Ep 132: Gaining & Sustaining Margin
How Creative Professionals Can Gain and Sustain Margin Without Burning Out
SUMMARY
Are you constantly racing against deadlines, working late nights to bring your creative vision to life, only to end up delivering something "safe" instead of spectacular? You're not alone. In this episode of Creativity Made Easy, I'm sharing insights from my keynote at the Salk Conference 2025, where I revealed why 74% of church creatives—and countless professionals across all creative industries—experience burnout, and more importantly, what you can do about it.
Here's the uncomfortable truth: most creatives get to about the 80% completion mark on their projects and bail. Not because they lack talent or dedication, but because they didn't give themselves enough margin to execute their vision the way they originally conceived it.
You've been there. That brilliant opener you planned—the one with interpretive dance, live drawing, slam poetry, and the pastor lowering from the ceiling? It becomes an acoustic guitar and a tired worship song because somewhere between conception and execution, your margin disappeared.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
⚡️ Gaining margin requires upfront work, but sustaining it requires communication and discipline. You can't wish your way to better time management. Just like financial debt, the margin deficit you've accumulated happened gradually over time, and it will take intentional effort to recover it.
⚡️ Stop living in the land of DUE and start planning with DO dates. The DO vs DUE Framework transforms deadline-driven chaos into proactive work planning by building in 25-40% buffer time between when you need to DO the work and when it's DUE.
⚡️ Your energy patterns matter more than your time blocks. A time and energy audit reveals that many creatives spend their highest-energy hours on low-value tasks, while saving creative work for when they're mentally drained.
NOTABLE QUOTES
💬 "In order to gain margin in your creative work, you're going to have to put in some extra work upfront. You didn't lose the margin to execute with excellence overnight—it happened gradually over time."
💬 "Margin isn't what's left after your work is done. It's what makes your best work possible in the first place."
💬 "If you have five tasks that take two hours to complete but eight hours of meetings and you're not prepared to work 10 hours that day, you've already messed yourself up."
EPISODE RESOURCES
dustinpead.com/free - More frameworks and resources for creative leaders
TRANSCRIPT
Hey creatives, you know how I'm always talking about creative systems that work? Well, that actually includes your money too. If you're still shoving receipts in a shoe box and hoping for the best come tax time, we need to talk about the Core Group. They're profit-first certified accountants who actually understand the creative hustle. No judgment, just clarity. They help you build financial systems that create margin in your business instead of stress. And this is coming from me—I'm a loyal Core Group subscriber. So check them out at coregroupus.com. That's C-O-R-E G-R-O-U-P-U-S dot com. Check out the Core Group today.
Did you know that 74% of creatives have experienced burnout? And the secret to breaking free isn't about working harder. It's about creating the right kind of space between your commitments. Let's get into it.
Taking creatives from chaos to clarity. Welcome back to Creativity Made Easy. This is the podcast where we help creative professionals transform chaos into clarity. I'm your host, Dustin Pead, creative consultant, and I'm on a mission to help creatives know themselves, their process, and their teams so that they can create with efficiency as they scale together.
Today's episode's a little bit different. I'm going to take you inside of a keynote that I delivered at the Salk Conference 2025 where I spoke to a room full of church creatives about gaining and sustaining margin. Now, while I was speaking specifically to folks in ministry, here's what I want you to hear: these principles apply to every creative professional, whether you're working in a church or an agency, a studio, or you're building your own creative business. Burnout does not discriminate and neither do the solutions.
So if you're not in the church world, don't check out. The DO vs DUE framework, the Time and Energy Audit, those 90-minute focus blocks—these are tools that work for everyone who creates for a living. Because at the end of the day, we all face the same challenge: too many ideas and not enough margin to execute them with excellence.
Thanks so much Ryan. Appreciate y'all sticking it out. Y'all are the troopers—last breakout session, post-lunch, Friday, Sunday's coming. I'm tired, let's just go home right now. No, I'm just kidding. I'm excited to talk to y'all about this.
I was telling them in the back before we were coming up here—I spoke yesterday. Was anyone in the breakout I did yesterday on effective one-on-ones? Cool. So when I gave that yesterday, I have been talking kind of one-on-one with a lot of people about that. But yesterday was the first time that I was able to talk to a larger audience about it. And today is a lot more opposite of that. The stuff that I'm going to be sharing with you today is stuff that I share every day of the week. This is what I do.
