes are 67%—that's two-thirds—more likely to successfully scale their business. The creative industry is not exempt from this. It's just been slower to adopt it because we feel like systems constrain us, but they don't. They free us to have more time and more mental energy to be more creative.

What now? I gave you a lot of different processes and systems to consider, but let me just give you a few next steps that you could take.

Number one: Start documenting what you're already doing really well. If you're like, "You know what, we have a really tight system for this and we do the same thing over and over again," start documenting that. And if you wonder why, it's so that you can develop more team members and more people easier without having to take your time to show them that process over and over and over again. You create a Loom video. You have a simple process document that you say, "Here's how we do it. Let me know if you have any questions." And that's a lot less time on you or your team to have to train that person.

Something else to consider is to identify your biggest pain point. Where do you find yourself repeatedly answering the same questions or fixing the same problems day after day, week after week? That's the first process that you need to figure out and start documenting, because these are things that always happen. If it always happens, there should be a system and there should be a process for that.

Use the next person test. Could someone else follow your documented process and get the same result? If not, it needs to be more detailed in the steps.

Another way is to build in small batches. Don't try to systemize everything at once that we talked about in this episode today. Pick one or two areas that we talked about today and start building that process. When you build it, test it and then refine it and then move on to the next one.

And lastly, get your team involved. If you have a team—again, volunteer, contractor, paid, it doesn't matter—get the team involved. The people doing the work often have the best insights into what the process should be. So be sure to include them in the development of those processes.

I want to remind you, you can get all sorts of free tools for these processes on my website, dustinpead.com/free. The DO versus DUE framework is up there. We have time and energy audit kits on there. Client onboarding, Future You framework—all these things at dustinpead.com/free.

Here's the thing about processes: They're not about constraining creativity. They're about creating space for it. When you and your team know exactly how to onboard a client, manage revisions and deliver projects, then you can start focusing your mental energy on doing great creative work instead of figuring out all these logistics.

I've seen agency owners reduce their stress levels dramatically and increase their team's productivity by more than 30% just by implementing a handful of key processes. More importantly, their clients start commenting on how smooth and professional everything feels, which means more referrals and more business.

Listen, you don't have to build everything at once. Start with one process that would make your life easier this week. Go ahead, document it, test it, refine it, and then build the next one. If you want help identifying which processes to build first or you want to see how other creative teams have systemized their operations, go to dustinpead.com and connect with me also on social media at Dustin Pead. You can book a free call with me and I can talk with you about what you're feeling right now.

Remember, there's a process for that. You just have to build it.

Next week, we'll be back tackling episode 127: "Why Your To-Do List Is Sabotaging Your Creativity." I'll show you how traditional task management fails creative professionals and introduce you once again to our favorite friend, the Focus Funnel, a framework for deciding what actually deserves your attention versus what's just noise. So if you're constantly overwhelmed by your to-do list and can't seem to make real progress on what matters most, that episode's going to be for you. It's going to change how you think about task management forever. Cannot wait to be back with you on that episode.

Y'all have an amazing week ahead. Talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy.

Ep 125: AI Assisted Weekly Preview

How AI Can Transform Your Weekly Planning Process: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Claude-Powered Productivity

SUMMARY

Planning your week shouldn't feel like another task on your endless to-do list. Yet for most creative professionals, the Sunday scramble to organize the upcoming week often creates more stress than clarity. What if there was a way to streamline this entire process while actually making it more comprehensive and insightful?

In this episode, I'm pulling back the curtain on something I rarely show publicly: my messy, evolving, but surprisingly effective AI-assisted weekly planning process. Joined by PJ Towle from 43 Creative, we walk through exactly how I use Claude AI to transform scattered calendar items and Asana tasks into a structured, actionable weekly preview.

The Current State of Creative Planning

Most creative professionals I work with fall into one of two camps: they're either drowning in multiple planning systems that don't talk to each other, or they're flying by the seat of their pants with no real system at all. Both approaches lead to the same result – feeling reactive instead of proactive, constantly fighting fires instead of making strategic progress.

The traditional approach to weekly planning often involves:

• Scattered information across multiple platforms

• Time-consuming manual compilation

• Inconsistent formatting and structure

• Missing context about travel, weather, or personal priorities

• No integration of business goals with daily tasks

Before you worry that I'm advocating for robots to take over your creative process, let me be clear: AI isn't replacing human creativity and thinking. Instead, it's handling the administrative overhead that prevents us from accessing that creativity in the first place.

The goal isn't to let AI make decisions for us, but to let it handle the compilation, formatting, and cross-referencing that normally eats up valuable mental energy. This frees us to focus on the strategic thinking and creative problem-solving that actually moves our businesses forward.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Project Knowledge is Everything: The success of AI-assisted planning depends entirely on the context you provide. Claude's project knowledge feature allows you to build a comprehensive understanding of your business, values, goals, and preferences that carry across all weekly planning sessions.

• ⚡️ Cross-Platform Integration Creates Clarity: By connecting Google Calendar, Asana tasks, weather forecasts, and business goals in one unified view, you eliminate the mental overhead of switching between systems and potentially missing important connections.

• ⚡️ Iteration Beats Perfection: The most valuable systems aren't born perfectly – they evolve through practice and honest experimentation. Don't wait until you have it all figured out to start incorporating AI tools into your workflow.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Innovation doesn't happen in isolation and the best systems aren't born perfectly. They evolve through practice, feedback and honest experimentation."

• 💬 "I fancy myself as a curator. I love to curate pieces from this thing and this thing and this thing. And then I kind of put all those curated pieces together."

• 💬 "Whatever you use though, just make sure it works for you and make sure it feels natural to you. Don't make it if there's any kind of hurdle or a new habit that you have to learn – the less of those that you can incorporate, the easier it's going to be for you to actually repeat use and success over and over again."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ Claude.ai

• ⚡️ ASANA

• ⚡️ reMarkable 2

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TRANSCRIPT

Okay, real talk. How many of you have amazing systems for your creative work, but your finances are still a hot mess? That used to be me too, until I found the Core Group. They're accountants who actually get creatives and they help you build financial systems that create breathing room instead of panic attacks. Using their profit first methodology means that you pay yourself first. Crazy, right? Go check them out at coregroupus.com.

Sometimes the most valuable content comes from showing the messy imperfect reality of how we actually work instead of the polished version we think we should present. So today I'm pulling back the curtain on my AI assisted weekly planning process with one of my clients, PJ Tao. It's clunky, it's evolving, and it's already changing how we approach productivity. Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business without sacrificing their sanity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, founder of Chief Creative Consultants, where I help creative teams move from chaos to clarity through systems that actually work. If you're new here, this show is all about practical strategies, real frameworks and honest conversations about what it takes to build a sustainable creative business. No fluff, no theory, just actionable insights that you can implement today.

Now here's the thing about today's episode. It's different from our usual format. Instead of a polished presentation of a perfectly refined system, I'm doing something I rarely do. I'm showing you something while it's still rough around the edges. I've been experimenting with AI to help streamline my weekly planning process for a while now. And honestly, it's been a game changer even in its current imperfect state. But rather than waiting until I have it all figured out, I wanted to bring you into the process now because I think there's real value in seeing how we can start integrating these tools into our workflow today with mess and all.

PJ Tao, founder of 43 Creative and one of my clients, joined me to walk through exactly how I'm currently using AI to prepare for my weekly preview sessions. You'll hear us navigate through the process in real time and you'll probably catch some of the places where I'm still trying to figure it out and I would love your feedback and insight on that. But that's exactly the point. Innovation doesn't happen in isolation and the best systems aren't born perfectly. They evolve through practice, feedback and honest experimentation.

So today you're getting a behind the scenes look at that evolution in action. Whether you're AI curious, AI skeptical or somewhere in between, I think you'll find value in seeing how these tools can enhance rather than replace the human creativity and thinking that makes our work so meaningful. All right, let's dive into this very real and very unpolished conversation about the future of creative productivity.

All right, PJ, welcome to the podcast again. Glad to have you back, bud.

You make it sound like I'm on here so often that you're back again.

No, maybe I can't. I think it's second time. I think it's your third. OK, I'll trust you. It's the second in the creativity made easy when I did have you on way back when I was doing any Graham stuff, didn't I? Did I have you over that?

Oh man, I've slept a few times and not enough since then to be able to tell you whether or not you did or not. I don't know. It doesn't matter.

Anyway, by now you all know why we're here. You saw it in the intro. We're going to walk through this really clunky process that I have for doing my weekly preview, just to give you a little backstory on the whole, what is a weekly preview thing? We'll start there. So, for a few years, I don't know, 2022 to probably 2024, I was a pretty avid user of the full focus planner and I still promote it. I still love it. I have family members and close friends and clients that use it. But it was just one more thing for me to carry around. I was already carrying around my laptop bag and everything else. And then I switched over to using a remarkable pad, which we'll talk about here in a little bit.

And so I wanted to have a way to be able to use it. But the full focus planner includes this thing at the beginning of every week. It has you walk through your week to plan out the week. Right. So like you're making the plan of what's going to happen before it actually happens so that you have a plan when you get into there. And obviously we talk a lot on this show about having a lot of margin. And so we plan in that margin as well. But yes. So it's a lot of things that we're going to walk through today and a lot of things that you're going to see on the screen as we share with you are centered around or their foundations are in Michael Hyatt's full focus planner.

So there's nothing, there's really nothing that we're doing today that is, you know, intellectual property. Proprietary or anything like that. I fancy myself as a curator. I love to curate pieces from this thing and this thing and this thing. And then I kind of put all those curated pieces together, which you could argue there's nothing new under the sun anyway, and that's how things are always done. But I digress.

So yeah, so we're going to show you all that today, but I thought we would start by introducing kind of the players, if you will, and the software and the different tools that we're going to be using. And I've got PJ here because we've been talking for a while in our coaching sessions on our weekly calls. We've been talking for a while about this weekly preview and how I do it. And we have some other friends that do something similar. And we're like, man, we just need to hop on a call and let's walk through this. So PJ is getting a two for today. He's getting to be a guest on a podcast and he's getting to see how I do this weekly preview. And he may have some insights on how I could do it better because he's super smart.

Thank you. Thank you. Let me introduce the players real quick. I mentioned at the beginning that I use a remarkable tablet now. So I use a remarkable tablet and remarkable. It's not like an iPad where it has email and text and apps and all these different things, right? Like this is designed to basically just act as a digital paper notebook. And there's multiple notebooks that can be used in it. There's all sorts of ones. I think Amazon Kindle has their own version of it. I think Google Chrome may have their own version of it. There's all sorts of different versions of it. I like the remarkable for the, I'm a clean simplistic when it comes to the technology. It's why I'm a Mac user.

And so I like the simplicity of this right here. Only integrations really is I can, I think it, can add stuff to my Google Drive or Dropbox and I can send notes via email from here, but I can't like check my email. That email can't be replied to. Like I love the restriction that it has on it because that's what it limits. Like this is the tool that I use for that. So I take notes on this all the time during coaching sessions. I will screen share with this because you can screen share digitally, you know, kind of John Madden playbook my way through it and draw things out. But yeah, this is an everyday carry for me. I use it every day. So and so what I'm going to do today is I'm going to produce this new weekly preview, which I used to do in the full focus planner. I'm going to produce it digitally and add it to my remarkable and I'll show you how we do all that.

So I'll start screen sharing and introduce the other players as well. So this is Claude. This is my good friend Claude, PJ and I both good friends with Claude. My son actually even drew a, drew like a robot like version of him the other day and named it Claude. I've found myself starting to refer to Claude with pronouns. Yeah. Like, Hey, I was talking with Claude the other day and he said that he said, and my wife always has to pause me like, wait, you're still talking about Claude AI, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. I don't actually know someone named Claude named Claude. Yeah. That's a good way. Like how many people know someone named Claude?

Right. So I think that's always a good way. Like if you're going to, if you want to humanize it and give it a human name, that's a good way to do that. I think so. Anyway, this is Claude Claude is an AI tool, much like, chat GPT or Gemini, I think is one. There's all sorts of different AI tools out there. Yeah, so and I'm sure there's I'm not I'm sure I'm not using the proper terminology for what Claude really is. But what I like about Claude is that instead of just dumping a bunch of stuff into chats and kind of using it like Google, which is kind of what I use chat GPT for now, then I can build these projects in here.

And inside of these projects, I can give it specific instructions and I can give it specific project knowledge so that it knows what to give me. And we'll walk through all that as well. The other tool that we'll talk about today or the other player in this equation that we'll talk about today as well is Asana. This is my Asana right now for today and the next seven days is kind of how we, me and PJ both have ours organized pretty much the same way.

So you've heard me talk about Asana at length on this podcast. I'm not going to go into it, but it's a project management software. This is where all of our DO and DUE dates live. So we know when we wake up and we look at the thing, it tells us, here's what we need to do today. We need to reach out. We need to call. We need to run through. We need to check. We need to write, record, write, write, write a lot of writing today.

