Updated June 14, 2026
Some weeks I can bang out creative project after creative project without much pause in between, moving from one thing to the next with energy to spare. Other weeks it’s like pulling teeth to accomplish even the bare minimum. The work is the same. The deadlines are the same. But something is different — and whatever it is, it’s not on my schedule.
I’ve been self-employed long enough to know this is real, not imagined. And I’ve talked to enough other creative professionals to know I’m not alone in it. The ebb and flow of creative energy and productivity is a genuine phenomenon, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make it go away — it just means you end up working evenings and weekends to compensate for the low cycles, which is its own kind of exhausting.
So what’s actually going on?
Honestly, I’m not entirely sure. What I do know is that the cycles seem to be influenced by a combination of things — how much sleep I’m getting, where I am in a project (beginnings are energizing, middles are hard), how varied my workload is, the time of year, and whether I’ve been spending enough time away from the screen doing things that have nothing to do with work.
Birdwatching, for the record, is genuinely restorative in a way that scrolling through social media absolutely is not.
What I’ve learned to do about it
After a long time of fighting the cycles, I’ve gotten better at working with them. A few things that actually help:
- Notice the pattern. Once you accept that low cycles are real and recurring rather than a personal failing, they become less alarming. They pass.
- Use the low cycles for low-stakes tasks. Administrative work, filing, invoicing, inbox cleanup — things that need to happen but don’t require peak creative energy. Save the hard creative work for when you’re on.
- Get away from the desk. Sitting in the seat waiting for productivity to arrive is sometimes useful and sometimes a complete fool’s errand. Learning which situation you’re in takes practice.
- Protect the high cycles fiercely. When you’re on — really on — that is not the time to schedule calls, handle admin, or get pulled into anything that isn’t the work itself. Those windows are valuable. Use them.
- Accept that evenings and weekends will sometimes be part of it. This used to bother me more than it does now. The work gets done when the work gets done. The goal is to make the overall pattern sustainable, not to force creativity into a nine-to-five box it was never designed to fit.
The mystery hasn’t fully resolved itself after all these years. But it’s less disruptive than it used to be — mostly because I stopped treating the low cycles as a problem to be solved and started treating them as a signal to be read.
If you’re a fellow creative who has figured out something I haven’t, I’d genuinely love to hear it.