When you see Chief Creative Consultants up on there—I was in ministry for 20-plus years, for those who weren't in the breakout yesterday. So in ministry for 20-plus years, did worship, everything creative, production, communications. I was the one person that did all of those things. And then I was also the one person that oversaw the people that did all of those things. So I know the struggle that many of you may be in.
If you're in this room right now, it's probably for a couple of reasons. One, your flight doesn't leave till later and you're like, I might as well just hang out. Or you're like, I'm going to do the creative process track the entire week. I'm going to make Hudson Hall my home. There's a tent set up over there for me where I've been sleeping every night. And you're like, I'm here in the hall no matter what, no matter who gets up there to speak. Or you've been bouncing around quite a bit and you're looking at the topics and something about the topic of gaining and sustaining margin really hit close to you.
Now I do want to ask—last year's conference was in Dallas and it sounds like we're going back to Dallas next year. Did I hear that? Cool. And so I was there last year in Dallas. Was anyone in my breakout last year in Dallas? One person, okay. You're going to hear a lot of the same things. I love it. Thank you for being here and shout out to the Commander fan in the back right here. He's got his back to me right now. He's probably not listening. He's checking email or something, but Commander fan, I'm so glad that you're here. Go commanders.
Anyway, I saw him walk in and I had to shout him out. So anyway, this stuff is stuff that I talk about all the time. Creatives by our nature are idea machines. We're always having new ideas, whether it's we had bad pizza and went to bed, or we saw a video on YouTube or TikTok and we have these really great ideas. Someone says something, it sparks an idea. If you're a songwriter, you're like, that's a hook. Those are bars, I'm taking it. Do you want credit on it? Do you want to collab on it? Whatever it is, we have ideas like crazy.
What creatives are not very good at, historically—don't hiss at me—not very good at executing those ideas all the way across the finish line. Well, I know. We get right up to about the 80% mark. It's actually been statistically proven that most creatives get to about the 80% complete mark. And for a myriad of reasons, they bail on it.
And personally, what I think one of the main reasons is, is they didn't give themselves enough margin to be able to do it in the way that they had originally concepted that idea in their head. And they get to the 80% mark and they're like, you know what, this is not shaping up the way I thought it was going to be. I'm out. I'm going to bail. Or we're going to do something safe.
You ever been in a creative meeting for a Sunday? It's for a series that's, if you're lucky, eight to twelve weeks away. If you're normal, it's eight to ten minutes away, right? And you're like, we have this idea for this opener. It's going to be dope. We're going to have this person come out and do interpretive dance. And this person's going to be live drawing on things. And we're going to have a poet come out and he's going to do slam poetry. And then we're going to lower the pastor from the ceiling. And it's going to be incredible.
And then you get to Sunday and it's the worship leader with an acoustic guitar doing like, "Love You Lord," because hey, we haven't heard that one in a while, right? It's because we didn't plan our time and our energy well.
And the one point I want to tell you—and again, you may not like to hear this—in order to gain margin, and we're talking about margin here. If there's any finance majors in here, we're not talking about financial margin. We're talking about time here. In order for you to gain time margin in your creative work, church or not, you're going to have to put in some extra work upfront.
It's the same principle that our friend right here in the Brentwood Franklin area, Dave Ramsey tells us. He's like, you didn't go—you didn't get in the hole that you dug yourself into overnight. It happened gradually over time. You didn't put on the weight, right, overnight. It happened gradually over time and you lost the margin to be able to execute with the excellence that your soul craves. You lost that margin slowly over time.
And it's going to take some real hard work to get that margin back. I don't want you to hear anything I'm saying today is, this is easy, here's three steps to get your margin back. You better lace up and be ready to put in the work. It's going to take some extra effort to use a church phrase just for a season, right? Just for a season.
Now, once you get that margin, in order to sustain that margin, there's two key principles that I want you to hear today. Gaining margin is going to take work, but in order to sustain margin, it's going to take lots and lots of communication and it's going to take lots and lots of discipline.
And whether you're a one-person team or a 20-person team, you can only control yourself. So put in the work yourself. So many times I give this talk and they're like, yeah, I hear you. That's what I'm preaching to my team, but no one else seems to get it. And I'm like, but are you modeling it? Or are you just complaining about it? And how can we lead up and lead horizontally, what I talked about in our workshop yesterday? How can we do that to increase communication and increase the discipline that it's going to take to stick with the margin that we created?