So yeah, that's, that's Asana. We did remarkable. We did Claude. I the only other thing I'm missing is there's some Google integration in Claude that it'll pull from. I have my Google calendar synced up to this, so you'll see me say at the beginning of this prompt, hey, referencing my Google calendar. Sorry, I don't know how to get this thing to stop telling me all the way. It's Grammarly is all the ways that it wants you to write better. Grammarly is like. I love it and hate it at the same time. Grammarly is probably going to want to force itself into this conversation several times today, but it's not a part of this. Right.

So yeah, so I thought what we would do PJ is just, I would just start walking you through kind of hear the things that I've put in the instructions. Here's the things that I put in my project knowledge. Here's the things in my weekly preview. And then we'll start populating it so that we can see it in real time. So I'm actually going to do my weekly preview for next week. We're recording this on Thursday, September the fourth, and I'm going to do this for the following week in which I'm, you'll see, I'm actually going to be up with PJ and Indianapolis area. So, so we'll start with the instructions.

So if you click on here, you know, you can, these are the specific project instructions you can give it, right? So I just said, Hey, create my weekly plan for each week, pull my calendar items for the upcoming week from your Google calendar integration. And I'll provide a list of my tasks broken up by day and category. We'll talk about that more in a second. Analyze the data and create a structured weekly plan following theme days and deep work preferences as outlined in the project documentation. That's the stuff over here that we talked about. Include relevant inspirational quotes. I love this because I love to learn from the leaders and heroes of our past and present.

And so include inspirational quotes from Winston Churchill, who I love and have a giant picture of over here. You've probably seen him in past episodes. Teddy Roosevelt, other leaders on themes of life, leadership, creativity process throughout the plan, included weather forecast for each day. This is a nice little tip. That's a good idea. I took from my, took from my friend, took from my friend and colleague Blake Bayer, and then provide thought provoking questions that align with my business plan for some of today's leading voices and small business growth. So those are my instructions, that I have for it. So now we'll walk through these six things that I have in here.

They're not really in particularly order to how they have it laid out, but we'll just talk about it. So this right here, I won't click on it because it's long and boring, but this one right here is a, is a Google doc that I have of a, kind of a running document of a business plan that I have for my business. It has all the stuff in there. Like this is what I'm going after. This is my target. This is my marketing. This is all the stuff that I'm kind of thinking, planning in and around my business. Then I have my personal values.

I include these in here because I want to again, I think there's some things that I ask for, but I want it to understand like these are Dustin's core personal values and I kind of break them down. Mine are courage, authenticity, resilience, excellence, faith, understanding and leadership. It spells out the word careful or another word for intentional. So, yeah, daily values integration. Each daily plan should include a specific challenge or reflection tied to one of these values. So I tried to include that as much as possible.

Let's see what else we got. The weekly preview format. So this is the format in which I want it to give it back to me when I'm done. I have theme days. I talk about the output format. I'm not going to get too much into it here, but it's got the quotes on there. Key notifications, calendar items. There are some things on here. I wonder if it's in this one or not, PJ, but there was one I think might even have been you that told me one time about telling AI what you don't want as much as what you do want.

Right, right. Be a critical thinker. Think for yourself. Push back on me. Don't just give me positive reinforcement for the things that I'm saying and that I'm asking. Yeah. And then humanize the writing. That's the other one I use a lot. Yeah, I love it. I need to that one to mine. So this is only include tasks explicitly listed in provided task lists. No suggestion or additional tasks, because it'll see it and it'll be like, oh, I see what you're doing here and here's 18 other things you can do. No, that's interesting. Yeah.

No timing of tasks. I don't let it tell me when to do the tasks. I only want the calendar items should have time blocks on it. And then group the tasks by business, client or project. So we talk about clear headers, weather formats, quotes from Churchill, things like that. Inspirational for my goals.

Speaking of goals, the next thing I have on here are my goals, which I simplified several months ago to just two things of being physically and financially fit. So are getting healthy financially and physically healthier. So I have that in here that I have not a priority, but I'm trying to read 50 books too. And then about me is this is as you can tell is a is a AI generated thing.

I basically told Claude when I was setting up this project, Hey, interview me so that so that you can know as much as you can about me and I can attach this to all my projects. So this about me one is pretty much in every single project. It goes through my name, where I live, what time zone I'm in. I speak English only. Here's my professional background. Like here's the here's basically my tech stack that I use. Here's my project context, it goes to communication preferences, like it goes through all these different things. It was really great. So I copied it and pasted it and I use it in every single one of these.

So if you want to add project knowledge and I'll talk about this last one here too, if you want to add project knowledge, you just click on this plus sign. You can upload a PDF or something like that from your device or image or whatever you want, which I have right here. You can click add, add text context. And that's what these are right here. If you see where it says text in the bottom. Or you can link a Google Doc. And I love that, PJ, because as I update this Google Doc, it's being it updates in the project. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't have to worry about like, oh, I got to go change that project knowledge.

So these things right here, my personal values, my goals about me, the weekly. These are things that when I'm going to do it in a text, I'm going to add text context. It's going to be the stuff that's like, hey, this is probably not going to change. Like this is, know, but if it's going to change and it's going to fluctuate over time, then I will, I will put it on a Google doc and then I will add the Google doc. Right. And then this last one here, I don't know if it'll show you or not. Yeah. I just uploaded my brand promises, which for my business. it's just a little bit more business context that may or may not be included in the business plan. I couldn't remember if it's redundant, it's redundant, but I'd rather make sure it's there.

Yeah. So one thing I'm not seeing though, from your stuff is like, I don't see your due versus due. Yeah, that's interesting framework that's there. And I'm also not seeing the future you framework. So those are those are two of your resources that when I build my project, project knowledge for for 43 creative projects, I always put those two in there. Yeah. And then just even reference, you know, build things out for with Dustin's do versus do and future you context, because then it's easy to copy into Asana. Yeah.

Yeah, for sure. So if my goal is to copy into a sauna, I 100 % use that. Okay. Okay. My goal, my goal here is not to copy into a sauna. I'm taking from a sauna. Okay. Okay. I'm not putting into a sauna. So for me, my, this is going to go into my remarkable. It's basically going to be on paper, right? Like I can print these if you wanted to, if you didn't have a remarkable, you could print this out every week if you wanted to. So yeah.

Good call though. I was anything that any project that I have in here, like PJ said, if I'm putting something into Asana, like if I needed to, hey, read this project overview meeting that I had with PJ, pull out all the stuff, remember the DO and the future me and all that, I'll put that in the project knowledge 100%. But I just haven't found it. I haven't found a need for it here yet. Got it. Maybe it'll help, I don't know. But I haven't seen a need for it yet.

What I do here is then I pretty much use the same prompt every time. Right. So I say, reference my Google calendars because it has the Google calendar integration, which you can do down here in your settings. You can link it to your Google calendar. Hey, reference my Google calendars and my Asana tasks below. Now I'll pause there for a second. I copy and paste my Asana tasks. And now some of you may be going, wait, Claude has Asana integration. You're right. It does. I have yet to figure out a way for it to actually work right.

So if you have it, if you have a way for it to work right, let me know. Because when I ask it to reference it, it pulls some stuff and then it will pull things from different time periods, like things that I did months ago, or things are things that I don't need to do until like three weeks from now. I'll only get some of the stuff, I won't get all this stuff. And so there's a lot of conversations of me having back and forth with it going like, hey, you missed this, you missed this. And it's like, oh, you're right. I missed this, you know.

And this is like for me, it's a lot more, it is a little bit more tedious to do the way that I'm about to do, but it it's more accurate than what I'm finding in their son integration right now. But again, if you or anyone who's listening to this knows anything more about this, I'm all ears for the Asana integration, but I will copy and paste my tasks over and I'll show you how I do that here in a second.

Referencing the Google calendars and the assign tasks below prepare my weekly preview for, and then I put the dates in because of what I've found in AI land is they don't always understand the dates. Even this morning I was using it for something else and it goes tune in or like check back in on Tuesday. You know this and, and, was it four or five days from now on Tuesday, December the 9th. And I'm like, that's not, that's not four or five days from now. No, it's September, bro.

Is December 9th Tuesday? That's what I want to maybe. I don't even know. Probably not. So then I have to go, Hey, dummy, it's today's date is which makes Tuesday yada yada. And it's like, Oh yeah, sorry. I don't know what I was thinking there. It can be a real stoner sometimes. I've always thought about it like a toddler who's just trying to, no, I shouldn't say that I've thought about it that way. I heard somebody say AI is like a toddler always trying to please you. Yes. Yes. A hundred percent. A hundred percent.

So then I'll give it the date, take Monday, September the 8th through Friday, September 12th. Full focus preview. Again, this is dismissed. Full focus will, you know, preview the weekends as well. I rarely used the weekend ones because I associated it with work and on the weekends I was trying to disconnect from that. So again, I do my weekly preview Monday through Friday. That's my work week.

So, hey, use the weekly preview format right here. And and and steps to achieve my annual goals for the week. I don't know what in steps means. Maybe I've mistyped something. Oh, and steps and steps to achieve my annual goals for the week. Ask clarifying questions if you need to. This one's a big one. I love this one. I also have a few items on other calendars that you may not see. I should say may not not cannot. that you may not see. So be sure to ask me about those as well. Because I have, you're like me, you have a bunch of different calendars. I have my work calendar, then I have another personal calendar, then we have a family calendar. There's all these different calendars, both of my businesses, they each have their own calendar. Right. So I just want to be uber sure that it's got everything.

So I will just like with everything with AI, we will cross reference this to make sure it's accurate, which I know is a little bit of a pain right now. But it's a needed step so that we don't miss certain pieces. Now let me ask you a question right here. Why not add this prompt minus the dates to your project knowledge and just say, Hey Claude, run my weekly preview prompts. Refer, you know, refer to the weekly preview prompt for these dates. Let's give it a shot. Let's add context and we'll say weekly preview prompt. I'll slide it in right here and we'll say.

What would I say? Like I would do like prepare my weekly preview for Monday through Friday and then in brackets put insert dates or something like that. And they threw Friday. Insert dates. Like that, because then now I think you could just go. This is what I've done a few times with some client deliverable work is build the prompt there and then just say run this prompt SOP for XYZ thing. Here's the little bit of information that you need and go and then it would kick it all out. So maybe maybe we just saved you even a few more minutes. Maybe I'm into it.

So yeah, run my weekly preview for Monday, September 8 to Friday, September 12 2025. Those are the right dates, right? Yeah, that's okay. Cool. So then what I do from there, nerd moment, but if you shift, if you do a soft returns of a hard return shift, enter, you just hit enter right here, it's going to submit it. And it's going to be like, all right, you said you're going to provide me with some tasks. Where are those dummy? Now, now who's the dummy? So I shift enter there to, to go down a couple of lines there just for my mental clarity. then what I do next, PJ, is I go over here to my Asana.

And well, first I will say, Hey, let's, let's do Monday. So I'll say here's Monday. Sorry. I will all caps do Monday. And then first thing I will do is CCC tasks, which is my business chief creative consultant. And then I'll do a colon and I'll do it like this, because if I just were to copy this stuff here, It doesn't know what project it's associated with. So I'm giving it that information as well. Got it. So let's see if I look at here's Monday. So I'm going to say Monday. Those are 1898 ones. Here's some chief creative ones. So I'll go chief creatives from here to here. So I will hold down shift and I will command C copy those things, go back over here, hit paste.

Drop it down with another soft return and just check and make sure that's looks like it's everything for Monday. That's chief creative. But then I also have 1898 stuff. So then I'll say 1898 tasks. I'll switch back over here. I'll go to 1898 tasks, click on those things, copy them, go over here, paste them just like that. Pretty much all the way, all the way down. Let's see. What do I have? That's pretty much everything for Monday. So then I'll go, All caps Tuesday.

Anything you see so far that's cool. So then I'll go Tuesday. Tuesday is typically more of a culture based day for me. That's my other business. It's going to be a little light next week because I have a lot of meetings and I'm traveling. So my task list looks a little light for next week. A little lighter than normal. You might look at it be like, that's a lot of stuff, but it's actually not. Yeah. So let me get down to Tuesday. So I do have a looks like I have one cheap creative. I'll come back to that one, but here's some, culture based stuff. I don't mind adding that personal one in there. Doesn't bother me. That's Tuesday stops right there. So then I'll go back over here. I'll put that in here. Now, as I'm doing this, I'm self editing as well. Yeah. So for example, I know because I know my calendar, I know off the top of my head that next week, this coaching meeting with Caleb Wright is actually gonna be on Friday and it's gonna be on the calendar. So if it's a meeting, I typically, I like to have my meetings in Asana, but I don't necessarily add them into my weekly preview because it's already gonna be on my calendar portion. So it's our, and you'll see that when we do this here. So if it's a meeting like that, I'll take that off. I'll take this one off again because it's gonna be on my calendar.

That one isn't necessarily, do remind myself to take a solo walk for 15 minutes twice a week. It's just for mental clarity and to get away from my desk and do all that stuff. I will be driving that day. So I'm probably not gonna do that. So then I'll go down here and go, okay, yeah, now we're good. Now we're looking at Wednesday. Again, I've got some culture-based stuff. So I'll go down to where the culture-based stuff ends. I'll copy and paste that.

We'll go down here to Wednesday. That's how I remember how to spell it. Yeah. Wednesday. I forgot up here to include this one on chief creative for Tuesday. So Tuesday was actually TCB task. And then if I go down to here and say CCC task is when I will be editing this episode, apparently.

