How Deadlines Help Creators Crush It

You do not create enough to be excellent. This is not a dig, this is a challenge. And it's true for every creator, including myself. Creators that crush are prolific and often have a rhythm or cadence or deadline to their work. So think of your favorite musician, your favorite podcast, TV show, book series. Even in business, they all are on a rhythm. So it's marketing content for sales, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Valentine's Day. Those types of holidays drive marketing content for Apple. There's an iPhone and software release schedule. When the new phones will come, when the new software will be implemented. What if you were able to implement deadlines that sustainably worked for you, that helped you excel in your content creation, release higher quality content and grow your business? What if you could produce more and more consistently without feeling like you were exhausting yourself in the process? And what if it was fun along the way? In today's episode of Creators that Crush, you'll learn how deadlines drive excellence, growth and quality. We'll learn how deadlines help creators with their creative process, how deadlines impact their content quality, how deadlines and content rhythm impact your quality of life, and how deadlines provide structure and help you make decisions. At the end, we'll have all of the components for you to create your sustainable content creation rhythm so that you can effectively use these deadlines in a way that supports your mental health, supports the things that you create and your business. Welcome to Creators that Crush, the show that helps creators go from crushed to crushing it. I'm your certified high performance coach and host, Sean Buckner. So how do deadlines help you crush it as a creator? So my wife and I were recently watching the SNL50 documentary. So it's like a forward episode series. The second one was on what it takes each week to produce an episode of Saturday Night Live. So very quickly the process is they go in and do light pitching and brainstorming on Monday. Tuesday is the start of the grueling week where they often don't sleep and they write skits that they will then pitch on Wednesday. We'll sit, get everyone in a room, they sit around a table with Lauren and, you know, pitch the things that they wrote the previous night. On Thursday and Friday, up to Saturday when the show goes live, they're building sets, they're creating costumes, they're getting everything ready for the skits, they're going through some dry runs or getting in front of an audience to see how the audience reacts. And then before the show goes live, they pick the skits that make the show that week. And out it goes. And through that process, it's intense. People are not sleeping. People are always worried about if their thing's going to get on, if they're going to do a whole week's full of work with an army of people. The amount of work that goes into these episodes is incredible. Or they have this amount of work that just at the last minute gets. The rug, gets pulled and they have to start again next week. So it's high pressure again and it could really hit your mental health, especially if you're not getting skits on. But this is the deadline, right? Saturday Night Live is the name of the show, but it's also the deadline for the production of the thing that helps organize the team, organize the writers, the staff, and all of the support to. This is the event where it's do or die. So good or bad, your show is going to go live every Saturday night. And it prevents rampant perfectionism. So there's no such thing as perfect art. And if you have that, that string of perfectionism in your blood, in your DNA, having a deadline can help you get around it because you have to produce, you have to show up. Like, this show goes live every Thursday, and I have to show up every week to make sure that that happens. You know, even when I am feeling sleepy or something in my life happens. Like the Thursday show has to happen each time. And some will be great, some will be less than great. But that variability is very human, and I think people really connect with that. So that's the first part of creating a sustainable content creation rhythm is that you have to define the deadline or cadence of your content release, your content rhythm. So whether it's weekly, monthly, quarterly, once a day, that's different for everyone. But this is the first component towards that sustainable process. Now, how do deadlines help your creative process? Well, they force you to define and refine your creative process and your work. So I'm a student of Brendan Burchard. He had a marketing training that he did a couple months back from the recording of this episode on how to create an amazing episode. Episode in this training was podcast episode, YouTube episode, chapter of a book, a particular, you know, single article. And what this training essentially was like, okay, you have your first draft of whatever you're doing that you write out, and it's just the brain dump. The second go over editing is looking for, how concise is it. The draft after that is what are catchphrases or hooky things that you can say, the next one is your audience, and so on. And so forth. I don't remember exactly all the things off the top of my head, but there's this idea of you write something and you revise it. You revise it, you revise it, revise it. And that story that I told about SNL and the writing process is you write the first draft and then the whole week you're refining it on the fly until it goes live, which gives it this phonetic energy, which is pretty cool. So deadlines help you focus your creative editing process because if you know at the end of the week, you have to then if you know by the end of the week the episode has to go live, you have to work backwards on when are you editing and updating drafts and when do you need to have the first draft done by. And as you go through your creation process, you'll naturally improve it. Hey, if you are loving this episode of Creators that Crush, as we're talking about productivity and content rhythm and you're like, hey, I really want to crush it more in my creative space, I want to let you know that I have a free 5 day email course that'll walk you through your performance on everything outside of the thing that you create. Go to creatorsrush.com provide your name and email, and I'll send you the free five day course where you get one email a day. Starting with focusing on getting clear on your goals, your psychology, your energy, your productivity, and then people skills. People love this course. So sign up again@creatorsch.com or check below in the show notes for the link. So second idea today is deadlines help you focus your creative editing process. How do deadlines impact quality? You might be thinking, hey, Sean, like, if I increase the cadence of the things that I create, it's going to tank the quality of the work. And to a certain extent that's correct, right? I'm not going to say that that's not going to happen, but it's also based on skill and it's based on the number of reps. So for example, there's a YouTuber that I follow April in alter in 20 and 20. In 2024, she, from January to November, she had produced like five videos on her YouTube channel. And her process was to do like 500,000 pages of notes, condense that down into a YouTube script and add all the editing bells and whistles, shout out to April and April Lynn. She does a