darren r hill

the creative minimalist

A Fiction Writing Prompt to stretch the literary muscles. No rules. No word counts. Simply write and explore. White fluffy clouds drift gently across the azure sky. The sight transports me back at once. The memory, as vivid as the heavens. Writing Prompt Expanded Sights and sounds, tastes and smells, and touch sensations are powerful.…
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Wordless Wednesday I went to the local fishing town yesterday. The weather was beautiful and the sun was shining. When I looked down I thought the colours were lovely. So I took a couple of pictures. The pictures don’t really do justice to the beautiful colours, but I hope you can get a feeling of…
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A Fiction Writing Prompt to stretch the literary muscles. No rules. No word counts. Simply write and explore. It is quiet. The constant background noise has ceased. That means… yes, the rain, it has finally stopped. Can we possibly venture out… Writing Prompt Expanded There is plenty of scope for exploration in this prompt. In…
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There are many kinds of trap. Traps are used to capture something. They could trap an animal, like those in the image. They could trap humans, both foolish and wise. They could capture measurements and be completely benign. Traps we fall into. Traps we deliberately trigger. Traps set by others. Traps set by ourselves. There…
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“I coughed. My chest felt tight. We had been told they were the first symptoms. Now I had them… “ A Friday Fiction Writing Prompt with a little nod toward the current season. As always these writing prompts are optional and entirely open to your own interpretation. Use them as a starting point for a…
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I journal. I do a mixture of morning pages, planning and general thought dumps. I write to myself. Okay, I talk to myself too but this is a little more structured. I have recently been having a discussion with myself about ‘voice’ and the broader issue around identity. It is possible both are linked and…
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Stop Overworking Your Art: How to not ruin your work

There’s a specific moment in every creative project where the work is genuinely good, but you don’t stop. You keep going. One more adjustment. One more pass. Just one more small change that feels necessary in the moment.

But somewhere in that extra tweaking, and without noticing exactly when, your art doesn’t improve, it gets worse.

This isn’t the same problem and moment as not knowing when something’s finished. It’s something stranger: the tweaking itself, the actual act of repeated small adjustments, actively damages your art that was already “feeling it”. Here’s why that happens, and how to catch it before it does.

Your Senses Are Working Against You

Sensory habituation is a thing. When we’re constantly exposed to the same stimulus, our nervous system’s response to it weakens over time. Research on this process shows the initial exposure produces a strong, conscious response, but with repetition, that response diminishes, sometimes dropping below conscious awareness entirely.

For artists, this isn’t a discipline problem or a focus problem. It’s how our nervous system is usually built. And it means something specific and slightly alarming for creative work: the more times we listen to the same section, read the same paragraph, or look at the same image, the less accurately we’re perceiving or feeling it.

We’re not getting a clearer picture the more we revisit something. We’re getting a duller one. Which means the “fixes” we’re making on the fortieth listen, or the twentieth read, aren’t necessarily improvements. They’re often reactions to a flattened, habituated version of the work, not the work itself.

This is different from simply not knowing when to stop. It’s our own perception actively deceiving us the longer we stay in the work, or even zone.

The Work Itself Can Get Worse, Not Just Your Judgment of It

Here’s what surprised me the most when I started paying attention to it: this isn’t only about perception. In some disciplines, over-tweaking causes actual, physical degradation of the work.

Painters have a word for this: mud. Watercolour artists describe it as what happens when a painting loses its transparency and luminosity through too much reworking, colours mixing into a dull, lifeless grey through sheer accumulation of adjustment. The spontaneity goes. The brushwork gets tight and rigid instead of fluid. The painting is objectively, physically worse than it was several passes ago.

Sculptors know the same phenomenon with clay: continued handling and smoothing can cause the surface to lose life, blur fine detail, and become tired and overworked. Clay handled too much becomes harder to shape and more likely to crack.

Musicians talk about “ear fatigue” for a reason. Writers know the particular flatness that creeps into a sentence rewritten one too many times, the voice slowly getting sanded away. This isn’t some weird supernatural superstition affecting artists. It’s the same principle showing up across every medium: past a certain point, more handling doesn’t refine the work. It erodes it.

The moment worth noticing: when a change starts to feel like undoing the last change rather than building on it. That’s usually the signal.

