Getting Sweaty: Staring Dead-Eyed at the Deadline

You're crafting an important presentation on a key project. It's 6 pm. The nerves are kicking in. Your idea stream has dried up and you're staring at the blinkety-blink of your cursor against the bare white page on your monitor.

In exactly seventeen hours, ten sets of eyeballs will be boring a hole through your brain as you unveil your latest creation. And, right now you haven't a clue where to go next.

What do you do?

We all get creative block but in order to conquer it, we have to change our perspective on a problem in order to uncover our next steps.

Years ago, Sting (the musician, not the wrestler), was quoted as saying, "An album is never completed...it is simply abandoned".

There comes a point where there is simply nothing more to offer creatively.
The development and refinement of any given project is involving,
challenging and actually quite fun until you get to the "action" points near the end and the presentation that wraps it up in a nice tidy box. We love to theorize and speculate. We thrive on the "aha" moments and dread having to put it all together at the end - especially when it's our reputation on the line.

So, how do you summon up the inspiration to cross that finish line?

First, breathe. Then go take a walk, eat a banana or pull out your putter for a little office putt-putt. Do whatever you have to in order to clear your mind of your dilemma prior to kicking it back into gear again.

Now, collect your work. Make a pile and drop it on the floor - it doesn't matter if your notes get mixed up because they are just "your notes" - and technically, all a note is supposed to do is trigger a memory, right?

Pull out a sheet of paper or click on Word and create an outline as if you were starting from scratch.

By having mentally flushed your work in progress another step in the "notes" process, you'll ultimately free yourself from the constraints of your dead-end train of thought. It's kind of like putting together a jigsaw puzzle and then dumping it to start over - you'll start in a different place but you'll recognize shapes and colors so the assembly is much quicker the second time. You'll also see things you never noticed before as your mind re-analyzes data, consider new alternatives and uses your mental and physical notes to forge new ideas.

No doubt, that this "second time around" you'll gravitate towards the soul of your project and its presentation. Consequently, you will develop a sharper focus than you did the first time around.

Once you separate the core idea from the forest of data, your concept will be stronger and more convincing than ever.