Every few minutes, more communications are being sent your way. Emails, text messages, voice mails, instant messages, twitter messages, facebook posts…and the list goes on.

Your human response? You simply try to stay afloat. You peck away at the latest communications at the top of your many inboxes. And since the flow of communication never ends, you slip into a life of what I have come to call “reactionary workflow.”

For those of us with great ideas and bold goals for the future, reactionary workflow is a big problem. If we spend our working hours reacting to the incoming barrage of communication, we will fail to be proactive with our energy. Our long-term aspirations suffer as a result.

For the past five years, i’ve been interviewing uber-productive leaders and teams – people at companies like Google, IDEO, and Disney, and individuals like author Chris Anderson and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. I’ve never asked them how they come up with ideas. I’m not interested. My fascination is how they make their ideas happen, time and time again. The outcome of this long project is MAKING IDEAS HAPPEN, being published this month.

Many of the people I met have developed ways to combat reactionary workflow. Here are a few tips on how they do it:

Create windows of non-stimulation.
Once you open the door to communications overload, you could spend all day reacting to what’s thrown at you. Piers Fawkes, founder and editor of the marketing consultancy PSFK, reserves a good chunk of his morning –  from 7-10am every day – to do research and digest the day’s trends and news prior to going through his email. Proactively blocking out time for creating and absorbing – rather than just responding – is a key tactic of productive creatives.

Keep Two Lists
When it comes to organizing the day’s tasks – and how your energy will be allocated – create two lists: one for urgent items and another for important ones. Long-term goals and priorities deserve a list of their own and should not compete against the urgent items that can easily consume your day. Once you have two lists, you can preserve distinctly different periods of time for focus on each.

Schedule intense periods of processing at a consistent time every day.
During the research for the book, I met a number of people that swore on the benefit of “power hours.” These individuals would try to compress all response-related work into pre-determined short periods of time every day, usually 1-2 hours of un-interrupted in-box clearing. The notion of compartmentalizing reactionary workflow was a theme across the most productive leaders I met.

Don’t hoard urgent items.
Even when you delegate operational responsibilities to someone else, you may still find yourself hoarding urgent items as they arise. When you care so deeply about a project, you likely prefer to resolve things yourself. Say an e-mail arrives from a client with a routine problem. Even though the responsibility may lie with someone else on your team, you might think, “Oh, this is really a quick fix; I’ll just take care of it.” And gradually your energy will start to shift away from long-term pursuits. Hoarding urgent items is one of the most damaging tendencies I’ve noticed in creative professionals that have encountered early success. When you are in the position to do so, challenge yourself to delegate urgent items to others.

Don’t dwell.
When urgent matters arise, they tend to evoke anxiety. We dwell on the potential negative outcomes of all the challenges before us—even after action is taken. Worrying wastes time and distracts us from returning to the important stuff. When it comes to addressing urgent items, break them down into Action Steps and challenge yourself to reallocate your energy as soon as the Action Steps are completed. It is also helpful to consider whether or not certain concerns are within or beyond your influence. Often your worries are for the unknown and there is nothing more you can do to influence the outcome. Once you have taken action to resolve a problem, recognize that the outcome is no longer under your influence.

How do you avoid a life of reactionary workflow? You need discipline and a dose of confidence. Recognize your tendency to surf the stream of incomings, and gain confidence in the potential of being proactive. It is easy to sit there and react all day. You’ll never run out of work to do. But your bold ideas will suffer unless you take your energy by the reigns.

Scott Belsky studies exceptionally productive people and teams in the creative world. He is the founder/CEO of Behance and is the author of Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming The Obstacles Between Vision & Reality (Portfolio, April 2010).

It doesn’t matter whether you are an architect, gardener, or bus driver, everyone has the ability to find the distinct beauty embedded deep inside their daily grind. The problem isn’t capturing our creativity, as individual inspiration is a steady pulse that beats within us all. The problem is keeping those embers hot once we have them in our grasp.

Keeping the flames of our creativity close to an inferno takes decisive commitment. Fire dies without tinder, so will creativity collapse to ash without the needed fuel. Coaxing our creative core requires listening to the quiet whisper of instinct, trusting the honor of its voice, and then doing everything you can to bargain, cajole, or trick yourself into following its advice to the letter.

The start of any project is often the most difficult as the rewards are slow to arrive. Yet taming the creative beast is well worth the best of your patience. You will eventually reach the tipping point where your brain can function with automaticity and your every action is but an extension of breath.

No one builds a cabinet by bare hands alone. To craft the most from your creativity, you must have your best toolbox always on hand. Individual methods are as different as the people wielding them. I could never hope to speak for everyone, but here are a few of the things that always work for me.

Find your rhythm

Your body knows when it’s time to eat, sleep, and regulate. Your mind knows when it is most creative. If you have the flexibility in your day to maintain a schedule, then finding an internal beat and sticking to it might offer your creativity the most motion. Me, I prefer late morning through early afternoon. When the sun is sitting high in the center of the sky, my mind is then mostly prize and very little cracker jack. When I have to work late in the evening, I am resentful. My mind is slower and my effort belabored. This internal reaction is as steady as the sunrise and I do everything I can to adjust my workload accordingly.

Build yourself a studio

This is easier than it sounds. Your studio can consist of a well lit corner in a 400 square foot apartment. The trick is to train your thought to traffic its creativity in the same neighborhood each and every day. If you use a particular area to be creative on a consistent basis, your mind will have a natural stimulus every time it’s near.

Use a quality toolbox

Your tools don’t have to be top of the line, but they do have to work for you. From the computer on your desk to the ink in your pen, using materials that do not infuse efficiency into your day will only slow you down. Set aside time, again on a consistent basis, to experiment with the various tools that will help you build the box that’s best for you.

Picture the milestones leading to the finish line

It isn’t enough to imagine how nice it will be when your project is complete. You must articulate the steps you need to move from A to B. Not only is this necessary to arriving at the finish line, it’s fundamental to the motivation needed to endure a daunting task. By building reward for yourself, you are fueling the engine that gets things done. As you pass those benchmarks along the way, you will have all the motivation you need to keep going. It is easy to keep rambling down the road when you’re driving toward sunset and leaving the big empty behind, but it’s important to evaluate your environment along the way. Maybe you didn’t get what you had hoped to get done. Sharpen your focus and go at it again. If you are happy with how much you’ve grown, congratulations, keep on doing what you’re doing. Either way, you’ve covered distance and now know the road a little better.

Keep twisting the Rubik’s Cube

Don’t give up. Difficult tasks are there for a reason. They force our brain to invent solutions. This is what makes us human. It might be necessary to set something aside for a while, but you must never abandon a task entirely, because you feel frustrated. Every problem you solve will sharpen your confidence, enhance your intelligence, and build on the overall body of your finished work.

Everybody’s creative process is different. My wife and I share few specific habits, you and I probably share even less, but the best tip is universal. Pay attention to what you’re doing. Never be content to do something just because it’s the way you did it yesterday. We’re meant to evolve, there’s no reason we can’t do it on a daily basis.

Read more from Sean Platt at Writer Dad and Ghostwriter Dad, or subscribe to his feed.