Fresh Ears, Fresh Eyes, and Why They Matter

If habituation is the problem, distance is the solution. Stepping away from a piece and returning with fresh perception is one of the most reliable ways to see or hear what’s there. This quite literally avoids the flattened version our overexposed senses have been serving us.

This is why so many experienced creatives build breaks into their process. Not as a luxury, but as a technical necessity. A day away from a mix. A week before final edits on a manuscript. Returning to a painting after it’s dried, with eyes that haven’t been staring at it for six hours straight – no, I’m not going to make a joke about watching paint dry.

The break isn’t procrastination. It’s the only reliable way to reset your natural senses and get an honest read on the work again.

What to Do Instead

Build stopping points into your process deliberately, before you start, not as a reaction to fatigue. Decide in advance: three passes, then a break. One listen-through per day, not five.

When you notice a change undoing a previous change, treat that as a stop signal, not a sign to keep going.

And trust the early instinct more than you currently do. The version you made when your senses were fresh is often closer to right than the fortieth revision your habituated, acclimatised senses talked you into.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

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23 August 2026
Smart Creative Shortcuts: How I Stopped Wasting Time and Created Stuff

It is only your creative pride that says, “If it came easily, it doesn’t really count.” Real work is supposed to be hard. If you found a faster way to get there, some shortcut to success, some part of you suspects you cheated. Hard work gets results. Cheats never prosper. The proverbial sayings flow easily.

My brain meats thought that for longer than I’d like to admit. And it cost me a lot of creative time I didn’t … have time for!

Why We Resist the Easier Way

There’s a genuine psychological reason this belief is so persistent, and it’s not just stubbornness or a latent Protestant work ethic. Researchers have identified the effort heuristic: the tendency to judge something as more valuable simply because it took a long time to create and/or was harder work to produce. In one well-known study, people rated a poem, a painting, and even a piece of art more highly when they believed it took more time and effort to make, regardless of the actual quality of the finished piece.

This bias doesn’t just affect how we judge other people’s work. It affects how we judge our own. If a piece came together quickly, some part of us quietly discounts it. If it was a struggle, we assume that struggle must mean something. There’s a related idea called the IKEA effect: people consistently value things more highly when they built them themselves, effort included, even when a professionally made equivalent would objectively be better.

None of this means hard work doesn’t matter. It absolutely does; practice and persistence are how skill develops in the first place. But it does mean our instinct to distrust the easier path isn’t a reliable signal about quality. It’s often just an emotional response that we believe as fact.

What a Shortcut Actually Is

So, we need to retrain the headspace neurons. A genuine shortcut isn’t cutting a corner. It’s someone else’s hard-won solution, or your own, made readily available.

Presets, templates, and proven workflows exist because someone already solved a problem you’re currently solving from scratch. A colour grading preset represents hours of someone else’s calibration work. A well-built chord progression template represents decades of harmonic convention that actually works. A tested structure for a piece of writing represents thousands of pieces that came before yours, refined down to what holds attention.

Using one of these isn’t about skipping the learning. It’s borrowing expertise you haven’t had time to build yet, so your own effort can go where it’s actually needed: the parts of the work only you can make, your creativity,

Professional editors who build preset libraries report saving five to fifteen hours a week using them for repetitive parts of the process. That’s not five to fifteen hours of laziness. That’s five to fifteen hours redirected toward the decisions that actually make the work distinctive.

The shortcut I resisted longest: using a template for the structural bones of a piece, rather than reinventing the structure every single time. Once I let myself use it, the actual writing improved, because I wasn’t spending energy solving a problem that had already been solved.

How to Tell a Good Shortcut From a Bad One

Not every shortcut is worth taking. Just ask the fairy tale character who gets lost in the woods. The distinction that actually matters isn’t effort versus ease. It’s what the shortcut is replacing.

A good shortcut replaces repetitive, solved problems: the technical setup, the structural scaffolding, the parts of the process that are the same every time regardless of what you’re making. Freeing yourself from those doesn’t reduce the work. It protects your creative energy for the parts that need it.

A bad shortcut replaces the part where you actually need to make decisions: the melody, the composition, the sentence that says the thing only you could say. Skip that, and you haven’t saved time. You’ve skipped the actual work.

The question worth asking honestly is:

Is this shortcut removing friction, or removing me?

