Six Starter Hacks for your Inner Navigator
Recently I wrote that Your Inner Navigator is Not Enough. Sometimes, though, we are lucky to find that our inner navigator is all we need to navigate a creative experience.
There’s no right or wrong way to get started on a session of creative work or play. Follow your inner navigator or take a purposeful pause to plan and clear the way for a better experience and better work. Your inner navigator’s boot-up strategy may even function as a fully formed Daily Navigator, it just didn’t have that name and you don’t need a pencil or a keyboard.
Any path that serves your arrival at productive creative work is a genius one.
Achieving Lift-Off
A successful inner navigator will be savvy about getting you started whenever you want to get some creative work done. If that sounds like your inner navigator, it’s probably aided by simple tools that feel natural to you.
Actually, we can use any of the tricks below whether we’re just following our noses to the drawing board (inner navigator) or taking time to navigate consciously. These are ways to be more purposeful and aware about how to focus and win in today’s—or tonight’s—work session.
Still, these hacks have special appeal for our inner navigators—which are still helping to guide our creative work even when we are also navigating purposefully with a planning and insight tool. If a creativity tip works well for getting your work rolling, your inner navigator is pleased and will probably claim it and make it its own.
What Road Do You Take to Work?
Do you find yourself in any of these daily launch methods? Does your inner navigator perk up as you read one of them?
THE LIST. If you have a running list of things to do in your project, consulting that list might be all you need to refocus and jump in any time you’re not sure where to start working. Checking something off and maybe adding something new after you’ve worked keeps the list alive and invites you to return to it—your starting gun—soon.
RENEWING MOMENTUM. Do you find yourself reviewing previous work on the project—what you recently wrote, sketched, shaped, chose, accomplished, or had insights about—until you feel oriented and moved to pick up where you left off?
RITUAL ENERGY. You might get your ready-set-GO energy from a personal routine (perhaps making coffee, arranging your tools, and starting the music, but it could be anything) that tends to slide or nudge you right into your work.
JUST NOTHING. Forget all that ritual fiddling around to get ready to work. You could be someone who starts with nothing every day.
Do you gaze out the window, or at a wall, thinking nothing in particular, just because? Do you meditate to create that open space of inaction? Maybe you kick back and daydream, drifting away from what is to the place of what could be.
If your nothing-doing inspires your muse, or moves you to creative work, you have a lovely starter hack, whether or not that’s your intent. Maybe it’s also a powerful navigating tool for your creative work.
JUICE IT. Inspiration is a beautiful thing. Writers, and lots of other kinds of creatives, often like to dip into the writing of others (reading for pleasure, or copying out as a word flow kickstart, not plagiarizing, to be clear).
Whatever your creative medium is, a real Artist’s Date (thanks, Julia Cameron) or a daily inspirational moment in the presence of creative glory can get you going.
You needn’t be a poet to have creative juices stirred by a regular infusion of poetry. Or make that art, architecture, nature, spirit, color, sound, taste, fragrance, beautiful smiles...anything that pulls us into the wonder of art or beauty, creating or creation, can send us humming or running to our own creative work.
POWER TIME. Time itself, plus a device that commits a chunk of it just for your work NOW, does the trick for many. Do you set a timer for 15 minutes and find you can’t not begin when you press START? Maybe you’re a Pomodoro Method fan—working in sets of timed work broken up by defined rest periods.
You might love to write in timed sprints or you like to see how many image variations or off-the-wall ideas for your presentation or product you can create before you hear the buzzer.
Any timer trick that works for you is like channeling and focusing water flow to create hydro power. You’re channeling and focusing time to make creative power.
What Works for You?
Which trick does your inner navigator already use to get your work started?
Maybe you have a curated playlist of starter hacks.
If so, what else belongs on the list above?
Please share. Generosity is a creative act.