How My Productivity Killed My Creativity [Summer Read-Aloud]

  Sam Vander Wielen: Hey there, and welcome back to On Your Terms®. So for the next couple of weeks, I’m gonna be doing something a little bit differently as part of a little summer series of sorts. For the next few weeks, I’ll be reading you a few of my essays that I’ve written on my Substack. My Substack is just called Sam Vander Wielen, because as you can probably tell by now, I’m really, really good with coming up with creative names for things.

But I have a Substack called Sam Vander Wielen, where I share personal essays and behind the scenes, a lot about grief and loss, coming back from that grief and loss, and learning to, I don’t know, uncouple myself from overconsumption and overworking, and really learning how to be more present in my life.

So all you have to do for the next couple of weeks is just kick back, put in your headphones, maybe even go for a walk, and listen to my reading of this week’s essay from Substack. If you’d like to subscribe to my Substack so that you can also read these on Substack or on the app, go ahead and just click the link down below. It’s completely free.

How my productivity killed my creativity. We’ve lost the plot when it comes to creating content.

Hi, friend. So for nearly the first time in 10 years since I’ve run an online business, I’m running low on content ideas. I know. Did you hear those alarm bells going off too? This is like me telling you that the ocean ran out of water, or water, as we would say in Philadelphia.

Since I started my business, my brain has felt like a never-ending Price is Right wheel. Whether I was sleeping, in the middle of a tax meeting with my accountant, or watching the worst movie of all time, that is Aloha, thank me later for not having to watch that one, but I watch it because my Philly guy, Bradley Cooper, is in it. I have always had an endless stream of ideas. I have never run out of ideas.

I didn’t even mind getting up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom because at least it gave me a moment to write down all of the newsletter ideas that I had just dreamt about. But then earlier this year, I announced 2026 was my gap year, which by the way, was just meant to be a year of more spaciousness, creative play, and white space. More than anything, it was supposed to be a year where I took the pressure off of myself, which I’m not doing that great at. But it was not a year off, even though that’s what people thought. And in this paragraph, I link to all the articles I’ve written so far about my gap year, if you wanna read those.

To create the spaciousness I said I wanted, I started batching to get ahead. My emails, my podcast, recording two to three episodes every other week, all of my social content, like up to 20 posts at a time. Here’s the thing. My team needs my part of the project, like the brainstorming, researching the concept, scripting it, writing it, and then actually writing and recording the content itself in order to do their jobs.

Like back in the day when it was just me, I could do things on the fly and be haphazard about it because I was the one touching the content from beginning to end. But now that people rely on my domino to be the first one to fall in a long chain of production, I can’t do that anymore.

Usually, I’m all about optimization and batching and anything that helps you to get a lot of stuff done at once versus having to do it all in little chunks and repeating yourself along the way. And don’t get me wrong, being consistent with your content is important. It’s how you build an audience. I’ve sent a weekly newsletter called Sam’s Sidebar, which I’ve linked to in this article, to now over 67,000 people every single week since 2017.

But being so productive and highly optimized comes at a cost, whether that’s burnout, creating content you’re not passionate about just to check off a box, or has been my case lately, killing your creativity.

The content rules that we put on ourselves and that are reinforced by experts on social media prioritize optimization and productivity over originality and creativity. Creators are exhausted. I bet you listening to this are exhausted, and to me, this is why.

You probably feel like it’s harder than ever to get heard or seen on social media, right? So what do we do? We shout louder. We shout more. We create more content with more bombastic and inflammatory hooks just to get people’s attention. We’re all just screaming to get people’s attention. It’s kind of like we’re playing the lottery to get people’s attention.

Everyone’s chasing down trends, creating content on the coattails of somebody else who’s created something taste-worthy, which fades as quickly as it blossoms.

It feels like a digital pipe getting clogged with more and more slop every day. That’s why none of your good content gets seen. It’s too hard to be heard above all of the noise. We’re not creating content because we feel moved or because we have something truly exciting to share. Half the time we’re not even creating content we love.

Most of the time we’re doing it because we’re keeping up with some optimized schedule we’ve been told to maintain, and AI has only made this worse. The more people use AI for generative content, the more that the pipe is getting clogged.

I sat in an AI lecture recently where the very smart presenters talked about how we can use AI to generate so much more content so much faster.

“Oh, yeah, more content,” I thought, rolling my eyes. “Just what the world needs.” If the content we create with our own beautiful brains doesn’t rise above the algorithm, what makes you think a worse version of computer-generated slop will? By using AI for generative content, we’re feeding the beast of optimization.

The more everybody uses it to create content, the more content will be required to stand out. It’s a never-ending content arms race, except the only ones in the race are ourselves. AI’s entire vibe is predicated on the fact that we need to produce more faster. It allegedly helps take things off our plates, except all it’s actually doing is making everybody’s plate bigger, since AI has just upped the ante of productivity.

By trying to maintain everybody else’s pace or the pace required to remain relevant online, I was putting too much pressure on my creativity to pump out ideas faster than an H&M T-shirt assembly line. My best, most creative ideas come from actually living my life. The more I do offline, the more movies I see or books I read, the more places I go that I’ve never been before, the more I have to say.

I’ll reiterate what I said at the start. Consistency for a business is important. I think what I’ve learned so far this year, though, is that consistency has to be balanced with actually living so you have enough to consistently talk about. If all you do is work or create, especially on some rigid schedule, you’re not refilling your creative stores enough to generate again.

Goodness knows I don’t have the answer as to how to do this, but I am certainly working on it. Okay, I have to go because a fire just broke out across the street from the coffee shop I’m writing at, and I’m grabbing a bucket of water until the fire department gets here. No joke. This is gonna make for some great content.

And then I link to a video of the actual fire happening real time at the coffee shop. If you click over to read this on Substack, leave a comment and let me know how you’re feeling content and creativity-wise in your business these days. I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast.

You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.