What to Do Instead

Notice the resistance the next time you feel it. When you catch yourself avoiding an easier path out of some vague sense that it doesn’t count, ask where that feeling is actually coming from. Usually it’s the effort heuristic talking, not a genuine quality concern.

Build or find the templates and systems that handle your repetitive, solved problems. Use them without guilt. That’s not skipping the work. That’s making sure your effort goes where it can actually make a difference.

The parts of the process that deserve your full effort are the parts only you can do. Everything else is fair game for a shortcut.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest

15 August 2026
Better Art Starts With Decisions, Not Tools

Sometimes your art, your creative piece of work, just isn’t right. You can’t quite see why; it’s frustrating. The mix feels muddy. The photo feels flat. The paragraph feels clumsy. Something’s off, and your instinct is to reach for a fix. A new plugin. A new preset. A new piece of software that promises to sort it out. Yes, it’s the Oh Shiny!

However, a new piece of kit isn’t the problem. The decisions made before you ever thought that are.

The Order Matters More Than the Tools

There’s a well-known piece of advice in music production circles: a poor arrangement will sink a mix long before a poor plugin choice will. As one industry writer put it, a song that suffers from poor arranging is a bigger roadblock to a good mix than almost anything else, and it’s worth thinking hard about arrangement before blaming your gear, or your skills.

The same logic runs through every discipline. A photograph with a weak composition won’t be rescued by better colour grading. A piece of writing with a muddled structure won’t be saved by sharper sentences. A painting with an unresolved composition won’t be fixed by better paints.

The early decisions, the ones made before the polishing stage even begins, set the groundwork for everything that comes after. You can’t edit your way past a structural problem. You can only disguise it, and usually not very well.

This is why so much of the frustration with “not sounding professional yet” or “not looking finished” isn’t actually a tools problem. It’s not even a skill issue. It’s a decisions problem, back upstream.

What Fewer, Better Moves Actually Looks Like

Too often we treat every tool, every effect, every technique as a lever to pull when something feels wrong. Too quiet? Add compression. Too flat? Add a filter. Too plain? Add texture. Each move is small and reasonable on its own. Stacked together, they usually make things worse, not better.

The alternative is fewer, more deliberate moves, applied earlier in the process. A balanced arrangement needs less correcting later. A well-composed photograph needs less cropping and adjusting after the fact. A clearly structured piece of writing needs less rewriting to make it readable.

This isn’t about doing less work. It’s about moving the work earlier, to the stage where decisions actually have leverage, rather than the later stage where you’re mostly compensating for choices you didn’t make on purpose.

Bonus thought: if you find yourself reaching for the same fix repeatedly across different projects, that’s usually a sign the fix belongs earlier in your process, not later.

The Skill That Actually Develops

The skill that separates experienced creatives from beginners often isn’t technical knowledge of tools at all. It’s perception.

Let’s talk chess. Expert players don’t have better raw memory than beginners, but they perceive the board in meaningful chunks rather than individual pieces. Years of practice reorganise how they see the same information. A beginner sees thirty-two separate pieces. A master sees three or four recognisable patterns. You can read more about that here.

The same thing happens with trained ears, eyes, and instincts in creative work. An experienced mixer doesn’t hear more sound than a beginner. They hear the same sound organised into meaningful patterns: this frequency clashes with that one, this element needs space, this section is competing with that one. An experienced editor doesn’t read more words than a beginner. They see structure, pacing, and rhythm where a beginner sees a wall of text.

Perception only develops through practice, and specifically through making decisions and living with the consequences. No plugin teaches you to hear a frequency clash. No preset teaches you to see a weak composition. That skill only comes from doing the work enough times that your ear, your eye, and your instincts start doing the sorting for you.

What to Do Instead

Before reaching for a new tool, ask what decision, made earlier in the process, would have made this problem unnecessary. Usually there’s an honest answer.

Practise the skill of noticing, deliberately. Listen to more finished work with a critical ear. Study the structure of pieces that work. Look closely at compositions you admire and work out why they hold together. That perception compounds in a way that tool knowledge doesn’t.

