Don't Let Personal Projects Become "Someday" Projects

At this point, I've spent at least two-thirds of my adult working life writing (and otherwise creating) for a living. And on paper, I get that that totally sounds like the dream. After all, how many people actually get to make a career out of something they genuinely enjoy?

The reality is a little more complicated, though (because isn't it always). One thing I've noticed over the years is that I have a very distinct pattern I fall into when I'm not careful.

Whenever work becomes especially busy, stressful, or uncertain, my personal writing has a way of fading way into the background. Yes, this happens when assignments and client deadlines pile up. But habit-wise, I'm just as bad about this when things are slow and I'm looking for new projects to take on.

I always tell myself that I'll get back to my personal stuff when life settles down again, but the problem is that life rarely settles down for very long. There's literally always something devouring as much of my time and energy as I'm willing to give it.

In other words, I've wasted a lot of time treating my personal work like a luxury instead of an essential part of my creative life in the past, and that was a huge mistake.

Why It's Important to Keep Creating for Yourself

Creative professionals spend so much of their productive days making things. Writers write, designers design, and artists create art. Yet so many of us eventually discover that creating professionally and creating personally are two very different experiences — often the hard way, especially if you're me.

You need somewhere to take risks

Clients hire us working creatives, because they trust us to solve specific problems. But unless we're super lucky, we almost never get paid to experiment wildly or follow some strange, wonderful idea into the wilderness.

That's where our personal projects come in — the blogs we keep to express ourselves, the art we make "just because," and all that good stuff.

They give us the room we need to explore, play, test, and occasionally fail in spectacularly educational ways, and that's so important. Some of my favorite ideas started as weird little experiments that would have made absolutely no sense in a client brief.

Your voice lives there

One of the oddest effects I've noticed about writing professionally for other people is that you eventually become very good at sounding like other people. You learn brand voices, adapt to audiences, and adjust tone as needed, depending on the project.

But while those are essential skills for any good copywriter or brand writer, they also make it heartbreakingly easy to lose track of your own voice.

My personal writing gives me a place to remember what I sound like (and take pleasure in it). It gives me a chance to really dig into my interests, pursue answers to the many questions I have running around in circles in my head, and develop my perspective without first squeezing everything through someone else's brand lens.

The things you create for yourself eventually compound

So many of my favorite personal projects started with little to no clear destination in mind.

But one blog post still led to another. One-off sketches or renders might eventually have inspired a whole series to revisit periodically, and even random ideas eventually paved the way for larger bodies of work. And the fruits of that whole process really accumulated over time, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Something I might write on a whim today might attract a reader six months from now. Personal projects sometimes become strong portfolio pieces, business opportunities, or foundations for something much larger.

I've learned that I honestly never know what might become very useful at some point down the line (or how), but that's part of the fun.

Your personal work keeps you interesting

If you're even somewhat the same breed of creative as I am, you probably don't really like to think of yourself as a creature of habit. Creatives still definitely have routines, though, and that's hardly a bad thing. Routines help us produce consistent work, so you want to cultivate and protect those.

But too much familiarity can also become a very comfortable little box if we're not careful.

Personal projects keep us curious and invite us to learn new things or explore subjects we'd never be exposed to at our day jobs. The more interesting your life becomes, the more interesting your work tends to become.

It gives you something no employer can take away

Yeah, the freelance writing market is shit right now. But if you've been freelancing long, then you already know that market shifts pretty much always feel like the end of the world.

Freelance life, especially if you offer creative services, is unstable almost by definition. Clients come and go. Algorithms appear to wake up every single morning and cheerfully choose violence.

But the work you create for yourself belongs to you. That counts for a lot, especially when times are tough professionally or financially.

How to Protect Your Creative Work During Difficult Seasons

Naturally, understanding why personal work matters is one thing. Successfully protecting it when life becomes complicated requires a different set of skills, though.

Stop treating personal work like dessert

For years, I approached personal projects as a reward. I'd tell myself that:

• Once I finished my client work, then I could write for myself.
• After I answered all my emails, I could work on my own ideas.
• As soon as everything else got done, I would finally "let myself" get around to the projects that mattered to me.