fantastic job discussing and breaking down how YouTube works. But in December she's like, you know, I'm going to switch up the deadlines. That I have for myself and see if I can do one video a week, right. And so she's basically doubling her output in the month of December roughly just to see if she could do it. And she was able to mostly adhere to that. She did like four videos over 35 days. So a little bit over one video a week. She did it and she learned. And in part of her breaking down, what really didn't work for her was she felt like her super power was getting things to a point where she was really proud of the quality. And she stressed out incredibly throughout that process, but she was still able to do it. And the videos she created were high quality. But if you're worried about the quality of your content, you can always increase the increments between releases, right? Give yourself more time to figure it out. This is especially important for beginners. And as you build your creative career, you'll be able to shorten that and, and get a little bit more on a quicker pace and you'll find what works for you. And I hope you're hearing that throughout all of this. This is all up to you to pick these elements in your deadline and for your content rhythm and your unique mix will be sustainable for you and it might not be for anyone else, and that's okay. So I'm here to cheer you on and to really think through this. So, okay, moving on. How can deadlines and content rhythm impact your quality of life? So from the SNL story, right, it's, you can't do this intense 100% effort every week thing forever. There's generally an SNL a six months on, six months off schedule. So you do about 20 episodes a year. And even that, you know, you talk to people that like Andy Samberg or the Lonely island guys or Seth Meyers or Joey Fallon. People will talk about the show and that they loved the quality of work they were doing. It was fun being around high performers and people that they loved and admired. It was incredibly intense. It and not sustainable. And most cast members, from what I've seen or writers say there's about, you know, at year seven, you kind of burn out and you're like, okay, like for my mental health, I need to change things, right? But so, you know, there's a seven year ish span that most people do before they either, you know, stay forever like Keenan or leave or there's also this, the six months on, six months off. Because I think it would just churn out broken people if SNL was live every weekend throughout the year, right? Could they do it? Yes. Is it a good idea and healthy for the people that work on it, they need a break too. So thinking about the intensity, that's the thing to take away is, you know, what is the intensity of the schedule? Is it once a day, once a week, once a month, once a quarter, once a year? And what does that look like? Right. There's different levers of intensity you can pull on, just output or making sure your process is super streamlined or not. So what intensity would be best for your customers? Content creation. And think about that. Right? Then finally, how do deadlines help provide structure and help you make decisions? I have found that the as you are creating your sustainable content creation process, it's this balance of being structured enough. And I come from a technical background, so I like kind of like finding the methodology and just repeating that over and over over again. And sometimes because you know, the format of your show, the format or outline of your book, that frees you up to get creative when it comes to actually putting words to page. And so also if you're, it's going, you're going to be fighting your motivation and your energy is if every time, every week for my podcast, if I had to choose the music, choose the name, choose the art and you know, and not have templates and not have an expectation of how the show flows, it would just exhaust me. Right. You'd spend all this energy trying to make those micro decisions when 80% of the time it's going to be the same. And the container, it's the container for the good stuff that you put in there. Right? Right. Which is the goal. I hope I'm able to accomplish that every week. I'm sure there are better episodes than others, but that's part of the creative process. So. All right, so all of this boils down to how can you create your sustainable content rhythm for your business. Right. Again, the things that we talked about in this episode are what is the cadence or rhythm? So when are you releasing things? We're talking about your creative process. And when you do editing and refining and to increase quality or research, we talked about the space in between releases. Right. So related to your cadence. But if you want more quality, give yourself more time. And if you want to get really good, release more. So whatever that looks like for you is important, the intensity. So thinking about, okay, you might have a season of, you know, in the summer it's really intense, and in the spring and fall, it's kind of medium intense. In the winter, because of the holidays, we shift back and put it into like a maintenance mode. So what is like your quarterly intensity for your content rhythm? And then finally, you know, the what is the structure that helps keep you motivated. For me, and again in the podcast, it's having a specific outline and format that I'm using and tweaking as I go. It's about having templates for thumbnails and for doing the show notes and all of that kind of stuff. So my challenge to you right now is to go and create your content rhythm, your content schedule, your deadlines, your reoccurring deadlines, using these five criteria, thinking through them, what works for you or what you think might work for you. Give it a try for a couple of weeks for at least two or three things that you create. So that could be two or three days, two or three weeks, two or three months. And I think you will find that having this process defined for yourself will help you be more productive in your creative career. It'll help you crush it as a creator. I know you guys can do this. I'm cheering you on. And with that, this is creators that crush. I'm your host, Sean Butner signing off. We'll see you guys next week. As we've talked about your content rhythm and being productive creatively, you might be thinking to yourself, hey, I need a little bit more help. I know that. I've had experience that myself. I recently have hired a podcast coach, business coach, to help me with my creative business. And just getting that extra perspective of someone that's been through it or has a process to walk you through can be immensely helpful. I would love to offer you a free creator performance strategy session where we'll go through your life, your creative business, the things that you're struggling with, and the things that you want to get out of your creative business and create a strategy plan for you. And we do this through a questionnaire, and we do this through focusing on specific high performance habits any creator can implement to increase how they feel in their business, to feel less like an imposter, to feel more confident when you create. So if you are interested in getting a little bit more extra help, go to the link below in the show notes to schedule your creator strategy session. I have about 10 slots open each two weeks to do days. So if you're thinking about it, Definitely go to shawwater.com backslash apply and that will get you scheduled up.