And when something isn’t working, resist the first instinct to add a fix. Go back one step earlier and ask whether the problem started there instead.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

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9 August 2026
What Actually Matters in a Home Creative Space

I want to tell you about the worst creative studio I ever worked in. A cupboard, basically. Barely enough room to swing a mic stand, one window that didn’t open, and a chair that made my back ache after twenty minutes. It was really cuboardy.

Some of my proudest creative moments came out of that room.

The point is, I think we get the home creative setup question backwards. We ask what we need to add: better acoustic treatment, a bigger desk, more shelving, more paint holders, more IKEA trolleys, a proper monitor stand, instead of the stack of books currently doing the job (my credit card company thanks me for that particular phase, by the way). And most of those additions, if I’m honest, barely made any difference to my creative output.

So here’s what I think actually matters. Three things, and none of them cost anything.

Your Creative Space Doesn’t Need to Impress Anyone

This one took me embarrassingly long to work out. I used to think my space needed to look like the studios I saw online: the tidy shelves, the perfectly positioned monitors, the plant that’s somehow always thriving. I spent real money and real time chasing that perfect creative look.

None of it made my creative output better. Writers don’t need the aesthetic writing desk from the magazine spread. Painters don’t need the studio with the north-facing light everyone, I mean everyone, talks about. Photographers don’t need the perfectly organised kit bag. What you need is a space that works for you, which is a much lower and much more achievable bar than a space that impresses anyone else, including yourself, scrolling through other people’s setups at midnight.

I still catch myself doing it sometimes. Looking at someone’s beautifully lit desk and feeling my own workspace falls short by comparison. It’s a trap, and I don’t think I’ll ever be fully immune to it. But I know to kick myself now when it happens, which helps… and hurts.

The Same Space, Over and Over, Does Something

Choreographer Twyla Tharp writes about this in her book on creative habits: she describes how habitually creative people build rituals tied to their working environment, and how just entering that space starts the creative process before any actual work begins. She tells the story of Stravinsky, who played the same Bach fugue on piano every single morning before composing, in the same room, at the same time. Not because the fugue mattered, but because the ritual of that room, that routine, told his brain it was time.

I didn’t understand this until I noticed it happening to me. There’s a specific corner of my house where, within a few minutes of sitting down, my brain just switches into work mode. It’s not a nice corner. It’s not well lit. But I’ve sat there enough times doing the same kind of work that the space itself has become part of the trigger.

Bonus thought: if you don’t have a dedicated space, a consistent object works – the same notebook, the same chair, the same mug. The brain latches onto whatever repeats.

This is worth more than almost any piece of gear, or “perfect” studio. A familiar space that reliably gets you into the work is doing something no upgrade can replicate.

Clutter Is Quietly Taxing You

The last one is the most measurable. Research out of Princeton found that visual clutter forces your brain’s visual processing centres to work through everything in view, whether you’re paying attention to it or not, and that this uses up mental resources you’d otherwise have for the actual task. A cluttered space really does create a cluttered mind. Oops!

This doesn’t mean minimalist in the aesthetic sense, all white walls and empty surfaces. It means resolved. The distortion pedal you’re not using put away rather than left tangled on the floor. The reference photos you’re not currently using filed rather than pinned up alongside the ones you are. Not because mess is a moral failing; it absolutely isn’t, but because your brain is quietly spending energy processing all of it whether you like it or not.

I’m not naturally tidy. But I noticed the difference when I started closing the loop on things I wasn’t using, rather than letting them accumulate in my eye line.

I know this can be difficult. I have my guitar on a stand next to me, always. I look at it, and my mind immediately jumps to forming chord progressions. That’s great when I need to make some music, not so good when I am trying to write words on a screen or notebook. It can be a delicate balance, but worth one worth seeking.

What to Do Instead

Don’t audit your gear list first. Audit what’s actually in your field of view when you sit down to work, and clear out what isn’t earning its place there.

Build a small, boring ritual around your space if you don’t already have one. It doesn’t need to be interesting. It just needs to be repeated.

And the next time you’re tempted to upgrade something because someone else’s setup looked better online, ask yourself honestly whether the upgrade would change the work, or just the photo of the work. Usually it’s the second one.

The cupboard I mentioned didn’t have any of the right gear. It had a chair, a window that didn’t open… but enough repetition that sitting down in it eventually just meant it was time to work. Turns out that was most of what mattered.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

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2 August 2026
Done Enough: A Practical Way to Know When to Stop

There’s a question that sits at the end of every creative project, and it’s one of the hardest to answer honestly: is this finished?