So yeah, there's all that good to go. Good to go get down and make sure I covered there. All my bases for Wednesday real quick. You didn't do your culture base yet. Didn't do culture base for Wednesday. I'm sorry. I meant CCC. You did culture base. You didn't do. Yeah. Yeah. So my bad. So here's chief creative there there. And is it just two of them? Yep. Just two of them. So I'm going to over here and say CCC tasks.

You need to put that back up at the top as well for Wednesday and go TCB tasks. This is the not this is like the like the least exciting portion of this episode. If you need to watch it on double time, I trust you're doing it right. September 11th is Thursday. These are they've got one forty three thing in here, which is PJ. I know that guy. Yep. So then I'll say Thursday. Forty. It doesn't like it when I do the colon. So I'll just say 43 creative. really hurts. That really hurts my four. I know I'm with you. It hurts me too. I hate not doing it, but every time it's like 40 and then it hard returns three creative. that what it does? It takes the colon as a hard return again. It can be a real stoner sometimes. So there's that task. And then I'll say down here, I've probably got CCC tasks that I need to add as well.

That's a TCB one, so I'll come back to that. Here, here. I'll dump those there, and then I'll say TCB task. There was one there. Right there. Quality manual for one of our clients. I'll pop that in right there. So then I'll just double check and make sure I have everything. I don't have anything for Friday because again, as you saw, I try to keep my Fridays.

I don't know if we covered that or not, but in my preview stuff up here, I said, I don't like to schedule, I've been not scheduling tasks on Fridays. I use, I've been using it as my like catch all day, but I also use, typically have a ton of client meetings on Fridays as well, whether it's coaching, it's usually coaching meetings. And so one of the things my VA helped me realize is like, hey, you don't get stuff done on Fridays. And I'm like, hey, shut up. Just because you're right doesn't mean you have to say it out loud. Right, right. So I'm like, you're right. So we decided we don't put any tasks on Fridays anymore. So yeah, everything in here looks right to me. And then from here, I will go ahead and submit it, see what it does. So now you're going to have to tell me if this runs as well with us using that prompt that we put in the knowledge. Yeah, I will. I'll let you know.

I fully expect to have to give it some things. So here it says it's creating weekly preview, pull on the calendar data, and then it's going to provide some clarifying questions. So you can see what it's doing. I have put the weather forecast in for up here. You're right. Normally I would, I'm honestly, man, I'm afraid of like what it might do to this be like, wait, which is it? I'm so confused. I'm so confused, but you're right. I definitely should have done that. That's a good catch. See already it's going. See you're traveling to Andy September 9th through the 14th several important meeting schedule throughout the week. So here's some questions that it's giving me. So travel details. So when I answer questions on Claude, I love how it gives me numbers. So I will literally just number it and answer it that way. So it says travel details. I see you Mark, Dustin and Andy from September 9th to 14th. Are you staying in Indy for the entire week? Will you be commuting back and forth? This affects how I structure your task planning. Great question Claude.

We'll be driving up on Tuesday afternoon, staying the night in Nashville, Tennessee before continuing the drive on. I'll fix all these spelling things. I know it's driving you nuts on Wednesday. I hate typing in front of people. I'm not judging you and I appreciate it. Everybody else is. All right.

So additional calendars, do you have any other important meetings or commitments on a separate calendar? I should be aware of this particular week. I'm going to say no, you should be able to see most things, but we can double check at the end. Three, priority focus, given your travel schedule and the mix of discovery calls, coaching sessions and business meetings, are there any particular tasks or projects you want to prioritize this week?

I'm going to say, no, let's focus on these things because that's why I'm going. So I'm going to say, no, let's focus on those. And then for TCB tasks and several TCB tasks, particularly around the various projects, should these take priority over other tasks given the client deliverables? No, I will be with them on Thursday morning. Let's see how this goes.

So far as it's operating the same way that it did when you would put the whole prompt in. It's riveting content right now. We'll just be here watching, watching AI process. Yeah, this is great. This is a hundred percent what I do. So it'll spit out this to me. And so this is what I copy into my first page of, of my remarkable, which I'll show you how I get all this onto my tablet here in a second. But yeah, it's doing calendar, it's doing tasks. I'll show you how I change those into check marks when I put them into my remarkable.

Got my travel plans in here. That's pretty cool. Yep. I am wondering now if the weather is for it. I may even ask it like, is the weather for where I'm at? you read? Did you recognize that I'm going to be in Indianapolis? Yeah, I might even start typing that problem at that prompt in here. So is the weather forecast appropriate for the locations I will be in this week. Man, trying to spell appropriate on a podcast. So yeah, here goes. It says I created this thing for you. Travel schedule, theme days, weather, and it's everything looks super right to me right here. And I'll show you what I'm doing. I'm going to do this one thing here on this about the weather and then let it tighten that up. And then I'll show you how I get it into remarkable. Great.

See what it does. Oh yeah. I see that there. Well, you know, just do what I was told. Yeah, probably. You're absolutely right. I made an error. Yup. Look at it. Here it goes. So it's updating my way. That's a good call. I like that a lot.

Now know if you're going to get rained on or yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, don't know how to pack, but yeah, you can see it's updating the weather here. I'll be in Carrollton on Monday. It's doing the weather up here. It's getting the little things, a couple of things out of whack, but I just let it do its thing while it's doing his thing. It's got Wednesday now before, but it's, it's fixing it.

Yeah, you can got Churchill quotes in here. Yeah, I love that idea. Yeah, the quotes are fun. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Eleanor Roosevelt. Let's just sit on that for a second. Yeah, no kidding. Indy on Friday. Gonna be beautiful. 79 degrees, mostly sunny, 10 % chance of rain. I love it. So now I've got all that.

Before I take this into Remarkable, I'm going to show you one more thing that I do with Claude. And I need to get a better written prompt for this, but I usually just kind of wing it week to week. But I also add in here, create a document with my calendar schedule for the week. And this is a one way that I double check my calendar to make sure it's right for the week to provide to my family so they know what and where I'm up to.

This is again a quick way. My wife likes to me to provide this to her or not so that she can go and keep tabs on me. But it's like, Hey, now I know when I can interrupt and when it's not a good time to interrupt because I do work out of the house. Right. Yeah. So right now I'm downstairs in our basement studio space, the family's upstairs. She has this and then boom, I've also started copying the same thing and emailing it over to my VA so that she has a good notice as well. I love the little, little emoji sometimes in the first one here. It's super fun.

So here's another question. If you get that prompt worked out, can you add that to your weekly preview? Yeah. Prompt in the deliverables. And then it would kick out two or three artifacts for you at once. Yep. Probably good. Probably good. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to double check with my calendar to make sure that everything actually lines up with what we're saying now. There's some red stuff on here. I'm getting real vulnerable here. There's some red stuff on here that would be more like family oriented stuff. But essentially I'm going to go through here and go, all right, do we have podcast discovery call weekly check-in? I got a dentist appointment going on here at the same time that I have a meeting with Coop. So I've got to let him know that's not happening. And then I have a, I have back to back dentist appointments on Monday afternoon. I've got glutton for punishment.

So let's go up here and go yet podcast recording discovery call weekly checking with Lou is there. Yep. It's there. That's there two o'clock to three 30, but I think I'm actually one o'clock to three 30. So I'll have to change that. I'll say dentist appointment on Monday. I will do all this in one prompt as well. And his appointment on Monday is actually from 1 PM to 3 30 PM. And y'all can see my terrible spelling cause I'm not a great person. All right. So that has nothing to do with your character. Dustin. Discovery coffee that I'm having TCB weekly pulse and then the phone call on Tuesday. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Wednesday? Extended meetup with Darren. Yup. That all looks right. I know my, I know my calendar there. Thursday coaching call Mitch. Okay. So it's not getting some TCB stuff. This is what I was talking about earlier about it, not catching some things. So here are some TCB meetings during the week as well. Now I know some people that will provide screenshots of their calendar and put it on there. I have yet to figure out how to make that work because maybe the maybe the answer is to blow it up big on my big monitor. But I feel like it usually cuts off information that I want to know. Like it'll cut off the end of somebody's name or it'll cut off the location or things like that. But I mean, maybe I'll just try it here and say, here's the screenshot.

Of when some, culture based things are. Cause usually if it's culture based, I have TCB written on it. So then I'll go back over here to it I say, screenshot as well. I'll say, see the attached screen shot with TCB items or with TCB in the appointment title.

So then I'll add right here. I'll upload a file to my desktop and look at my, the screenshots that I have up in here. There it is right there. Boom. I'll do that. And it might say, Hey, I also picked up on some other things. That's I was kind of nervous about. Maybe I should have like unchecked those, those calendars, their calendars. Yeah. So it could only see mine. But again, we told you upfront folks, this is a raw episode. That's part of it. It's learning episode. a learning episode. I'm learning. You need to watch me learn. That's what all this is. Yeah.

Okay, so while that does its thing on adding those additional items, have you tried uploading a CSV of your exported Asana tasks? I think I did one time and it still didn't give me what I wanted, but it may be worth revisiting. Because I think when you do the CSV, doesn't it include the project as a Yeah, I know what the issue was. I was having trouble figuring out how to export only a period of time as opposed to everything as opposed to everything. So like right now when I do an export of my Asana, it exports everything, which is a long. Yeah. So I was having a hard time, which I guess you could probably go there and then go, OK, and now we're just going to edit out that thing. But I feel like by the time I do all that, I can copy and paste just as quick. Major updates, Dennis appointment, Wednesday lunch, Thursday, three back to back coaching sessions that should be Friday not Thursday.

That's what I was nervous about. Thursday is now accurately shown. Overlapping meetings. Thursday reality check. It's like, hey, the are actually on Friday, September 12th, not Thursday.

No, probably my guess is that it's probably only updating this calendar, which means I'm going to have to tell it now. Go back in and add all these correct times into my week. Oh, it looks like it might be doing that, actually. No, no, it's not. No, it is. Yeah, this is my weekly preview that's working on right now. Yeah, because there's the second artifact. Yeah, weekly preview and then now he's now fixing the family schedule. Nice. For everything for the correction, now updated both documents accurately show. Perfect. Let me just double check that Thursday morning. It still didn't catch my Thursday morning. Right here. Because you singled out TCB maybe. Oh, you're right. You're right. You're right.

So one more, please add this to my Thursday morning from 9 to 11 a.m. at Verus Engineering.

All right, well, let it do that thing. Yeah. So a little clunky here on the calendar side of things. But while it's booting up, I'll show or while it's doing that, I'll show you over here. So here's that's my text worksheet. Let me see that. To cut that out, I was gonna say and cut and edit out. Whereas what I was looking at. So remarkable has a desktop app. So I open up my remarkable desktop app.

And already PJ is like, I see how you do it. So Weekly Planner is a folder that I have. And inside of the folder, I do a new notebook for every week. You can see all my weeks in here. So then I'll go up here. I'll create a notebook and I will name it the dates. I'll say September 8th through 12th, 2025. Boom. Now I have a blank slate of a notebook of September 8th, 20th through the 12th.

So now I will go back over here. Yes, it's done doing my thing. Now I'll click on weekly preview and I'll start copying. Now I could just copy this whole thing and break it up. But again, I'll show you, like to do it on different pages. So I'm selecting that I'm copying it. I'm going over here and I'm pasting it there. Now I want to do a new page. Cause I like my weekly pre like my kind of big overarching theme for the week to be on one. Let me go big here to be on one. And then I will add pages from there. So I'm to go up here. I'm to add a page. going to go close the calendar now. I'm going to go back over here to I'm going to grab everything from Monday all the way down until until the break. I copy that. I'm to go over here and I'm going to paste that in. So there's all my stuff from there. And I will do this for every day of the week. And then I'll show you my final format and then we're done and open for any additional questions.

Pop that there. New page. Go down here and grab Wednesday. I know this is taking like 45 minutes, this typically showing me which is going to take longer. Yeah, this typically will only take me about 15 to 20 minutes. So there's Thursday. I'll go there, go here, there, and it will give me a Friday, but I don't necessarily. I mean, I guess I've got stuff for meetings there, so I can probably should take it. So there's a Friday right here. paste it right there. Now it gave me some additional stuff here with my weekly. It says weekend preparation and goal alignment. But I will take all of this stuff here. Goals, small business growth insights, things like that. I will copy all of those things and I will actually add them to my first page. So I'll go back to the first page. Come on. There it is. I go back to the first page, enter a few times.