And I'm sure you can see where this is going. "Everything else" was never done. And when I did finally make it to the weekend or wind up with a free weekday afternoon I could use however I wanted? I was way too creatively tapped out from writing and designing for everyone else to do much else but watch TV or maybe read.

The thing is, there will always be more bullshit landing in your inbox, demanding your attention. You'll always have responsibilities to take care of, even when work is on the slow side. Creative work for yourself still deserves a place in your life before every other obligation receives its third helping.

Lower the scope, not the frequency

I'm like lots of other creatives in that I can easily fall into an all-or-nothing trap. Maybe you already have some idea how that looks when it happens:

• If there isn't enough time to write an entire essay, you write nothing.
• If you can't finish a whole painting, you skip the entire art session.
• If you don't have an uninterrupted afternoon at your disposal, the project gets postponed until some hypothetical future day when you do.

Creative acts don't have to be huge or complete in and of themselves to be worthwhile. A single page of writing or 20 minutes of brainstorming is still something. Consistency is way more effective when it comes to eventually getting things done than occasional bursts of heroic effort, anyway.

Create a minimum viable creative day

Most productivity advice assumes that everyone secretly wants a color-coded planner and a life organized with military precision. I have never met this person. I certainly never became this person. Not really. I

find it a lot more effective to simply ask myself something like:

What is the smallest creative action I can take that allows me to say, with honesty, "I actually showed up today"?

For you, that might mean writing 500 words. For someone else, it could mean taking the time to record an observation in a notebook or sketch out a rough concept for a future project.

Perfection isn't the goal here. The goal is actually staying in contact with your work and keeping it from eventually becoming foreign territory.

Make your projects easier to start

Starting usually requires way more energy than continuing once things are already underway. Finally getting that all the way through my head changed the way I approach personal projects.

So now, when I have an idea for an article, I open a document immediately and jot down a few quick notes on the spot. If a project interests me, I leave myself visible reminders where I'll run into them again over the natural course of my day or week.

Think for a moment about how easy it is to open social media. Consider the way most platforms remove every possible obstacle between you and distraction.

You can give your creative work the same advantage. Just eliminate (or at least minimize) friction wherever possible. Future You will very much appreciate the assistance.

Keep a creative emergency fund

No, I'm not talking about money. I'm talking about ideas, because even the best of us go through periods where good ones are in short supply.

So, whenever an interesting thought appears, I make it a point to save it somewhere. Start looking for ways you can do the same:

• Collect article titles.
• Write down observations.
• Capture strange questions.
• Store snippets of interesting dialogue.
• Keep a running list of links, images, quotes, and fragments that spark curiosity.

During stressful periods, creative energy can become nearly impossible to reliably access. An idea archive gives you something valuable to work with when inspiration decides to take an unscheduled vacation.

Mine has rescued me more times than I can count, and it continues to.

Stop valuing everything according to income potential

This one literally took me my entire 50-year life to really learn, so the sooner you get the memo yourself, the better.

Creative professionals naturally think about value. After all, we spend our careers connecting effort to outcomes and showing our clients or readers how to do the same. But that mindset gets super limiting when every personal project has to justify itself financially.

Because some projects might generate income. Others might eventually lead to opportunities. Most will probably just make your life a little bit richer than it was before, though.

Every personal essay doesn't necessarily need to become a product before you're allowed to enjoy working on it. Creative work has value beyond revenue. Please don't do what I did for so many years and lose sight of that.

Yes, the Market Is Changing

It's impossible to be a working creative these days and not feel that. (I certainly do.) And I don't know exactly what the next few years will look like for me and others in my field, but they will require adaptation.

Exploration will probably be part of it, too. But whatever's in store next, I've experienced the cost of abandoning my personal work during uncertain seasons. I refuse to do that ever again.

Because life will keep on doing what life does best, regardless — hurling full-force curveballs at my head with impressive consistency. But my writing is coming with me anyway.

Yours should too.