Not “is this perfect?” — most of us have already made peace with the fact that it won’t be. The harder question is: is this done enough? Done enough to release. Done enough that continuing would cost more than it returns. Done enough that the art I share represents the work fairly.

Knowing when to stop is a specific creative skill, and like most skills, it can be developed. But first it helps to understand why it’s so difficult.

The Diminishing Returns Problem

Every creative project has a curve. Early in the process, each session produces significant changes. The piece takes shape. Key decisions get made. The work moves fast. Then, gradually, the returns diminish. Each new revision produces a smaller improvement than the last. Eventually you’re spending as much time on the final five per cent as you spent on the first ninety-five.

This is the law of diminishing returns applied to creative finishing, and research on the revision process puts it plainly: “The marginal improvement from the fifth revision to the tenth is almost zero, yet that last five per cent usually costs more time than the first ninety-five combined.”

More revisions aren’t the same as more improvement. At some point, they’re just changes.

There’s a second problem running alongside this one: familiarity. The longer you work on something, the harder it becomes to hear or see it clearly. What was once a meaningful decision becomes invisible through repetition. You stop judging it honestly because you’ve seen or heard it too many times. The work doesn’t get worse. Your ability to evaluate it accurately does.

When you’re in this state, more revision doesn’t fix the problem, if you even know what the problem is. It makes it worse.

The Energy in the Work

Here’s something less often discussed: creative work carries the energy of the session it was made in.

A track recorded with momentum and fresh ears has a quality that’s difficult to manufacture in later sessions. A paragraph written when the idea was clear and alive has a directness that tends to erode as you return to it. A painting made in a single focused day often has a coherence that a month of touch-ups can’t improve and can easily damage.

The best version of a piece of work isn’t always the most revised version. Sometimes it’s the one made when you still had energy for it. Or the right creative energy.

Seth Godin, as always, has a useful framing for this: “Ship often. Ship lousy stuff, but ship. Ship constantly.” The point isn’t that quality doesn’t matter. It’s that perpetual revision is its own kind of failure — and that the act of shipping is what makes you creative, not the act of perfecting.

The version released with some rough edges is often more alive than the version polished until nothing moves. Beauty is found in the imperfection.

The risk of one more revision: you might fix the flaw and lose the energy at the same time.

What Your Audience Actually Hears

There’s one more thing worth knowing about the gap between “done” and “done enough”: the things you’re still bothered by are rarely the things your audience notices.

The specific flaw you can’t stop hearing — the transition that doesn’t quite land, the word that isn’t quite right, the composition element that feels slightly off — has been invisible to you for so long that it feels enormous. But it’s enormous because you’re the one who knows it’s there. Fresh eyes and ears encounter the work differently. They respond to the whole of it, not the specific imperfection you’ve been staring at.

This doesn’t mean shipping sloppy work. It means recognising that some of what you’re still fixing is for you, not for them. And that’s worth knowing before you spend another week on it.

Tip: Always take a break between recording and mixing. This gives your ears a little time to “forget” and reset.

A Simple Way to Know

When you’re unsure whether a piece of work is done enough, three questions tend to cut through the noise:

Does it do what it’s supposed to do? Not everything you originally hoped, but the core intention of the piece — does it do that? If yes, that’s a significant threshold crossed.

Would more work improve it, or just change it? This is the honest one. If you can name a specific improvement the next session would make, that’s a reason to continue. If the honest answer is that you’d just be moving things around… that’s a reason to stop.

Is the energy still in it? If you’re still genuinely engaged with the work, that matters. If the work has become a chore and the sessions feel like maintenance rather than making, that’s often a signal that the piece has already given you what it has to give.

And if you can’t answer those three questions when you ask them, that’s a good reason to step away for a short time and then ask them again.

Done enough isn’t a compromise. It’s a decision, made deliberately, that the work is ready to do its job.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

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26 July 2026
What I Stopped Doing That Improved My Work Immediately

Most creative advice is about what to add. A new technique. A new process. A new habit. The assumption is always that progress comes from doing more, learning more, trying more. It’s consumerism’s gift to the masses!

But what if some of the things already in your workflow are the problem?

