Many of us started side projects during COVID and its range of lockdowns. We had more free time than ever and many of us filled that free time with something creative and artistic.
How lovely. A great way to change the narrative from something globally scarring to something in which we were able to find some form of silver living.
Now, many of us are tapering out with the time and motivation for these creative projects and that is a real shame.
Real life has mostly come back across the world and work has resumed its previous dominance. As such, many of our creative projects are lying neglected and even untouched in a nearby corner.
But, keeping up a creative project is something that is really great for all of us in a range of ways. Being creative can:
- Help us connect with our inner child
- Help us manage and minimise stress
- Give us a moment of mindfulness and peace
- Help us connect with others with similar passions and interests
- Offer us a profitable avenue for a creative side hustle
As such, keeping up with these COVID projects is something we should work hard to do.
How do we do it? You might ask.
I’ll tell you how.
Keep your work-life balance stable
COVID showed many of us a lot of hard truths about our lives and our societies, one of those being that many of us spend far too much time working. After the lockdowns have ended, many of us have gone back to the same old routines and this is the main reason that our projects lie neglected and unloved.
To keep up with your creative projects in a post-lockdown world, try your best to keep a healthy work-life balance.
When you aren’t working, don’t work.
When you are working, maximise your time.
Reinforcing your boundaries will help you find the time to fit in projects and joy into your life and it will stop you from becoming overwhelmed by work.
We all need balance.
Remember the joy it brought you
It’s very easy to forget what we went through as soon as it is over.
If you want to keep up with a project that you started through lockdown, try and ignite the joy it brought you in the first place. Remember why you started and what it brought you.
Try and bring yourself back to those long evenings where we couldn’t go anywhere and painting, blogging, sculpting, dancing, gardening, sketching, yoga… was all you had to keep you sane.
Remember this and try and bring it into the life you have now.
If it meant something to you once, it’s worth continuing again now.
Just do it
(Don’t sue me, Nike).
Sometimes the best advice we can hear is that we just need to do it.
There will always be a reason not to, an excuse, a get-out clause.
If you want to do something again, do it.
No one else is going to swoop in and do it for you, that’s for sure.
