LONG-RANGE PLANNING FOR CREATIVES
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In this series, we’ve been looking at planning tips for creatives. Today, let’s look at long-range planning. Here are eight things to keep in mind.
- Maintain a sensible balance between dreaming big dreams and testing those dreams in the crucible of reality. Part of your long-range planning should include some regular way of making sure that you still have dreams and some regular way of making sure that you are being real in your efforts to realize those dreams. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself on the matter of dream-upholding and reality-testing.
- Include some regular way of reminding yourself that, while creating is not the only meaning opportunity available to you, it is one of your most important ones; and that, if you’re feeling low on meaning, creating is a great way to make some new meaning. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself on the extent to which you are making adequate use of your ability to create as part of your meaning-making efforts.
- Keep track of how well or how poorly you’re doing with the rhythm of starting creative projects, working on them, completing them, showing them, and selling them. That is, you want to make sure that you are going through lots and lots of complete cycles with projects and not just starting them and abandoning them. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself on the extent to which you are finishing the things that you start.
- Keep track of how well or how poorly your body of work is growing. Your goal, of course, is to make seamless transitions from creative project to creative project and to build a satisfying body of work over time. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself to make sure that you are actively building a body of work, which is one of the ways that we make ourselves proud.
- Keep track of your marketplace connections and of changes in the marketplace that affect you—to take one example, about current self-publishing options and how the electronic delivery of books has changed the publishing landscape. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself on whether your understanding of the marketplace is up-to-date enough.
- Regularly catch up with yourself and keep track of milestones, developmental changes, and whatever else is new and different in your life. You aren’t quite the same person after you’ve had a few gallery shows as you were before you had your first one; you aren’t quite the same person after your novel has been rejected fifty times as you were before you began sending it out. Our life experiences matter—and it’s hard to know how they matter unless we stop and check in with ourselves. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself about who you now are and what currently matters to you.
- Keep track of how well you’re dealing with the many challenges that we’ve been discussing, like marketplace disappointments, losses of confidence, new stressors, and all the rest. You want to keep sharp track so that you will be quick to notice if some challenge or other is getting the better of you. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself about the challenges you face and about how exactly you intend to address them.
- Continue your cognitive work and maintain it in an ongoing way, noticing those thoughts that don’t serve you, disputing them, and substituting more useful inner language. If you decide to keep some sort of ongoing or long-range planner, you would want to regularly check in with yourself on how well your self-talk is serving you.
The average youth finds planning and scheduling too boring for words. As we grow older, it dawns on us that creating a smart routine amounts to a real service that only we can provide for ourselves. Phrases like “daily practice” take on a new, poignant meaning as we notice how much time we’ve lost by not planning and scheduling and by not keeping to our plans and schedules. Institute simple, sensible daily plans, monthly (or three-month) plans, and long-range plans. You’re unlikely to achieve your best life in the arts without them.