And I'll paste those things right there. So my first page, when I open up on my actual remarkable tablet and I opened this up on my tablet, this will be my first page and I'll see everything here. My key rocks. Here's some goal stuff to remember. Here's some reading goals stuff to remember. I can get more specific if I wanted to look pack current book for travel reading. Great call. Small business growth insights for each day. I could put those on the days if I wanted to. I might even, But then I go down here. And so what I'll do is I'll do a quick formatting thing because PJ and I both are, what do you want to say challenged in this way? Um, visually stimulated visual. Yeah. Like we have to have certain hierarchies there. So you can see there's different options for me here. So I do, these types of things. If it's a header, I change it to a header. leave the title up there. Now these are actual tasks. So I'll highlight these, sorry, my peers lagging a little bit. I'll highlight these and I'll change them over to check boxes. So now that just does that straight in remarkable. Yep. I see. see. Yep. So I'll make that check box as well. I'll make this here. I'm not going to, I'm not going to do every single day, but you guys get the picture of what I'm doing here. So there's that just like that. So now

Each of my days will look like this. When I open up my remarkable, it'll look, it'll show me this weekly preview. Got all that right there. I go over here. Now I've got Monday. Here's my weather. Here's my quote from Winston Churchill. My personal value focus of the day is courage. Take one bold action today that moves your business forward, even if it feels uncomfortable. Here's my calendar for the day. It's gross. Very few tasks because it's calendar heavy. My whole week will be calendar heavy. So it'll be task light. which we talked about on my most recent blog post, calendar, calendar task optimization. So I think that's everything. A lot of things I learned here. And hopefully it wasn't too clunky for you. And hopefully there's some little bits and pieces there that you can take and make your process. But really at the end of the day, what we say always PJ is like this process is for like whatever works for you. Right? use Claude, remarkable Asana. You could use a legal pad and iPhone and chat.

I don't care what you use. Whatever you use though, like just make sure it works for you and make sure it feels natural to you. Don't make it if there's any kind of hurdle or a new habit that you have to learn the less of those that you can incorporate, the easier it's going to be for you to actually repeat use and success over and over again. Any final words of encouragement to our listeners? No, I think the big takeaway

At least on my front is the quotes. The quotes are great. No, actually it was it was a couple of the other things in the project knowledge. So I'm a I'm an I've iPhone, iPad, GoodNotes user. So I would probably do this exact same process, but then have it format for a Google Doc that then I can open into GoodNotes and then be able to check off through that rather than using the remarkable piece. But I think that the other stuff with it, though, is in that all in that project knowledge piece where I loved the about me section. That that's a great one that I'm going to add today for sure. Yeah, and then and then working out some of those. It makes you really feel seen. Yeah, right. I, I, Claude knows me. So is me. So so get off my back about Claude. You don't know me like Claude does.

Funny story, a friend of ours, their eighth grade daughter asked me to fill out some questions about video editing and marketing, like using video and marketing. And so I was like, she sent me the questions and I just straight dropped them into Claude and said, you know, everything about my business and what I do answer these questions. And I started reading them out loud to my wife and she was like, oh my gosh, that sounds exactly like you had to do some, do some proofing, do some tweaking and some editing. yeah, so I'm like, it knows me. It's great.

But I love the I love the additional pieces to that in the project knowledge. I think that those were the big takeaways for me of what'll what'll push me forward with the yeah. Yeah, project knowledge is just like any other person that you're talking to. They have to have the context of what you're talking about. You can't just walk up to somebody and go, give me this. And they go, wait, what's the context here? You know, it's the same thing like, right, you need to be able to get whether you're using chat or Claude or Jim and I or whatever you're using, like you need to be able to give it the appropriate context. And so I just, I rather have it. I like Claude because I don't have to give it that context over and over again. can kind of, it's all built in there. So chat does do that now too. You can do project builds the same very similarly to what you can do in Claude. I do find that chat is just better for research and Claude Claude creates the content, writes the content in more of an authentic voice that way. Yeah.

For sure, for sure. All right, well, we'll wrap up the episode here. Next week, we're gonna be back with another episode of Creativity Made Easy. We're gonna talk about, there's a process for that. You know how people always used to say when Apple first came out, there's an app for that? We're gonna talk about next week how there's a process for that. You got a problem? There's a process for that. And we're gonna talk all about that next week on Creativity Made Easy. You can find out more about Chief Creative Consultants at DustinPead.com. That's P-E-A-D. You can find out more about 43creative.com. Any of your marketing or branding needs, go check PJ out at 43, spell it out, 43creative.com. PJ, thanks for being here, bud. Thanks, man. Thanks for the lessons. All right, we'll see you guys next week. Have a great week.

Ep 124: From Bottleneck to Business Leader

How Creative Entrepreneurs Can Fire Themselves from Daily Operations with Madi Waggoner of Building Remote Co

SUMMARY

Are you drowning in the day-to-day operations of what was supposed to be your dream business? If you can't take a vacation, delegate meaningful work, or step away without everything falling apart, you've become the biggest obstacle to your own growth.

In this episode, I sit down with Madi Waggoner, founder of Building Remote, to explore how creative professionals can transition from being stuck in daily operations to leading with vision. Madi has helped over 50 entrepreneurs fire themselves from their businesses, and her insights will transform how you think about delegation, team building, and sustainable growth.

The Reality Check Every Creative Entrepreneur Needs

Most creative professionals start their businesses to have freedom and do what they love. But somewhere along the way, they become trapped. They're answering every email, jumping on every project, and saying "I'll handle that" to everything that comes up.

Sound familiar? You're not alone.

Madi shared a powerful observation from her work with tech startups: "When I sit in on client team meetings, I often hear the founder say, 'Oh, I'll handle that, I'll handle that, I'll handle that.' We have to change that mindset of you are not the one who is actively always taking things on."

The LIFT Framework: Your Path to Freedom

Madi's proven LIFT framework addresses four critical areas every growing business needs:

L - Leader

This isn't just about management skills—it's about fundamentally shifting your mindset from doer to delegator. The solopreneur-to-CEO shift requires changing how you think about yourself and your role in the business.

I - Infrastructure

You need systems that work without you. This includes clear mission, vision, and values that serve as decision-making tools for your team, plus the operational systems that keep everything running smoothly.

F - Fuel

This encompasses everything that drives your business forward—marketing, sales, client delivery, and the experience you create for your customers.

T - Team

Building a team that can execute your vision requires intentional hiring, onboarding, and ongoing development processes.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️Stop Being the Default Solution: Every time you say "I'll handle that," you're reinforcing your role as the bottleneck. Instead, ask "Who on my team can take this on?"

• ⚡️ Delegate with Structure: Effective delegation isn't just handing off tasks. Get buy-in, provide context, set checkpoints, and coach through the process to ensure quality results.

• ⚡️ Involve Your Team in Creating Systems: Don't write all your SOPs yourself. Record a quick Loom video explaining the process and have your team member create the written documentation. They'll be more invested in using something they helped create.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "If you want to have strong team members, you have to start the hiring process off well. Don't just say, 'Oh, I need help. I need an assistant.' You need to be more strategic in how you're actually breaking out what you need to hand off to this person."

• 💬 "When you're working in a remote environment, we have to be intentional. You can't build culture remotely the same as you can in the office—you have to be intentional about it."

• 💬 "Building a business that can run without you isn't about working less. It's about working on the right things."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️ BuildingRemote.co

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Okay, real talk. How many of you have amazing systems for your creative work, but your finances are still a hot mess, right? That used to be me too, until I found the Core Group. They're accountants who actually get creatives and they help you build financial systems that create breathing room instead of panic attacks. Using their profit first methodology means that you pay yourself first. Crazy, right? Go check them out at coregroupus.com.

Creative professionals often become the biggest obstacle to their own business growth. Trapped in daily operations when they should be leading with vision. And today we're exploring how to fire yourself from the day to day with systems expert, Madi Waggoner. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for professional creatives who want to scale their business with efficiency. I'm your host, creative process coach and consultant, Dustin Pead, and I'm here to help you go from chaos to clarity in your creative business. Whether you're a solo creative, just starting to build systems or you're leading a creative team that's ready to scale, this show will give you the frameworks, tools and strategies you need to create your best work while building a sustainable business. So let's dive in.

A few weeks ago, I had one of those networking calls that reminded me why I love what I do. I was talking with Madi Waggoner from buildingremote.co. Within a few minutes, we both realized that we were solving the same core problem from different angles. And so she helps entrepreneurs fire themselves from their daily operations so that they can focus on what they love and actually take time off. Man, it's awesome. I help creators build systems that eliminate chaos and create sustainable growth.

So the light bulb moment was this, the most creative professionals that I work with have become the bottleneck in their own business. They can't take a vacation, they can't delegate meaningful work, and they're drowning in the day-to-day operations of what was supposed to be their dream business. So if that sounds familiar, today's conversation is gonna change that. So let's get to the interview right now that I had with Madi Waggoner.

All right, Madi, welcome to the Creativity Made Easy podcast. I'm so happy to have you here.

Thanks, Dustin, for having me on. I'm so excited for our conversation today.

Yeah, as we already said in the intro, Madi owns her own business, Building Remote. And we met a couple of months ago and now have some similar circles. But Madi, why don't you start by sharing with our viewers and listeners, tell us about Building Remote and what led you to focus on helping entrepreneurs fire themselves from their daily operations.

I love it. Yeah. So I work with founders and their teams primarily, and it started out by when I worked in tech startups, I worked directly with these founders and noticed how difficult it was for them to be able to take time off. And by working with them directly, I was able to help streamline operations, including with customers and internal team members and creating things like SOPs, standard operating procedures, to help them be able to get things out of their head and pass the work off to other people so that they could actually take time off.

And the first startup I worked in, actually, I was there for a few years. And we did so well with this process that that founder was actually able to take a full month fully disconnected with maybe two check-ins during that entire time, which is kind of unheard of in tech startups, especially at that stage. And I loved getting to make that work possible. And especially as I've become a parent, and had other things happen in my personal life and seen how things have happened in my clients' personal lives. I've loved being able to give them that time back to not just spend in their business, but also on the personal parts of their lives as well.

Yeah. We talk a lot on this podcast about margin and I love that you're talking about giving them back their time. And when you do that, you work through these four pillars with your clients. Can you kind of walk us through what those four pillars are and why is that structure so important for professionals in general?

Yeah, so it's my LIFT framework, L-I-F-T. It's leader, infrastructure, fuel and team. And the leader one is first there because we have to first work on mindset and how the leader acts in terms of how they delegate, in terms of how they communicate, in terms of even how they think about themselves. Infrastructure is more about the systems, the tools, the meeting cadences, the communication that we have in place.

Fuel is actually fairly detailed in the number of pieces that it encompasses. Some of it is marketing, some of it is sales, other things around customer and client delivery and the experience that we deliver. I don't actually solve for marketing and sales, but I want to call that out when I work with clients. And I have referral partners who I can connect them to in the case that they're really glaring issues that need someone's specific help. And then the last one, T is team.

And team is all about, we have the right people in place? What's our hiring process, our off-boarding process, which most people don't think about, and how are we working together as a team? And there's a lot of other things within that as well that a lot of people honestly don't consider when they start hiring and building up the number of people that are working with them. And so covering all of these different pieces, the reason why I have it structured this way is it's LIFT. A rising tide lifts all boats in the same way we have to address all of these issues if we're going to have a successful business.

Yeah, I love it. Let's walk through a couple of those for a second. Let's focus in on leadership for a second, cause my clients and the people that I talk to in the creative industry, a lot of them are moving from what I call from maker to manager. Right. And so they're going from being the doer to the leader. So what does that look like when you're working with these leaders of organizations? How do you get them to transition to make that transition from maker to manager or from doer to leader?

Yeah, I call it the solopreneur to CEO shift. And it's really about when you're starting your business, like you said, you are the doer. You're the one who's literally doing everything. You're responding to emails. You're the one doing the work you're delivering. You're the one getting on calls. And when we start making the shift, we have to stop just jumping into everything. One of the things that I like to call out in, I'll sit in on client team meetings, for example, this is one of the core things I like to do. And when the team is talking about something, I often hear the founder say, oh, I'll handle that, I'll handle that, I'll handle that. I say, we have to change that mindset of you are not the one who is actively always taking things on. It is looking for someone on your team who can take it. So instead of saying it like that, I work with the founder and their team to help normalize the shift of the founder is not the one who should be taking everything on. Either you should be volunteering or the founder should be saying, who can take this on? And that's one of the first shifts that we have to make in how are we actively taking work off of our plates and also not adding it to our plate.

So when they're going through that transition of changing, not, you know, how can I take this on? But, but who can I not how, but who, right? When they're doing that transition, I imagine there's a lot of anxiety in them about losing a little bit of quality control. How do you help kind of guide them through that and see that differently?

Yeah, I was actually just working with a client on this recently and walking them through the process I recommend. So a lot of times when people think about delegation, it's I'm just going to write a message to someone on my team and they're going to handle it. But the problem is that they're likely going to handle it differently than you would, especially if they're new to your team. So what I recommend is that when you delegate, you start off with a very specific process.

So first of all, you try and get buy-in. Are they even interested in doing this? In some cases, if it's a growth area for them, if they haven't done this work before, if you have a conversation around, hey, I want to look for someone to take this on, I thought you'd be a great fit. But I want to understand, is this something that you even are interested in? Most of the time, they are. I rarely hear like, oh no, I don't want to touch that. But it's good for you to know upfront because if they're not interested at all, you might not get the best work out of them. So that's the first step.

And then when you're actively delegating, I actually recommend that you use a couple of different types of templates that I have. It's making sure that you share context with them around who is this for? Why are we doing this? What are the parameters that you expect for completing this work for it to be high quality? What's the timeline? And then any other context around, you know, I've had a conversation with this person, here's some more information that you should know, etc, etc, to make sure that whoever you're handing it off to has the information that you do. So have all of that organized in that way.

