For athletes, a warm-up routine strengthens muscles, mentally prepares you for the game, and helps you form good habits. Because of this, author and podcast host Srinivas Rao believes that creatives should adopt this habit as well. Of course, athletes who don’t first warm-up run the risk of pulling muscles. You, however, aren’t going to hurt your back if you sit down and start working immediately. Your work itself will benefit immensely from a pregame routine though. For example, when writing:
Writers have to warm up too. We warm up by putting our pen on a page and fingers on the keyboard and tap, tap, tap. It doesn’t really matter if anything particularly coherent shows up. We just need to get our fingers in motion. We need our fingers to loosen up. After all, painting vivid pictures that engrave deeper memories by tapping away at a keyboard is not exactly a natural state.
And in the same vein as getting a few practice lay-ups in before the real game, Rao suggests we need to loosen up and find our creative state before beginning the work. This is easier said than done, as there will also be days when we simply do not feel motivated to start. Behavior and habit writer James Clear encourages us to use our warm-up to not only physically get ready, but mentally as well. Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: A good pregame routine starts by being so easy that you can’t say no to it. You shouldn’t need motivation to start your pregame routine. My writing routine starts by getting a glass of water. So easy, I can’t say no.
Step 2: Your routine should get you moving towards the end goal. For example, if your goal is to write, then your routine should bring you closer to the physical act of writing.
Step 3: You need to follow the same pattern every single time. The primary purpose of your pregame routine is to create a series of events that you always perform before doing a specific task. Your pregame routine tells your mind, “This is what happens before I do ___.”
Being a professional in your field means having the ability to create on demand. If we are subject to our creative whims, it is nearly impossible to accomplish anything. By having a warm-up routine, you will be able to enter that state of creative flow whenever it is required, no matter where you are. It can be as simple as sketching your breakfast while you wait for your coffee to finish brewing, or writing for five minutes about the first thing you see, or writing a few lines of code for a silly side project that carries no deadlines. The goal is to loosen up your imagination, strengthen your skill set, and bring your best to the real game—your work.
Relevant: More Insights on Building a Rock-Solid Routine
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