Now again, to use that financial juxtaposition here—Dave Ramsey talks about having that emergency fund because it's not when it's going to rain, it's when it's going to rain, right? The washer and dryer are going to break down. To put that in our context, the pastor is going to have a crazy idea on a Saturday night. It is going to happen. And so if you don't plan for that and you act surprised when it does happen, you've completely blown the margin that you worked so hard to get.
So if you know that people on your team, people in your organization are last-minute people, and you're like, I've tried to change them, I've prayed for them, I've interceded, I've fasted and asked for them to change and they're not changing, then you know what you already know. So use that and go, well, I know this is going to happen. It's happened here, it's happened here, it's happened here, time after time. This is what happens. This is the rhythm of what happens. And it's out of your control completely, but what is in your control is how you prepare for that and how you build that time margin necessary.
So I want to ask, what if the secret to your best creative work isn't about working harder, but about creating the right kind of space between what you need? Now, I know I just said it's going to take a lot of hard work. It's going to take hard work to gain the margin. You've got to work extra hard to build that buffer in. But what if the secret is not necessarily after you get that, it's just about creating the right kind of space that you need?
Here's the current reality. 70% of media, marketing, and creative professionals reported experiencing burnout in the last 12 months. 52% of creators have experienced burnout this month. 30% have considered leaving their profession altogether. 74% of church creatives have experienced burnout. Only 10% of church creatives polled have said they've never experienced any sort of burnout whatsoever. They're at Elevation Church. I'm just kidding.
Calls for mental health support in the creative industry, church and not, have increased 35% year over year in the last decade. 35%. And it's because we long to change the things that are completely out of control. And we've got it wrong. We've got to flip that script and we've got to control what we can control and change the things that we can change.
So I want to talk about these three pieces. I want to talk about redefining margin as a combination of time, energy, and mental space. All right, so we're going to talk about a little time and energy here to start. So here's some things that I've just put in my toolbox over the 20-plus years of doing creative ministry that helped me manage my energy and gain and sustain the margin that we need. I'm going to walk through some of these with you. My friend here probably remembers this from last year.
Number one, we're going to talk about the DO versus DUE framework. Now, if you're listening to this in the future and you're not able to see the screen, you're like, the guy is broken. He said the same word twice. I'm saying D-O versus D-U-E. Like as many creatives, live in the land of DUE, just like they're in 11th grade all over again. That paper is DUE tomorrow, so I guess I should probably get it done in the morning.
But instead, what I propose with the DO versus DUE framework is that we build in the margin that we know it's going to take to get things done. We build in the crazy request margin. We build in, I forgot my kid had a gymnastics thing that I have to take them to and now I don't have those three hours to work on this project like I thought I had. We build in that margin to create DO dates instead of DUE dates.
And I'll give you the whole free system here when we're done, if you didn't already grab it last year. I want to talk about an energy mapping exercise. Has anybody ever read a book? It's not necessarily a Christian book. So if you just kind of want to half raise your hand—there's a book out there by a guy named Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time. Has anybody ever read Buy Back Your Time? Nobody, that's sad to me. Okay, so go read Buy Back Your Time.
Dan Martell has lots of really great things in there, but in that he talks about doing a time and energy audit. And he provided a free PDF for how to do that. And I was like, it's not good. So I created my own. And so I'll give that to you when we're done here today. But basically what you do is for about two weeks, you're going to write down every 15 minutes from your nine-to-five workday exactly what you did or what you're doing. You're going to write down next to it the value of that task.
Now I know in church world we're like, well, I'm worth a whole lot more than what I'm getting paid for. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about, is this something that only you can do? And be ruthless about that. Don't be prideful about that. Is this literally something that only you can do? Is it on your job description?
And then thirdly, did it give you energy or did it drain you of your energy? And after two weeks, you're going to be able to step back and you're going to be able to look at this thing and you're going to go, wow, I'm spending a lot of my time doing low-value tasks that take away my energy. Knowledge is power. And so we can't really do anything with it. We can't really gain this margin until we know what's eating up our margin.
And a lot of times in the church world, we love to blame the senior pastor. I've already made jokes about it already. We love to blame our boss, our senior pastor, the executive pastor, this person, and that person. I have to do because they have—they're my boss. But at the end of the day, you know what you spend your time and energy on is completely up to you.
It's completely up to you. No matter what you may think in your mind, like you don't understand, I have 18 meetings to be at. Do you really have 18 meetings to be at or do you have 18 emails that you need to send? Think about that for a moment.