And then after you do that, I recommend that you have checkpoints. So the first time you hand work off to someone like this, you ask them to go do the first step. Maybe that's writing an outline. Maybe that's doing a wireframe, like if they're designing a website, for example. Anything that is the first step that you can check with them and meet with them and say, walk me through your thought process, because you want to first understand how they made their decisions to get them to where they are, and then coach them. And then if they made any kind of missteps or they're going along the wrong direction, you can then help shift them back onto the right path. And you just keep doing that through the process. And then by the time you get to the end, you're going to have a much higher quality result. And they're going to understand how you think about your process in this particular instance.

I love it. I love that you're thinking through the, we always talk to my clients about the focus funnel, right? Like, Hey, we're going to go through and we're going to automate, eliminate or delegate some things. And I think leaders need to understand that. Let's get into the infrastructure just a little bit. So we talked about, need to have this delegation system, this delegation process down pat. What are some other systems that need to be in place before a founder can successfully step back from those daily operations?

Yeah, one that is somewhat related still to leader is actually getting really clear on mission, vision and values. And I explicitly like to focus on values because it's a decision making tool. So for example, I used to work for one startup and they focused very heavily on this value of respect your audience. And it wasn't just thinking about like marketing material where you're sending it out to an audience, but it's thinking about the individual person who is going to be using or responding to whatever you send to them. And in some cases, that can be your future self. And so we want to respect who that is and make sure we're very, very clear. So it's things like that that help your team to be able to make decisions on your behalf. And you have to get that out of your head in order for that to happen.

So there are a number of different pieces that's more communication and information sharing. So SOPs can be a part of this. And one thing I recommend is that when you're starting to try and distance yourself from that day-to-day work and be able to take vacation, you want to involve your team in creating those resources. So I don't actually recommend that founders write out standard operating procedures. I recommend that they create something like a loom video or even a voice note, depending on what the task is and give that to the team member and ask them to create the written material because then you're delegating, you're moving that off from your plate so you don't have to do the work, but you're also creating buy-in for that person because it's something that they created. It's their resource.

So they're more interested in than using it and encouraging their team members to use it as well. Because what I've seen with some clients, I was consulting with someone recently on this, they were creating all the SOPs and having a hard time getting their team to use it. I said, well, they don't have to buy in. So we have to psychologically change it so that they're more interested in that.

So that's some of the informational infrastructure. Some of the other pieces that are more like team related are, are you doing team meetings? Are you doing one-on-ones with your team? Are you doing what a lot of like agile companies, like software companies use retrospectives. So that's after a task or a project or an event that you run, have questions, have a little meeting and have asked some questions that go through what went well, what didn't go well, and what should we do differently next time so that you're systematically capturing this information so that you can continue to iterate and make things better.

One-on-ones are really important because if you're not doing these one-on-one times with your team, especially if you're a remote organization, you're missing out on some really key information and connection points. And all this is really important towards this whole business of everybody rowing together in the same direction. And then some other more like tactical tool oriented systems kind of varies between different companies, but some basic ones are a project management tool. I personally really appreciate Asana as we've talked about. Others are like ClickUp. Another one that I've heard good things about is Motion, which actually puts tasks onto individuals calendars, which can be helpful. So that's one part of the infrastructure. Other communication tools like Slack. I'm a big believer in Slack. I do not like Microsoft Teams. It's not designed for strong remote communication.

And then the other thing that I won't dive too deeply into is automations and how you use your different tools to deliver information and material to clients. For example, a lot of people don't think about the experience that they're creating for their clients when they onboard them. I have signed into multiple communities and joined different programs and I'm always disappointed when they haven't put thought into that onboarding because it can make or break trust in that experience, especially if you're investing time or money into it. So all of that is infrastructure related.

Yeah, I love it. You started to dive into a little bit of the, or a lot of it honestly, of the team aspect. Let's break into the team a little bit and how do we help owners build teams? So we talk about one-on-ones are super important, right? But good leaders are good team builders naturally. They should be anyway. So what can leaders or business owners or founders do to build a team that can really execute their vision without that constant oversight, especially in a remote environment?

Yeah. So I've hired over 50 roles for clients. And what I've found when they start working with me, when they've tried hiring before, is they're not starting out on the right foot. And if you want to have strong team members, you have to start the hiring process off well. And part of that is getting extremely clear on exactly what you need. Don't just say, Oh, I need help. I need an assistant. No, you need to be more strategic in how you're actually breaking out what you need to hand off to this person.

So a quick way that for you to do this is to just sit down and brain dump essentially, what do I like doing? What do I not like doing? What do I procrastinate on is a big one. And what am I not good at? Anything that isn't in your zone of genius, you should consider handing off to this person. Now, with that being said, not everything can go on that job description because you can't ask one person to do the jobs of 10 people. So you have to be realistic about that. But all of that clarity then feeds into a job description that you post. And that job description should not just be a replica of that list, but it should actually be designed in a way to help attract the right candidates.

So for me, I want driven people when I hire. So I structure the job description in a way to be attractive to that kind of person. For me personally, I also am big on like career development. So I list that in benefits when I'm hiring for roles for me of, we will have conversations with you about your growth plan and where you want to go. I do not care if this is a contract 1099 role. I still do this. That kind of thing can help show people who I am.

And something else that I'm starting to play around with is using voice and video on job descriptions as well. Because so often job descriptions are just written, but we live in a world, especially these days, where when you're working remotely, we do a lot of that through video and voice. So if we can bring in some of that personality, do you see the difference of how much more intentional this is just even at this point? We haven't even gotten to applications yet.

And so after that is applications that help to filter out the wrong applicants and bring in the right ones and keep them going through the process. Same with interviews. And when you're going through this entire process, you have to, again, think about the candidate experience, because if they don't have a good experience, if they're strong people, they have other options. They're not going to keep bothering spending time with you or prepping for interviews.

And so going through that whole process, that will help you to bring in the right people. And then once you have them on your team, a lot of it, again, is intentionality. When you're working in a remote environment, we have to be intentional. I've heard so many arguments about, you can't build culture remotely the same as you can in the office. My argument is you can't build it lazy like you can in the office. You have to be intentional.

So when we bring on new team members, I always encourage a really strong onboarding process. So that starts off with a kickoff call with their manager. You do check-in calls during the first week. You give them action items. So it's a win for them and a win for you in the first week. And then you keep going through that process, kind of backing off a little bit as you go over the next month, two months, depending on the role. And through all of that, we are building and establishing that this is how we do things. I want your opinion. I'm going to ask you questions through these conversations around, what are you seeing that is broken or is confusing? I want to know that from the get-go. So we're building that trust.

And also through all of that, if we're doing the onboarding process intentionally and the hiring process intentionally, they will have learned already about how we operate here because we will have shared that through the process, just kind of in the different things we do, but also actively proactively sharing the mission, vision, values, the examples, loom videos that we might want them to turn into SOPs at the beginning. They get all of that from the get-go.

And it creates this really solid foundation so that as we start adding in other pieces, like doing retrospectives on a project, when you ask at that point after doing all this work, what didn't go well with this, they feel more comfortable, like they can own up to mistakes they personally made and say, I did this, this is what happened. This is how we can adjust this going forward so it's stronger. And that all of those steps help to feed into a strong team that not only allow you to delegate to them, but will be more proactive in taking things off of your plate.

Yeah, that's a great four minute clip on how to build successful teams. I love it so much. So we cross paths originally and started having conversations because we solve similar problems from different angles and different clients. Can you talk to me about how like partnerships fit into scaling businesses as businesses and founders are trying to grow their business.

Yeah. It's funny because I've worked or had conversations with a number of different consultants who are clearly very good at the work they do, but we all are going to be experts in some areas and not able to touch others and referral partnerships and partnerships in general can be so beneficial for our credibility by saying, I don't do this, but I have this partner here who you can work with who's fantastic in this area. Here, I'll make an introduction to you. That can make the other person on the other end of the call or if you're in person meeting, understand that you have things together. You are their guide. You will walk them through what needs to happen. You will connect them to the right people. And the more that you can build strong networks like that, the easier it is for you to scale because it builds trust with your clients. And then you can have these referral partnerships between yourself and other people who can send you work. And that all of that feeds into being able to scale because you can't do everything yourself, whether it's lead generation, whether it's completing work and having the right people in your network, in your team that you know and build relationships with just helps you to be able to accelerate your results that much faster.

Yeah. I've got two more questions for you. And this next one's personal. This is just for me. No one else is listening. If someone right now recognizes that they're the bottleneck in their business, who has two thumbs and is the bottleneck, right? What's the very first step they should take.

So I always say that you should first celebrate that you're self-aware enough in order to recognize that because I personally, right? Exactly. Celebrate it. I personally cannot work with founders unless they're at that point. I can try and have conversations with them, but they will not be ready to work with me until they recognize that they're part of the problem. And so once you see that, we can start addressing, where are the areas that this is breaking down? What are the small things we can start doing? And I do really start with small quick wins. Starting with team meetings, like I mentioned, that's just one shift. We bring the team in so they can call you out, especially if you've already developed some of that trust. Then it's easier for your team to be like, oh, hold on, you're not supposed to do that. Madi said so.

And I teach them how to do that. So if I start hearing you pick up, say, Oh, I'm gonna I'll take care of this. I say, Ah, we're not gonna do that. One of your team members needs to handle that. And then the other thing too, is that oftentimes, if you've developed yourself as the bottleneck, we have to start changing your team's perspective of how exactly they handle problems. So if they're used to coming to you and saying, Hey, I found this problem, what do we do? And you normally give them the answer.

One really quick, easy win to start changing this for all of you is to instead turn the question back on them and say, well, what would you do? How would you approach this? Go do a little bit of research or create an outline or whatever you want to do to address this, and then come back to me and then we can talk about it. That can throw people off guard at first, but if you just keep repeating it and you say, this is how we're trying to change things, I'm trying to enable you and I'm trying to get myself out from being a bottleneck, so this is what I'm going to start doing, it starts to change their behavior without you really having to do much except ask a question. And that can make a huge difference towards shifting that for all of you.

I love it so much. Well, where can people learn more about building remote and potentially working with you?

Yeah. So I'm active on LinkedIn. You can look for Madi Waggoner and I'll pop up and then otherwise buildingremote.co. There's no M at the end. Some people miss that. So buildingremote.co.

I love it. Madi, thanks so much for your time. I know this information is going to be invaluable to our audience and I'm gonna go back and listen to it and recommend everybody listen to this at least twice. Maybe half speak because there's a lot of really good information, but thank you so much for your time.

Thanks for having me on Dustin.

So here are a few things that you need to do to start freeing yourself up from being the bottleneck in your business. First, just like she had me do, celebrate the awareness, right? If you recognize the problem, you're already ahead of most founders.

Secondly, audit your delegation habits this week. Start paying attention to how often you say, I'll handle that in meetings or conversations. Madi's right when we do this unconsciously and every time you catch yourself volunteering to take something on pause and ask who on my team could handle this instead.

Third, implement the question flip immediately. I love this and can't wait to use it. The next time someone brings you a problem don't give them the answer ask them what would you do or how would you approach this. Yes it might feel uncomfortable at first but you're training both yourself and your team to think differently about problem solving.

Fourth, start small with your very own LIFT framework assessment. Look at Madi's four pillars, leader, infrastructure, fuel, and team. I love how simple that is. Pick one that feels like your biggest gap right now and identify just one small improvement that you can make this month. Don't try to fix everything at once.

And lastly, involve your team in creating your systems. Instead of writing all those SOPs yourself, just record a quick loom video. We talk about that tool on here all the time and explain the process and have your team member turn it into written documentation or visual representation, whatever it is that you may need. And they'll be more invested in using something that they actually helped create.

Remember, building a business that can run without you isn't about working less. It's about working on the right things. And you can find more resources for scaling your creative business at dustinpead.com slash free. I'll have links in the show description to where you can find Madi and her business and on LinkedIn as well.

But the truth is this, that your creative business will only scale as far as your systems allow it to. If you're still the bottleneck, you're not just limiting your business growth, you're limiting your ability to do your best creative work. Take Madi's advice seriously and start with one small step toward delegation. Document everything and remember that firing yourself from daily operations doesn't mean losing control. It means getting the freedom to focus on what only you can do.

If today's conversation resonated with you at all, head over to dustinpead.com, download free frameworks and follow us on at Dustin Pead on social media. Most importantly, pick one thing from today's action list and implement it this week. I would love to work with you as well. If you'd like to do that, you can follow me or find me at dustinpead.com. Click on the contact button and hop on my calendar for a free 30 minute strategy session. I cannot wait to be back with you next week on Creativity Made Easy. Have a great week.

Ep 123: The Renewal Ritual Every Creative Needs

A Systematic Approach to Preventing Creative Burnout

SUMMARY

Picture this: you're going through the motions, checking boxes, but the spark that made you fall in love with your creative work feels like a distant memory. What if I told you there's a systematic way to get that fire back and prevent burnout before it happens?

