Develop a Pre-Play Ritual for Your Creative Work
Warm-up routines and pre-game rituals are fairly common among athletes, but we usually don’t think about them with other things. On Medium, writer Srinivas Rao notes that pre-game ritual is useful for creative people as well.
Using a letter as an example, Rao explains why the pre-game ritual is important:
Writers need to warm up, too. We warm up by placing the pen on the page and fingers on the keyboard and clicking, clicking, clicking. It really doesn’t matter if anything particularly coherent is found. We just need to get our fingers moving. We need to relax our fingers. After all, drawing vivid pictures that leave deep memories by tapping on a keyboard is not entirely natural.
Of course, your ritual depends on what kind of creative work you are doing. If you’re writing, that could just mean dropping 1000 words per page no matter what. If you’re an artist, this might mean drawing on a napkin for free, if you’re a programmer, it might mean writing a few lines of code for a side project, and if you’re a speaker, it might mean telling a funny story in the mirror. It doesn’t matter what it is. It’s about giving yourself an easy way to warm up before you start working on the present.
Writers Need to Warm Up Like Athletes | Medium through 99U