Podcast: Ashlee Gadd on banishing boredom and keeping creativity alive

Jul 1

We talk in Exhale pretty often about social media and sharing our art with the world. We wish we didn’t have to -- don’t we all just want to create our art and say “TA-DA!” and reap the rewards? But: sharing our art with the world is a constantly evolving medium and because of that, it’s a topic we ourselves have to revisit pretty often to make sure we are using the right tools -- and in a way that doesn’t drive us completely bananas in the process. How can we best use our energy to move the conversations in our communities forward? How can we find joy in being online? We asked Ashlee Gadd to come on the show and share with us how she’s been managing her creative energy and her online time in order to make space for some big projects.

Resources we mentioned:

Follow Ashlee on Instagram, read her blog, and subscribe to her newsletter.

The idea of “deep work” comes from Cal Newport’s book of the same name.

Wanting to lean farther into focusing your own energies but not sure how to get started? We’ve got a reading guide for Greg McKeown’s fantastic book, Essentialism, in the Creative Library.

We’ve of course talked about social media on Exhale before:

Exhale Podcast #32 The WHY of Social Media & Exhale Podcast #33: The HOW of Social Media.

Sonya created two excellent resources that live in the Creative Library under the “Artist Toolbox” section: Creating for Social Media & Consuming Social Media.

Here’s Ashlee’s Exhale newsletter intro on boredom from February 2021.

A quote from this episode:

“Something I try to be really strict about is separating creating time from working time. For me, creating time is typically writing, and working is everything else: emails, website updates, Instagram… that all goes in a different bucket, and I really do try to separate the time that I spend in both of those things, so when I’m creating, I don’t have any other tabs open; when I’m working, I have 18 tabs open.” --- Ashlee Gadd

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