As creative professionals, we often treat renewal as a luxury we'll get to "someday" rather than the necessity it truly is. But after experiencing my own creative drought and finding a way back through systematic renewal practices, I've learned that protecting our creativity isn't just about taking breaks—it's about building intentional systems that fuel our long-term creative success.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Renewal must be proactive, not reactive - Schedule these practices in advance, not just when you feel burned out. Like budgeting for gas money each month, build renewal into your quarterly rhythm.

• ⚡️ Cross-medium consumption sparks innovation - Consuming creativity outside your medium creates fresh perspectives and prevents tunnel vision. The most unexpected inspiration often comes from the least likely places.

• ⚡️ Team culture benefits from individual renewal - When leaders model systematic renewal, it creates a culture of creative curiosity that benefits the entire organization and improves long-term creative output.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "You don't have time not to do this. The cost of burnout, both to your creativity and your business, is far greater than the investment of systematic renewal."

• 💬 "Observation without the pressure to produce allows for pure inspiration."

• 💬 "Your creativity is your most valuable asset as a creative professional. Protect it, nurture it, and watch how it transforms not just your work, but your entire approach to your creative business."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron - Essential reading on creative renewal

• ⚡️Guide to Effective One-on-Ones for team leaders at dustinpead.com/free

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Picture this: you're going through the motions, checking boxes, but the spark that made you fall in love with your creative work feels like a distant memory. What if I told you there's a systematic way to get that fire back and prevent burnout before it happens? Let's get into it.

Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business without sacrificing their creative vision. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative coach and consultant, and I help creative professionals know themselves, their process and their team so that they can move from chaos to clarity. Whether you're a designer, writer, photographer, any kind of creative professional, you're in the right place. This show is about building systems and processes that free your creativity instead of constraining it. So grab your coffee, open your notes app and let's dive into today's episode.

Episode one hundred and twenty three, the one, two, three episode. And we're going to give you the one, two, three of the renewal ritual that every creative needs. So let's dive into it.

It's summer 2017. After 10 years in full time church ministry, I was running on empty. I knew something had to change. So I looked to something that I had never done before: a six week sabbatical, six weeks to completely step away, reset and reconnect with my calling. And I'll be honest, the first week was brutal. I felt guilty for not working. I was anxious about what was piling up, waiting for me and frankly, a little lost without the constant demands of my time.

But something happened in about week three. The fog started lifting. And by week six, I had the clearest vision for my work that I had in years. I came back refreshed, refocused and more creative than I had been in a decade. That sabbatical taught me something crucial: that renewal isn't a luxury for creative professionals. It's a necessity and it can't be something we do only when we're burned out. It has to be scheduled, systematic, planned and most importantly, protected.

So today I want to share with you two types of renewals that I believe every creative professional needs, whether you're a solopreneur or just starting out or leading a team of creatives.

Let's get into the warning signs that you cannot ignore. Listen, hear me when I say this: burnout doesn't happen overnight. It sends warning signals that most creatives ignore until it's too late. Don't just go through the motions. We get in this mode where we go through the motions and what I call "going through the motion syndrome." It's not like an official term, it's just kind of like where you add syndrome to the end of something because it's what you feel like you're doing.

So you may feel like you're just going through the motions when you're more concerned about getting tasks done than bringing in your creative perspective to projects. It's productive work versus meaningful creative contribution. And listen, we talk about getting things done on this podcast all the time. But if it's at the cost of your health, of your mental capacity, of your creative energy, then we need to fix that. And the way we do it is with these two types of renewals that we're going to talk about today.

Another warning sign that we start to see is that our quality starts to slide back a little bit. There's subpar work that doesn't match our usual standards. There's a lack of innovation or creative problem solving. And then our clients or our fellow teammates, they start noticing the difference.

Another warning sign is emotional indicators. Are there more bad days than good days, more bad moods than good moods throughout the week? Are you being snappy with your teammates or your clients? Are you dreading projects that used to excite you? Are you feeling disconnected from your original vision, your original why that you got into this business in the first place?

Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way, which is a book that I love—it's one that I highly recommend. If you go to the resources page on my website dustinpead.com, I have a bunch of books that I think are just cornerstone, pivotal, must reads for any creative professional and The Artist's Way is one of them. In the book she calls these warning signs "creative drought" and she emphasizes that waiting until you're completely depleted or completely empty is like waiting until your car is out of gas to find a gas station. We don't do that. We're more proactive. We see the warning signs. We see the needle fading down. If you're like some people, I can't resonate with this, but you wait until the gas light comes on. That drives me crazy, but whatever, at least it's one last final warning sign that you need to get gas before you run out. And we can't ignore these warning signs.

So let's talk about the first type of renewal and it is the renewal day. Renewal days are all about stepping back to remember why you do what you do and getting clarity on creative direction. So what makes a true renewal day? Activities that give you renewed vision for your creative profession. Things like journaling to process and clarify your thoughts, reading books that inspire your creative vision. I like to go on like nature hikes or any kind of physical activity on my renewal days. They can create space for that reflection. It can remove you from the screen or from the sketch pad enough to allow your brain space to think about what it needs to think about. And you'll start to see some breakthrough come through that. And so through prayer, meditation, other practices that can center you, these things make up a really great renewal day.

And I like to plan these quarterly at minimum. I plan them in advance, not just when I feel burned out. We're looking at the warning signs. We don't wait till the gas tank is empty, like Julia Cameron says. We're planning these out in advance. We have gas money in our monthly budget every month we use that for gas, so you have these renewal days in your quarterly budget if you will, so use them. Plan these in advance not just when you feel burnout. Prep your team and your clients for these protected days. Block off the whole day. If you use a calendar system where people can add themselves to your calendar, make sure you block off that whole day. Let everybody know well in advance that that day you're not going to be available. You'll pick things back up the following day.

I like to take mine on Fridays, make it like an early refresh into the weekend. Recently, I had a client take one of these renewal days and they came back with some clear directives on what to stop, what to start and what to continue. And I love that because that clarity refreshed their entire team and the ripple effect of their renewal made a big impact on their team culture. So renewal days are away from the work. They're away from your typical grind.

I will typically, in fact, as of this recording later this week, I'm taking my quarterly renewal day. I'm going to go to a creative gathering here in Atlanta called Creative Mornings that morning. Then I'm going to have lunch with a friend and then I'm going to go that afternoon to the local spa and get a massage and just try to detox my body and my brain as much as possible before enjoying pizza night with my family where we watch a movie and eat pizza every Friday night together. That's one type of renewal day.

The other type of renewal day that I need you to take is called the creative fuel day. And this is where we're doing things that specifically fill our creative tank. We talk all the time about we can't give out what we aren't filled up with. So creative fuel days are about consuming creativity. I recommend doing it in a different medium than your own to inspire fresh perspectives of your own work.

So writers maybe go visit art galleries, not read more books. Designers should maybe attend some concerts, not browse Dribbble or Pinterest or any other design inspiration sites, things like that. Photographers, maybe go to the theater. Don't study other photography. Staying in your medium creates tunnel vision. And in order to be more creative, you need to widen that vision out. And so there's reasons why we get inspired in the least likely places. It's because it triggers something in our brain to go, "now that gives me an idea for back over here to center of what I was working on, of how I could be more creative for this project."

On these days, it's super important: be an observer, if at all possible, not a participant. There's a difference between consuming creativity and creating. You can have days where you're just creating for creatives, for creating sake. Those are great things to do. I highly recommend doing that. Most weekends, I would recommend you do that. But these days are about, these creative fuel days is meant for you to consume. It's you're fueling yourself up. So you need to practice the observation without the pressure to produce because ultimately that makes for pure inspiration later. I'm going to say that again: observation without the pressure to produce allows for pure inspiration. Process what you observe through your creative lens.

So in preparation for these days, you plan them just like you plan the renewal day, your creative fuel day. You plan them as well. You research and you select experiences intentionally. You can go alone or you can go with others. Both have benefits and maybe I might suggest that you alternate between those. So if you're doing four of these a year, if you're doing them quarterly, then maybe on the first and third instance, you're going to go do them alone. But on the second and fourth instance, you're going to bring some other friends or some other creatives along with you. These new perspectives will start to show up in projects a week later and immediately you can come back from these days and you can start to share inspiration with your team, with your clients, with whoever's around you in your corner because it's going to begin to build a culture of creative curiosity within your business. And that is the win of these creative fuel days.

We talk about the observation thing all the time, but we want to build a culture of creative curiosity within your business. That will make you more creative and that will give you the fuel that you need to play the long game without burning out.

All right. So the application of these renewal practices looks different depending on your role, but the principles remain the same. So for solopreneurs, they're different and for team leaders, they're different. So for solopreneurs, build the habit early. Don't wait until you have a team. Start with half days. If a full day feels impossible, start with a half day. Hey, I'm going to work in the morning and then I'm going to take the afternoon off for my renewal day or my creative fuel day. Or opposite. I'm going to do it in the morning. Then I'm going to come back refreshed and face the work. So start with half days. If you need to set boundaries with your clients around that renewal time and be clear with them about that, this is time that you're not available, but you're doing it to protect yourself from burnout and to make yourself more creative in the long run that will help serve them better.

For team leaders, this is about modeling. Lead by example, your team watches how you handle renewal. So create team policies that protect renewal time, not just for you, but for your team as well and make it safe for people to actually disconnect. Don't tell them you should disconnect, but when they come back, go, "man, thank God you're back because all of this stuff happened." Don't do that. You need to be proactive about that so that when they come back, they're excited to be back into the fold, just like you would be after one of these renewal days.

Listen, renewal days and creative fuel days, they fail if they're reactive. I'll say it again. Renewal days and creative fuel days, they fail when they're reactive, not proactive. So clear your schedule way before you go, not after. Set up systems and gain margin. So work doesn't pile up. That's what we talk about here all the time on this podcast. That's what my business Chief Creative Consultants is all about is setting up systems so that you can gain margin so that work doesn't pile up. So think through communication strategies for clients and stakeholders. What do you need to communicate before and after so that you can set yourself up for success? Be proactive about this.

So what now? What can we do? Here's exactly what you need to do to implement these renewal practices in your life. Number one, just start thinking about all of the burnout that you're thinking through right now. Think through all the warning signs that I mentioned and honestly assess where you are. Rate yourself on a scale of one to 10 for your energy, your creativity, for your enthusiasm, for your work and start to notice your scores. And start to notice how are you actually feeling? This is a great reason to be journaling every day because you can see it in black and white.

Number two, schedule your next renewal day or creative fuel day within the next 30 days. Go ahead and look at it. Block a full day in your calendar if you can right now. If you can only do a half day, then block a half day in your schedule right now. Pause this podcast. Block it out. If a full day feels impossible, again, you can start with a half day, but prepare your team and your clients in advance. Let them know this is a time that you will be unavailable so that you can be available for them in the long haul.

I would say another thing you need to do immediately is to start keeping a note of renewal activities or fuel activities. So I keep a note on my phone that anytime I hear something like, "man, that would make for a really good activity on my renewal day" or "that would make a really good thing to go consume on a creative fuel day," I will jot that down on my phone so that when those next ones come up, I'm not sitting there going like, "I don't know what to do. I know I planned this thing. Dustin said I needed to put it on my schedule. So I did and let all my clients know, but I don't really know what I'm supposed to do." But if you start creating that list of activities that renew your vision and fuel your creativity, then you'll have that at your disposal as that day grows nearer. So it might be books that inspire you, places that you think about or that help you think. Activities that center you. Having this list ready makes planning these days easier.

And lastly, if you lead a team, introduce this concept in your next team meeting. Share the warning signs, explain the two types of renewal and start the conversation about how to support each other in this practice.

Again, for setting yourself up for creative longevity, I cannot recommend enough The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. It is essential reading on creative renewal and how to avoid artistic drought. I also have a guide on my website. If you need to guide your team through these practices, you can check out my guide to effective one on ones for team leaders, for anyone who's wanting to take their teams through these renewal conversations. Reminder, you can get all sorts of free resources, frameworks, tools at my website, dustinpead.com/free. So check that out.

Listen, I know what you're thinking. "I don't have time for renewal days. I'm too busy." But here's the truth. You don't have time not to do this. The cost of burnout, both to your creativity and your business is greater, far greater than the investment of systematic renewal. Your creativity is your most valuable asset as a creative professional. So protect it, nurture it, and watch how it transforms not just your work, but your entire approach to your creative business.

Next week, we're back with a very special episode. I have a guest that's going to join us to talk about how to go from bottleneck to business leader within your creative business. It's going to be an amazing episode. Don't miss it next week on the Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have an amazing week.

Ep 122: More Tasks Than Time to Complete

The Focus Funnel

SUMMARY

When you start producing systematically, you quickly discover just how much work it actually takes and you suddenly start to feel overwhelmed by an endless task list. Here's what happens to almost every creative professional I work with: they implement better systems and processes, set up project management tools, and then suddenly become completely overwhelmed—not because the systems aren't working, but because they're working too well, revealing everything they actually need to do for the first time, and the real problem isn't time shortage but decision shortage, because creative work naturally expands to fill available time and without boundaries, every opportunity becomes an obligation.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Decision Shortage Over Time Shortage: Most creatives don't have a time management problem—they have a decision-making problem. All tasks aren't equal, and energy matters more than time blocks.

