You’re in a good patch. Here’s why that’s also the most dangerous time.
There are periods — if you’ve been doing creative work long enough, you’ll know exactly what I’m describing — where you hit a vein.
The ideas are coming. Good ones. Connections you haven’t made before. Things clicking into place in the way they sometimes do when you’ve been doing the input work (reading, walking, observing, thinking) and the output work (making, writing, teaching) simultaneously, and something starts happening between them that is more than the sum of the parts.
You’re in a rich creative vein.
The natural response to this is to be delighted. To keep going. To mine it for everything it’s worth.
The risk is something I’ve started calling double-handling. And it’s one of the main ways creative people waste the most productive periods of their working lives.
Double-handling is what happens when you engage with your own material more times than is useful.
You have the idea. You record it (good). You go back and listen to the recording to check it’s there (fine, once). You listen again to add context (reasonable). You start to structure it into something more formal (necessary at some point). You restructure it (sometimes necessary). You revisit it to make sure the structure is right before you write the actual thing (this is where it starts to go wrong). You write a draft. You read the draft and decide it needs a different angle. You go back to the voice memo to see if the original idea supports the different angle…
By this point, you’ve handled the same material four or five times and produced nothing publishable. The vein is still there, but you’re circling it rather than mining it. Triple-handling. Quadruple-handling. Each pass reducing the energy available for the actual production.
I know this from the inside. I know exactly what it feels like to be busy with creative material while not actually making creative progress.
There’s a question I’ve started asking myself when I feel like I’m working hard on something: Am I generating, or am I reviewing?
Generating is moving forward. Writing new sentences. Making new marks. Recording thoughts you haven’t recorded before. Building structure that doesn’t exist yet. This is the work.
Reviewing is moving sideways. Going back over territory you’ve already covered. Checking, verifying, assessing, reorganising. This is also work — it’s the editorial work, the curation, the quality control. But it’s different work. And doing it when you should be generating is one of the ways creative people stay very busy while producing very little.
There’s also the question that I find more uncomfortable: how do you not end up wasting this short life?
I mean this seriously. We are given a finite amount of time in which to do things that matter to us. Creative people — the ones I know, the ones I teach, the ones whose work I admire — often have more ideas than they will ever be able to pursue. The limitation is not inspiration. The limitation is time and execution.
Which means that every hour spent double-handling existing material is an hour not spent generating new material. Every session circling the same notes is a session not spent making the thing those notes were supposed to lead to.
This is not a productivity speech. I’m not interested in optimising you into a content machine. But I am interested in the gap between what you have in you and what actually makes it into the world. That gap matters. It matters to you, and I’d argue it matters more broadly — creative work that exists can do things; creative work that doesn’t exist can’t do anything at all.
The practical approach I’m trying to build is this: a clear distinction between capture sessions and production sessions.
Capture sessions: voice memos, notes, fragments, anything that preserves the idea before it evaporates. Quick, low-fidelity, not trying to make it good. Just trying to make it exist.
Production sessions: taking the captured material and making something publishable with it. Not reviewing the captured material to see if it’s good enough to work with. Just working with it. Trusting that if it’s in the archive, it was worth capturing.
The two modes have completely different qualities. Capture is light and fast and can happen in bad conditions — mid-walk, half-awake, in the car, standing in the kitchen. Production needs proper time and attention.
The mistake is using production time for reviewing instead of building. Once you’ve captured something, you’ve done that work. The next time you touch it, you should be making something new from it, not confirming that it exists.
There’s a corollary to this: some ideas just needed to leave your head.
Not every captured idea deserves a full production run. Some thoughts are pressure release — they needed to be externalised to free up space for the next thing, and once externalised, their job is done. They don’t need to become a blog post. They don’t need to become a course module. They needed to stop being in your brain.
Being able to identify these — and to let them go without feeling obliged to develop them further — is itself a skill worth developing. Not every voice memo is a commission. Some of them are just exhaust.
The rich creative vein is real, and worth mining properly. The way to honour it is to produce from it — not to circle it indefinitely, adding ever more layers of handling to material that was ready to be used the first time you touched it.
Write the thing. Publish the thing. Start the next thing.
Next time you sit down to work: are you generating or reviewing? Be honest. If you’re reviewing, set a timer for ten minutes, and when it goes off, stop reviewing and start making something new. The material is ready. Are you?
CP52 Stage: Stage 4 — The Work (doing the creative work daily)
Series: The Creative Clog Series
Image note: A mine shaft — rich seam visible, untouched. Or a notebook with layers of annotations, getting further from the original idea rather than closer to it.
