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

Free Time with Jenny Blake

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

Five considerations for your ideal ratio of quantity to quality

❤️ Jenny Blake

Oct 06, 2023

Transcript

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

—Maya Angelou

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

Not necessarily.

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

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

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

🌟 5 Key Takeaways

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

📝 Permission

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

✅ Do (or Delegate) This Next

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