• ⚡️ The 15-20% Rule: When using the Eisenhower Matrix, only 15-20% of your tasks should actually be urgent AND important. If more items fall here, you haven't been ruthless enough in your categorization.

• ⚡️ Strategic Elimination Builds Creative Focus: Regular practice of eliminate, automate, delegate, and strategic procrastination doesn't just manage tasks better—it reclaims your creative energy for work that truly matters.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Without boundaries, every opportunity becomes an obligation."

• 💬 "Most creatives don't have a time shortage problem. They have a decision shortage problem."

• 💬 "You're never going to have enough time for everything, but you can have enough time for the right things."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️Focus Funnel Action Guide - Free download with step-by-step framework

• ⚡️ DO vs DUE Framework - Create margin for strategic work

• ⚡️ "The Four-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss - Original focus funnel concept

• ⚡️ "Essentialism" by Greg McKeown - Master class in doing fewer things better

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

When you start producing systematically, you quickly discover just how much work it actually takes and you suddenly start to feel overwhelmed by an endless task list. Today we're solving the I've got more tasks than time problem with a simple but powerful decision making framework that will help you transform how you approach your workload. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to scale their business with systems and processes that actually work. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process coach and consultant, and I help creative professionals know themselves, their processes and their team so that they can move from chaos to clarity in their business, whether you're a freelancer, agency owner or leading a creative team in an apartment.

This show is designed to give you practical frameworks that create margin in your work and freedom in your life. Let's dive in.

Here's what happens to almost every client I work with. They come to me saying they need better systems, better processes, something to help them get organized, because it's just chaos and madness. And so the first thing we do is we implement the DO versus DUE framework, and we set up their project management system. And then suddenly, boom. They are completely overwhelmed, not because the systems aren't working, but because they're working too well.

For the first time, they can see everything that they actually need to do. And all of these projects floating around in their head, all of these someday ideas, all of those client requests that got buried in an email, it's all there in front of them staring at them from their task list.

I had one client tell me, "Dustin, I thought I had a time management problem. Turns out I have way too many tasks problem." They weren't wrong. When creatives start being systematic, when you start being systematic about capturing and organizing your work, you often discover that you've been trying to drink from a fire hose. And that's where the chaos comes from.

But here's the thing. There's this overwhelming moment when you see things in black and white for the first time. It's actually a breakthrough moment because now instead of the tasks controlling you, you can start making intentional decisions about what deserves your time and creative energy.

You see, most creatives don't have a time shortage. We all have the same amount of time. So why do some produce more quality work with the same amount of time that we have? It's because creatives don't have a time shortage problem. They have a decision shortage problem.

There's this illusion that we always have a full plate when we think our plate is full when it's actually not full. It's overflowing. Creative work naturally expands over time and fills all of your available time. Think about if you're a homeowner and you ever used there's a product called Great Stuff. It's a great name and it's this foam spray that you spray to fill in different gaps. Maybe it's a leak around your window or whatever. But something is leaking, something is wrong and there's a gap where there shouldn't be a gap and so you spray this Great Stuff and it expands to fill that time.

Creative work is just like Great Stuff. It is great stuff. We love doing it, but creative work will naturally expand to fill any available time that it can because without boundaries every opportunity becomes an obligation. Let me say that again. Without boundaries every opportunity becomes an obligation.

And this is why traditional time management fails creative professionals all the time. Time management assumes that all tasks are equal and we know that they're not. Creative work doesn't fit neatly into time blocks. There's ebbs and flows that we have to make room for. And it's actually our energy that matters more than time. And so we end up in this decision fatigue cycle. There's too many choices and that leads to poor choices. We get paralyzed by all the decisions and that creates procrastination. Hey, if I can't figure out what to do next, then I just won't do anything and we shut down. And that overwhelm leads to reactionary instead of proactive, and proactive is where the strategic work really starts to hit the road.

So let me talk you through kind of a three-step approach when it comes to being overwhelmed. When you're overwhelmed you need this systematic approach and it's simple as this: number one brain dump, number two categorize, number three act. Let's walk through these real quick.

Step one, brain dump everything. I will often walk new coaching or consulting clients through this all the time. We sit down with a legal pad away from our computers and away from our phones and we will just start to write down every little floating task that is bouncing around in between your ears onto paper. Write it down on the paper and we're not organizing them. We're just capturing everything that causes any kind of mental tension. Any big projects, small tasks, ideas, concerns, worries, hopes, dreams, whatever it is, we're writing them all down because what that does is it immediately relieves the cloudiness and the mental pressure.

Psychologists know this. That's why they tell you in order to process through certain things in your life, you need to write them down because you need to get them out of your head because what happens in your head is it spirals and it doesn't go anywhere and it's just spiraling and spiraling and what happens when it spirals is it's building energy and it's building tension and there's no release, there's no relief from it whatsoever. So step one is we're gonna brain dump everything.

Step two, I talk about this all the time. Jim Kwik on his podcast for mentalists and brain energy, he talks about this all the time as well, but you need to be ruthless and use the Eisenhower matrix categorizing. Eisenhower matrix categorizing, which we know is the four quadrants. Things are, everything that we dumped on that sheet of paper, we know that it's either urgent and important, or it's just urgent and not important, or it's important but it's not super urgent. And in the fourth category, it's neither important nor urgent.

And so what we're going to do is we're going to take time and we're going to be ruthless about each item that's on that legal pad or on that notepad. And we're going to begin to place them in one of those four quadrants, one of those four boxes. And we're going to be honest about what is truly urgent and what feels urgent. Just because it feels urgent doesn't mean it is urgent. Be honest about what's truly important and what's busy work because most overwhelm that we experience, it comes from treating everything as urgent and important.

And I always tell my clients this, that when you're using the Eisenhower matrix, really only about 15 to 20% of the things that you dumped out on that sheet of paper in step one, really only about 15 to 20% of those things should actually end up in the urgent and important category. If there's more than that, then you have not been ruthless enough. If there's less than that, then maybe you were too ruthless and you need to kind of reprioritize some things. But usually it's the fact that we think everything is urgent and important. And we know that when everything is urgent and important, nothing is urgent and important.

And step three is act on it. Now, how do we know how to act? What is the action for each one of these quadrants? Here's how I break it down. Listen, if it's urgent and important then you need to do it ASAP, but you need to plan better next time. Do it ASAP but plan better next time that it comes around again, and what I mean by ASAP is hey this is kind of your big three or your big frogs of the day or of the week or of the month or however long you're planning it out. These things need to happen and you need to be the one to do it before anything else.

If it's in the quadrant of urgent, but not important, can you automate it? Can you delegate it? Same thing with important, but not urgent. If it's important, but not urgent, can you automate it? And can you delegate it? If it's in one of those either or categories and then listen, if it's not important or urgent, then it means one of two things. It means it's really not needed at all and you need to eliminate it. Or finally, maybe it is needed, but it's just not for right now, then you can procrastinate it. It's okay to procrastinate as long as you give it a date later in time or you give it a place where you can go back and revisit it over and over.

According to the research from the Productivity Institute, knowledge workers spend 41% percent of their time on discretionary activities that could be handled by others or eliminated entirely. So you've brain dumped onto that and now you're looking at that giant list of things. According to statistics about 41 percent of the things that are on that list could either be eliminated entirely or delegated to someone else. So think about that for a minute when you're going through this step one you're going to brain dump step two you're going to use the Eisenhower matrix and step three use the focus funnel so that you know how to act on it.

Now once you've tried this a time or two, it's time to turn this into a habit. Make the whole Eisenhower matrix and focus funnel, I like to use those in tandem. We brain dump and we use the Eisenhower matrix of urgent and important. And then we use that focus funnel. The focus funnel is where we decide whether we need to act on it or we need to delegate, eliminate, automate or procrastinate. And it comes back around to us doing it again later. Make this a habit.

Maybe it's weekly, maybe it's monthly, maybe it's quarterly. For me, I do this about once a month right now because after about a month's worth of creative work, my brain starts to feel that cloudiness again. And whenever I feel that cloudiness coming on, it's probably because there's too much up here and I have not released it. And so what I'll do is I'll write it down. I'll put things through the Eisenhower matrix and then I'll use the focus funnel to determine where it goes.

So whether you do it weekly or monthly or quarterly, whatever it is, just schedule 30 minutes in your block of time. Whether it could be every Friday, could be the last Friday of every month, first Friday of every month, whatever. Schedule 30 minutes for the focus funnel review. So you've gotten to the point where you've dumped it, you've gone through the Eisenhower matrix. So now you see those things in the Eisenhower matrix, schedule 30 minutes to just go through those things and go, okay, that needs to be eliminated. That can easily be automated. I know somebody who can help me automate that. This one can be easily delegated. This one is procrastinated. I can come back and do that later, whatever the case may be.

And when you do this review, you're not going to just look at what's currently kind of built up until now. You're going to look ahead a little bit at the upcoming week, the upcoming month, the upcoming quarter with this fresh perspective and you're going to question everything that made it onto your task list.

This is where the default to no policy comes in. Every new request that enters your brain, every new idea that pops in. Maybe we should, maybe we should, maybe we should is immediately met with a no until proven otherwise and proven otherwise just means that you're going to ask yourself if I say yes to this that means I'm going to have to say no to something else. Every yes is saying no to something else. So what is it that if me saying yes to this, what am I saying no to? That's the default no policy.

And over time, you'll start to build this elimination muscle. You'll start to whittle down. You'll start to notice things quicker. In the beginning, it might take some time to brain dump to Eisenhower matrix to focus funnel. It's OK if it takes time. It's a new habit. But as you begin to build that elimination muscle, you'll start to quickly identify those obvious time wasters. You'll start to really question the we've always done it this way activities and start to go, well, why have we always done it that way? And is there a better way to do that? You'll start to eliminate even before you have to try to optimize something, which is an incredible, incredible superpower for creatives.

Research from the Harvard Business Review shows that owners who regularly practice this elimination tactic, they are 25% more effective and report significant lower stress levels. And I know that's what we all want.

So what do we do with this now? How do we implement this whole focus funnel situation starting today? What's easy is one, two, three that I mentioned earlier. Number one, right now do a 15 minute brain dump. Get every task, project, idea, concern out of your head and on to paper. Don't organize it. Just capture everything that is creating mental tension for you.

Step two, you're going to take that list and you're going to ruthlessly categorize each item into one of the four Eisenhower quadrants. Urgent, important, urgent and important, urgent but not important, important but not urgent, and neither urgent or important. Be honest about what's truly urgent versus what just feels urgent and what's truly important versus what's just busy work.

And step three, we're gonna apply the focus funnel actions. We're gonna handle important and urgent items immediately. We're gonna automate some urgent but not important things or delegate. We're gonna delegate or automate the things that are important but not urgent or urgent but not important. And we're gonna eliminate or consciously on purpose procrastinate everything else that does not fall into the other boxes.

And lastly, as this begins to take habit right now that you've done this for the first time today or this week, schedule a weekly time or a monthly time or a quarterly time to go through this. I would suggest in the beginning that you schedule it for 15 minutes every week, every Friday. I say Friday because by Friday you've built up all of the things in your head or whatever the end of your work week is. If the end of your work week is Thursday, then do it on Thursdays, but in your work week because you don't want to carry all of that mental tension into the weekend and then begin your next week, your next work week with all of that stuff stored up. You want to begin your week fresh and organized and emptied of the last week's problems and worries. So if it's Friday just call it a focus funnel Friday and have that 15 to 30 minute session with yourself and if you need other people around bring other people into it to help think through the things. Really this is about you here, not about your team. Because when you do this well, then you can lead your team well as well.

Now this focus funnel concept was originally introduced by author Tim Ferriss in his massively successful book, The Four Hour Workweek. So I highly suggest you pick that up. Another one that I read last year, complete master class in doing fewer things better is called Essentialism. That's by Greg McKeown. I hope I'm saying his last name right. So definitely check that out. I also have a full focus funnel action guide that you can download available to you for free at dustinpead.com slash free. So go and check that out.

Listen, the truth is that you're never going to have enough time for everything, but you can have enough time for the right things. And the focus funnel isn't about cramming more into your schedule. It's about creating space for work that matters. When you regularly eliminate, automate, delegate, and strategically procrastinate, you're not just managing tasks better. You're reclaiming your creative focus.

So start with one thing. Pick the most obvious task that you can eliminate and delete it right now. Do you feel that? Do you feel what clarity feels like? So get into that this week. Start this method right away as soon as possible. At the end of your work week go ahead and do these steps that we talked about today.

For more frameworks like this and more free resources you can find at dustinpead.com slash free. You can follow me on social media at dustinpead. Remember creativity doesn't have to be chaotic. It can be systematically excellent though.

Next week we're going to talk about something that every creative professional needs but most ignore until it's too late. This is the renewal ritual that every creative needs. Burnout isn't just about working too much. It's about systematically renewing your creative energy. And I'll share some specific practices that keep top creative professionals energized and inspired even during their busiest seasons. Don't miss it. Talk to you next time on Creativity Made Easy podcast. Have a great week.

Ep 121: Leading Without Crushing Creativity

The 80-20 Principle That Transforms Creative Teams

SUMMARY

Most creative professionals think they need more freedom when what they actually need is better structure. Not more structure, better structure. And there's a big difference between the two.

