What Multitasking Was Really Doing to My Creativity
- 11 minutes ago
- 7 min read
During July and August, I completely neglected posting my long-form YouTube videos and podcast episodes.
(and instead, I was playing with EmoteLab and made my custom emotes hehe)
Which is pretty embarrassing to admit, especially since I'm always talking about how consistency is key to surviving on social media! So... I'm feeling a bit bashful writing this post(and talking about it on my podcast episode), to be honest.
These past two months were creatively rough, and for most of that time, I felt completely stuck in my workflow.
Today, I want to walk you through what was actually happening during that silence, and chat with any fellow artists out there who are chasing multitasking, because I'm really not convinced it's helping us the way we think it is!
The Wake-Up Call
Toward the end of June, I had this terrifying realization.
"Wait, the second draft of Book 2 hasn't moved at all, has it?"
From there, through July and August, I threw myself into writing, plus commissions, plus everything else. And I didn't have enough energy resources and mental capacity to handle all the other projects like writing blogs, recording podcasts, and editing my videos.
If you've listened to my podcasts or read other posts of mine, you probably know I'm a pretty optimistic person who jumps into anything I want to do almost immediately.
That's exactly how I ended up opening commissions on VGen, I thought "I kind of want to draw a lot," and there wasn't much of a business plan behind it beyond that.
Commissions are genuinely fun and rewarding! (by the way, I'm now verified on Vgen, so if you've been thinking about commissioning me, now's a good time to check it out...)
But here's the catch, and it's a good problem to have in one sense: because these are projects clients are paying for, the pressure to finish them fast grew stronger and stronger.
I ended up pouring a huge amount of time into commission work specifically.
So between book production, video production, commissions, and various illustration streams, I was juggling everything at once and everything started to feel neglected.
Losing the Big Picture
In the perfect world, we could plan something like this: 2 hours of working on commissions, 1.5 hours of doing social media stuff, 3 hours of writing, 1 hour of editing videos...
But chopping all these projects into pieces did something I didn't expect: I completely lost sight of what I should actually be prioritizing.
I should have wrapped the writing and sent it out at the beginning of August. I couldn't. I kept pushing back finishing Book 2 and getting it to beta readers, all the way to mid-August.
Finishing a task feels great, and slamming that Deliver Commission button feels so incredibly rewarding.
But working on a massive project, without knowing when you'll finally cross the finish line, is exhausting and takes a ton of energy and determination.
So instead of focusing on writing Book 2, I kept gravitating toward commissions and other smaller projects.
On top of that, I lost the ability to tell apart what I want to do, what I have to do, and what I should do. My brain would just short-circuit before I could even sort through it, which, looking back, is a pretty ridiculous place to end up.
This was also proof that Notion, which I'd been using for task management, had completely stopped working for me.
I set Notion up at the start of this year to manage both my projects and my day-to-day tasks. But once again, it didn't work for me.
Yes, it looks pretty. It looks well-organized. But it doesn't help me to know what to do today, what to do in 3 days, or what to do in a year.
I understand now: digital tools for task management just don't suit me.
Because you can dump an infinite number of tasks into them.
My head is already overflowing with ideas and things I want to do. And that overflow is exactly what keeps pulling me away from the one task that's actually urgent right now. It drains my motivation before I even start.
The Science of Decision Fatigue
I read somewhere that our brains actually burn physical energy just from making decisions.
Which tracks, because during July and August, my brain completely overheated trying to process what felt like an infinite task list.
I also think this is just a trait of mine: once I start something, if I don't finish it in one sitting, it feels awful!! It got stuck in my head, unresolved, nagging at me forever.
That means slow, time-consuming projects like writing a book or drawing a manga, don't really match how my brain is wired.
Other tasks, like commissions, blog posts, or short videos, I can finish in a single day. But that also means they don't finish unless I give them a full day. And if tasks like that keep stacking up, day after day, there's simply no time left over to write a book.
Once I realized how bad it had gotten, I hit the brakes. I paused podcast updates, blog updates, video updates, and focused on finishing Book 2 first.
For someone whose main battlefield is social media, that's a genuinely risky move. The algorithm rewards creators who post every few days, not ones who go quiet for two months.
But I didn't have a choice. Focusing on branches and leaves while forgetting to water the trunk isn't sustainable, and neglecting book production, which is the actual root of everything I do, would have meant pedaling backward on my whole career.
Finally handing Book 2 to my beta readers felt like the first real breath I'd taken in weeks.
My New System: Going Analog
Here's the honest conclusion: I can't multitask. Or maybe it's not that I can't... it's that trying to navigate a non-functioning Notion, a weak-willed brain, and an endless bubbling-up of things I want to do, all at once, is simply impossible.
So I changed my approach.
I'm still using Notion. I just narrowed its job down to project management only. What I changed my mind about was task management specifically.
I mentioned this a bit on Ko-fi already, but I've moved from digital back to analog. The point is to limit the thing that's both the blessing and the curse of digital tools: the ability to stuff in infinite tasks.
I laminated some magnetic sheets, cut them into small pieces, and stuck them on my fridge. Tasks now go into categories: things to do today, things to do in three days, things to do this week, and things to do by the end of the month.
The advantage is huge, the number of tasks stays finite, and I can see everything else at a glance.
With digital tools, either the task list would balloon out of control, or I'd lose sight of everything except whatever I was hyperfocused on.
With this system, I can see today's tasks while still checking tomorrow's and this week's, all at once.
The detailed parts of those bigger projects like references, data, granular breakdowns, still live in Notion.
That's the one thing Notion is genuinely great for: keeping every past post and script organized together in one place.
Why Sticky Notes Didn't Work
I tried sticky notes/Post-its first. They didn't suit me.
The problem is the glue. Post-its only survive a handful of stick-and-peel cycles. If I wanted to bump today's task to next week, I couldn't just relocate it. Once it's written, it's written, and constantly using and tossing them felt wasteful and honestly a little uncomfortable.
Small magnetic sheets solved all of that. As long as it's on the fridge, I can move it anywhere, stick and peel it endlessly, add to it, rewrite it, or erase a finished task and write a new one in its place.
Returning to a Physical Planner
I also picked up a physical planner.
Back in college, managing my schedule with a paper planner worked really well. I had classes, which meant I was naturally blocking out time, fitting in homework, fitting in drawing. Looking back, I think I was actually pretty good at time management then.
Right now, without classes or assignments structuring my days, I have total freedom. And that freedom has honestly been sweeping me around more than helping me.
The planner is meant to fix that. I like the timeline-style layout, where each day is blocked out and you fill it in as you go: drawing until noon, heading out in the evening, that kind of flow.
I tried this in Notion too, but Notion splits each day onto its own separate page, so nothing ever felt continuous. Every day felt disconnected from the last, and I didn't like that. Needing my phone or laptop just to check it didn't help either.
I want to get back to that college-era habit: protecting and actually using my own time, the old-fashioned way.
I still don't know if this new system is the right long-term fit. It's only been a few weeks! But I have real hope it suits me better than Notion ever did.
So, what I really wanted to say with this post:
Getting caught up in small tasks can make it impossible to ever finish the big ones.
Managing tasks digitally comes with real risk. It works brilliantly for some people and just doesn't for others(like me!).
Sometimes having less flexibility helps more than having infinite options ever could.
And if there's a season where you need to focus on one big project, giving yourself permission to make that call matters!
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