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, argues that the “stop doing” list is as important as the to-do list. His research into high-performing organisations found they were as disciplined about what they eliminated as what they pursued.

“They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.”

The same principle applies to creative practice. Not everything you’re currently doing is helping. Some of it is actively in the way.

Here are three things I stopped doing that made an immediate difference. They apply across every creative discipline I know.

Switching Modes Mid-Session

There are two fundamentally different mental states in creative work: the generative mode, where you’re making something, and the evaluative mode, or evaluating, where you’re judging it. They feel like the same thing, but they’re not. And trying to do them at the same time is one of the most effective ways to miss the mark on both.

Checking your stats mid-session is evaluating. Seeking feedback before something is finished is evaluating. Scrolling through other people’s work while you’re supposed to be making yours is evaluating. All of these pull you out of the generative state, and research on context switching shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully refocus after each interruption. In a 60-minute session, one distraction can cost you nearly half of it. How much?!?

When I stopped checking anything during a creative session, the quality of the time in that session changed. Not the length of it. The depth.

The fix is structural, not motivational: close the tabs. Turn off notifications. Put the phone in another room. Make evaluation mode physically unavailable during the making window. I use focus modes on the Mac. I have separate focus modes for music and writing. These hide the apps, and distractions that I don’t need.

This applies equally to the musician resisting the urge to check streams mid-session, the writer who keeps re-reading yesterday’s chapter instead of moving forward, the painter who stops to photograph and post every stage, and the filmmaker who reviews rushes before the shoot is finished. All those are valid actions, but not when you need to be in the flow

Starting Before I’d Finished

Creative work has a gravitational pull toward new beginnings. The new song idea, the new chapter concept, the new project: all of them have a shine that the project currently in progress has lost. The work-in-progress is familiar. The new idea is possibility.

“Oh shiny”

The problem is the pile that builds up. Every unfinished project carries a small but persistent cognitive weight. You’re not consciously thinking about it, but it’s there, quietly occupying space. And the more unfinished things there are, the heavier the collective weight.

There’s also the lesson you miss. Finishing is its own skill — completely distinct from starting — and you only develop it by doing it. The songwriter who has started forty songs and finished three hasn’t learned what finishing thirty-seven of them would have taught. The writer who abandons chapters when they get difficult hasn’t developed the muscle that pushing through would build. The photographer with a thousand ideas half-executed hasn’t found out what a single project taken to completion looks like.

When I started finishing things before starting new ones, two things happened: the mental load got lighter, and the quality of what I completed got better. Because I had no choice but to work through the difficult middle rather than escape into a new beginning.

Bonus thought: capturing the new idea somewhere safe so you don’t lose it, then deliberately returning to the current project, is a simple system that works. It might take a moment to get back into the “zone” (see above) but that is better than ditching the WIP

Trying to Make Each Piece Do Everything

This one is subtler and took me the longest to notice, and something I still struggle with. Every creative piece has a natural scope. A song does one thing well. A photograph captures one moment. A chapter moves one part of the story forward. The piece is what it is.

The temptation is to load it with everything you want to say. The song that needs to be the definitive statement. The painting that has to contain every idea from the series. The blog post that tries to address every angle of the topic. The result is almost always a piece that does many things adequately and none of them well.

Stopping this means accepting that the current piece doesn’t have to say everything. The other ideas belong in future work. Letting a piece be exactly what it is, without forcing it to be more, is one of the most practically useful things I’ve learned. It simplifies the making, and it improves the result.

Removal isn’t always about eliminating bad habits. Sometimes it’s about releasing the expectations that are weighing the work down.

Making Your Own Stop Doing List

The habits worth stopping are different for everyone. What gets in the way of your particular creative workflow is personal. But the question is worth asking directly: what am I currently doing in my creative process that isn’t actually helping?

Not what you should add. What you could remove.

One session spent honestly auditing what’s in your workflow, and what it’s actually doing, is often more useful than a new technique or a new tool. The friction that’s slowing you down might already be there, waiting to be identified and removed.

Thank you for reading this post. Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.
namaste
d
xox

If you enjoyed this post please support my writing by making a donation of any amount.

Sign up for my (ir)regular newsletter to keep up to date with my creative adventures, including special offers, and join me on Instagram | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest

19 July 2026