As creative leaders, we often face a paradox: how do we provide the structure our teams need to be productive while preserving the creative freedom that drives innovation? The answer lies in understanding the 80-20 creative structure principle that can transform how you lead creative teams.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• ⚡️ Structure Creates Creative Freedom: 80% structured work builds the margin and resources needed for meaningful 20% creative exploration time.

• ⚡️ Constraints Spark Innovation: Clear boundaries and defined problems force innovative solutions and eliminate creative paralysis from unlimited options.

• ⚡️ Relationship-First Leadership: Caring about the person behind the creativity, not just project outcomes, unlocks higher creative performance and team engagement.

NOTABLE QUOTES

• 💬 "Intention creates the conditions where inspiration is more likely to emerge."

• 💬 "Professional creatives don't wait to feel inspired. They go get inspired, and the 'go get' is the intentional part."

• 💬 "Your creatives don't need more freedom. They need better intentionality that serves their creative process."

EPISODE RESOURCES

• ⚡️The Creatives Guide to Effective 1:1's - Free download

• ⚡️ DO vs DUE Framework - Create margin for creativity

• ⚡️ "The Accidental Creative" by Todd Henry - Essential reading for creative leaders

• ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⚡️ Subscribe to my weekly newsletter here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

• ⚡️ Schedule a FREE Coaching Call here.

TRANSCRIPT

Most creative professionals think that they need more freedom when what they actually need is better structure. Not more structure, better structure. And there's a big difference between the two. Today we're going to explore the 80-20 principle that transforms how you lead creative teams and why putting creatives in a box actually unleashes their best work. Let's get into it.

Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy, the podcast for creative professionals who want to take their business or their teams from chaos to clarity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative process coach and consultant, founder of Chief Creative Consultants, and I help creative professionals know themselves, their process and their teams so that they can move from chaos to clarity. If you're tired of the feast or famine cycle and ready to build a creative business that works as hard as you do, you're in the right place.

Listen, let me tell you, I love structure. I think structure is intentional and I like to be very intentional with my time because time is the one asset that we cannot get more of. It's here and then gone. I believe that structure makes us more creative and we're going to talk about that, but it can be taken too far and often squash our creative flow.

So I've come up with this principle to make room for creative adventure and spontaneity. Most things in life revolve around some type of an 80-20 rule. Every time we talk about something, it's really more about the balance. And the balance usually is not 50-50. The balance is usually somewhere 80-20. And that's no different in today's episode.

The 80-20 creative structure principle. 80% of your creative work should be highly structured and 20% built for flexibility and immediate inspiration. I just actually restructured my week to match this. What I was noticing about a hundred percent of my creativity being structured was that I would get to the end of the week and I felt like I had no room to really be creative.

And so what I've done recently is I've changed up my Fridays to have no tasks on my plate. Now I know not everybody has that luxury, but maybe you can move towards it as much as you can or pick a different day of the week. I have no scheduled tasks for Friday now. I have calendar items, but I have no scheduled tasks for Friday.

And there's a couple of reasons for this. One, I want to be able to have margin at the end of the week to be able to catch up on some things that I maybe didn't have time for because things happen. But I also want to have the flexibility to go create something at the end of the week because I want to end the week on a creative high. And so I think it's super important for all of us to understand this balance of this 80% structure, 20% freedom as much as I am practicing it as well.

And I want to say too that I think a lot of creative teams get this backwards. Most of them spend 80% of their time chasing inspiration. I just have to create the right environment. I have to have the right amount of sleep. I have to have the right amount of caffeine. I have to have the right music playing at the right temperature and the right candle burning and all these different things to chase inspiration. And they only get about 20% of their time structured. And that is a mistake because they're waiting for a perfect moment instead of creating some type of consistent output. They're mistaking chaos for creativity and structure for constraint.

Now there's power in structured creativity. This is where I talk about in the intro about being inside the box. 80% of structured work creates predictable progress and deliverables. Structure actually builds the financial and time margin needed for true creative exploration. You need to be able to afford the time and the money to explore those things. So I'm going to keep my week structured Monday through Thursday and Friday is going to be a lot less structured as much as possible.

Structure also provides the foundation that makes 20% flexible time actually valuable. It's not just sitting around twiddling your fingers, but you've done what you need to do and now you can create something truly unique and valuable.

So here's how to implement the 80-20 split. Structure your processes, deadlines, and communication rhythms, whatever that works for you. For me, it's Monday through Thursday. It could be from 9 to 2 is going to be super structured, and then from 2 to 5 is going to be a little bit different, whatever the case may be. But structure that with your processes, structure it with your deadlines and your communications.

Because if you don't structure it, let me just say this for a second. I know you're hearing like too much structure, too much structure. Structure is nothing but intentionality. That's all it is. It's I'm being intentional to choose what I'm going to do with the one asset that I can't get more of which is time. I'm gonna make every moment count. I'm gonna make every moment count towards the thing that I want to create instead of just like if a hundred percent or if it was vice versa where 80% of your time was open to creating the right environment in the moment, you're going to get to your end of your week and you're only going to have a 20% success rate at the most because that's the part that was actually structured.

And so I think if we can build in these intentionalities, let's replace the word structure with intention. If we can build our week intentionally, then we can protect certain time blocks for exploration and inspiration and we can actually be more creative by using the 80% structure to fund the 20% inspirational flow time.

This is why we talk a lot about the DO versus DUE framework because it creates that margin that makes this 80-20 split possible and it does that by eliminating the last-minute rushes that consume creative exploration time. If you build this 80-20 intention into your work or your team or your department or your agency, but you're constantly waiting until things are DUE to get them done, then you're not gonna have that. It's gonna eat up that 20% that you built that you work so hard for.

So download the DO versus DUE framework on dustinpead.com slash free. Look at all the stuff out there that I have about it. We talk about it pretty regularly on this podcast.

Let's talk for a second about building inspiration instead of just sitting around waiting for it. I think there's a myth that we think that inspiration hits. It doesn't just hit. Inspiration builds through consistent creative habits and a structured practice. This whole idea of I'm just waiting to feel inspired, it actually kills creativity and it kills any chance of getting anything done.

The most successful artists and creatives in the world don't wait to feel inspired. They go get inspired and the go get is the intentional part. And that's the difference between being motivated and being disciplined in your creative work. We need both. We need both motivation and we need discipline. But professional creatives, they show up regardless of how they feel and they're willing to put in the work.

So inspiration is actually a byproduct of the habits that you create, the intentional habits that you create. Consistent creative practice trains your brain to generate ideas at a moment's notice. Structure creates the condition where inspiration is likely to emerge. Let me say that again and replace the s-word. Intention creates conditions where inspiration is more likely to emerge. Maybe that's all you needed to hear today. Intention creates the conditions where inspiration is more likely to emerge.

Regular creative work builds creative confidence and flow state. I believe Todd Henry said it best in his entire work of his first book, The Accidental Creative. And his research shows that structure actually enables rather than inhibits creative breakthroughs because it's intentional. You're intentionally feeding your creativity. You're nurturing it. You're giving it what it needs so that when it's time to be creative, you can be creative. You don't have to wait for inspiration to hit.

I want to be clear. Putting creatives in a box does give them clarity. It gives them clarity. I know you can't see anything when I'm in a box. But I'll tell you what you can see. You can see the boundaries. You know exactly where to push the limit. Without boundaries, you can't push boundaries. And all creativity is pushing those boundaries. Giving them the box gives them clarity to be creative with purpose rather than with confusion.

There's a paradox here of creative freedom. Unlimited options, no box often leads to creative paralysis. We've talked about this before. It can handicap your creativity. Clear boundaries force innovative solutions within defined parameters. Different constraints can actually spark your creativity by eliminating all of the irrelevant possibilities. If anything is possible, then I don't know where to even go with this. But if you give me, it's like great improv, they'll give you a scenario. You're walking into a grocery store, great, and walking into a grocery store and now I can take that and be creative with it.

That's why improv exists and that's why improv is one of the most creative forms of art that exists because you can take one simple idea. That one simple idea is a box and now you're off to the races with it.

So create empowering constraints and you can do this by defining the problem clearly. We talk about this all the time about painting done from Brené Brown, but define the problem clearly before asking for creative solutions. If you don't know what problem you're out there trying to solve then you can't solve it the best way.

So set specific parameters while leaving methodology open. It's not how we're gonna solve it, it's just what we're trying to solve. If you know that, then you can provide context and purpose for every creative project that you have.

Now I do want to say there is such thing as helpful creative boxes and limiting boxes. And this is where we have to be careful as leaders. A helpful creative box is clear objectives, it's a defined target audience who are we speaking to, and there are specific outcomes that we want to see on the other side of it.

Now a limiting creative box is filled with micromanagement. It's every little step of execution. There's no room for creative process. So don't limit creatives. Give them clear objectives, defined audience and specific outcomes. Constrain focus constraints on the what while freeing up the how. That's how leaders lead creatives the best way.

I think we'd be remiss if we don't talk about the relational aspect when we're really when we're leading creatives. Effective creative leadership comes from caring about the person more than the project, especially since creatives are driven more by emotions and feelings than your average other leader or business profession. Traditional management fails here with creative professionals because creatives are more invested in their work.

Now I'm not saying this is always the most healthy but you need to understand where they're at in order to kind of lead them towards what might be best. Their identity is often tied to their creative output again not necessarily healthy but understanding where they are will help you lead them and creatives standard performance metrics don't capture the creative value that they bring.

If someone walks in the room and you immediately feel more creative because they're there, that's some value that can't be tracked from regular standard performance metrics. And so you need to understand that. You need to understand that by building a relationship with them first.

There's power in this relationship first leadership. It's not about the outcome. It's not about the project. It's about the person. It's shepherding the heart of the creative. That's what we love to do at Chief Creative Consultants. We are all about shepherding the heart of the creative person through building these structures, building these intentions around their creativity so they can unleash their best work.

So understand what motivates them. Get to know them on an individual level. Recognize creative work as a personal expression not just deliverables and build trust by doing that you will build trust. Build trust that allows for creative vulnerability. The more vulnerable a creative can be the more creative a creative can be every single time.

So make sure you're having one-on-ones with your creatives. Not just quarterly progress reports on evaluating every little thing that they do, but make it about what they're feeling and what they're going through. Ask them about creative challenges, not just their project status. Understand their process and honor it as much as you possibly can. There's always somewhere to meet in the middle. Focus on removing obstacles so they can present their best creative work.

What are some things that we're doing with our systems and processes or with our communication or with our culture or with our leadership that are creating obstacles for their best creative work? Now understand that sometimes they don't know what's best for their creative work so take it with a grain of salt and understand that what they're giving you is a little piece of themselves. That's addressing those emotional aspects of creative feedback and the iterations that they bring every single time.

There's been much research on creative motivation that shows that autonomy, mastery, and purpose, that's what drives creative performance more than any other traditional incentives. So focus on autonomy, focus on them mastering their skills and focus on the purpose behind what they're doing.

I do have a guide on my website, dustinpead.com slash free. It's called the creative guide, the creatives guide to effective one-on-ones. You can download that. I'll be speaking on that topic this fall at the salt conference in Nashville, Tennessee.

So let's get into what now, what do we do? First thing you need to do is you need to map out what's your current state of this 80-20 split. How much time is your team spending on structured work versus creative exploration? Give them time to explore. Most teams need to flip this ratio to become more productive and more creative.

Number two, create daily creative habits. Establish a non-negotiable creative practices for your team, even if it's just for 15 minutes. Do not wait for inspiration to hit. Build the creative habits now that create inspiration later.

Thirdly, define your creative constraints for your project, for your audience, for your team, whatever it looks like. Start asking what those constraints are so that you can give better solutions every single time.

And lastly, schedule relationship building one on ones. Ask each team member what would help you do your most creative work this week? Find out what they're struggling with, what's going on in their lives. Focus on the person, not just the project status.

I want to remind you a couple of feature resources that we talked about in this episode. The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry is essential. It's on my website as one of my essential readings. If you go to the resources and tools section there as well. I also have the DO versus DUE framework and the creative guides, the creatives guide to effective one-on-ones available at dustinpead.com slash free. There's many other things there as well that can help you build intentionality without crushing creativity.

Remember, creativity isn't about having unlimited freedom. It's about having clear purpose with defined boundaries. When you build the right structure, you build the right intentionality, and you provide meaningful constraints and lead them through relationship rather than just through project management, then you can create conditions where creativity naturally flourishes. Your creatives don't need more freedom. They need better intentionality that serves their creative process.

If you're ready to transform how you lead creative teams and build systems that actually enhance creativity, visit dustinpead.com to learn more about our consulting services or connect with me on social media at dustinpead. I'd love to hear from you on how you're implementing the 80-20 principle in your creative work.

Next week, we're tackling the number one complaint I hear from creative professionals. It's this, I have more tasks than time to complete them. And we're going to dive into all of that through the focus funnel and systematic approach to eliminate, automate, delegate strategic procrastination to reclaim your creative energy for the work that actually matters. If you're drowning in your task list, the next episode will give you the roadmap back that you need to create your best work. I cannot wait to talk to you all about that. Until next time on the creativity made easy podcast, have an amazing week.