Creativity killers. Let's talk about some creativity killers. Speaking of meetings, unnecessary meetings. I spoke yesterday in the one-on-ones about having an agenda set ahead of time before you walk into that one-on-one meeting. And the reason is, yes, it's polite. Yes, it's kindness. Yes, it's kind because it's clear, right? Clarity is kindness. But the real reason is so that when you get to the end of the meeting, you know if you actually did what you said you wanted the meeting to do. Imagine that.
Imagine we actually went into a staff meeting or a department meeting, and we had a clear—these are three things we're going to knock out while we're in this meeting. And when we knock out those three, we know that we did what this meeting was supposed to do. But instead we get in the meeting and we talk for—it's a 30-minute meeting—and we talked for 10 to 12 minutes about what we saw on TikTok or Netflix over the weekend and how something didn't go your way on Sunday morning. And then you might have time to get to like half of one of the things that you actually need to talk about.
That is a creativity killer and it's a margin killer. Commitment overload. Commitment overload. Now again, you may say, it's not up to me what I have to do. You don't understand. And again, I will say you are the only person that can control your actions. If you're a person that says yes to everything, then be ready to be burnt out. Be ready to have no margin. Be ready to have zero room for any extra creative ideas.
And that leads me to my third creativity killer, which is unrealistic time projections. Unrealistic time projections. Now this goes both ways. I've been in creative meetings before and we have the executive pastor in there, the senior pastor in there, and we have that idea for that big opener. And someone inevitably goes, great, how long is it going to take us to pull that off?
That's a great question to ask. Someone in the room should be asking that question and someone better be ready to give an answer. But eventually, usually what happens is one person in the room will say, I think we can get that done by this weekend. Another person in the room will say, I need a solid six months of doing nothing else in order to get that done. And realistically, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
The person that said it's going to take six months to get it done is burnt out. The person that said it's going to take six minutes is naive to what it actually takes to get the things done. And that's okay. Not everybody has to understand what it takes to get it done. But you can in that moment be realistic about your time projections.
Let me speak lastly here about the buffer principle. The buffer principle is basically you're creating purposeful space between time commitments. If you're like me, I'm a slave to my calendar. I put it on my calendar and I forget about it. And I open up my calendar for the week or for the day and it says to be here at this time, I'm there at that time. But what kills my margin is when I have no buffer between every little single stack on the calendar.
Now, if you're a people person or an extrovert, you look at a full calendar and you go, yeah, my kind of day. If you're an introvert, you look at it and you go, I'm calling in sick. I don't want to do this today. Either way, if you have five tasks to do that day and those five tasks take you two hours to complete, but you have eight hours of meetings and you're not prepared to work 10 hours that day, then you've already messed yourself up.
And so understanding that you need some buffer time in between meetings, in between calendar items, so that you have the brain capacity to be fully present and so that you have the capacity to knock out some things in between meetings. I know people love—churches are really—they love to do this a lot. They love to say, look, we're going to have all of our meetings on Monday and then we'll have no more meetings the rest of the week.
I think it's a great idea. I think the problem is when they're back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back with no in between. Because whoever has that two o'clock meeting, like we're in right now, you're not getting the same mental energy from the people in that room that there were in the nine o'clock meeting. They just—they can't process it all. There's been too much to process.
So gaps between meetings, purposeful space between commitments. And then I love this—is a 90-minute task reset. A 90-minute task reset is basically there's a $6 timer that I bought on Amazon. It's like a little round dial. A lot of people use them in their kitchens. And I set that on my desk and I go, okay, I'm going to focus on this one task. And I set that thing to 90 and I hit go. And I don't stop to check my email. I try not to get up to go to the bathroom if I don't have to. I don't surf the web, I don't pick up my phone. I got focus mode turned on and those 90 minutes I'm locked in.
And the creatives that I know in the church and not in the church who can commit to doing at least just one 90-minute block a week will tell you that it was the most productive week they've had in a long, long time. And if you can't afford to take 90 minutes out of your week to have some real heads-down work, then you need to seriously look at what's on your plate and re-prioritize some things.
All right, so let's talk about prioritizing some things. Sustainable margins—these are some tools that I've used over the years. The weekly preview is introduced by yet another Franklin, Tennessee person, Michael Hyatt and the team at Full Focus. Any Full Focus users in here? Couple of them. So you know what I'm talking about when I say the weekly preview.
The weekly preview could be Friday afternoon, could be Sunday night, could be Monday morning, whatever. You're looking at your week and you're going, I understand the commitments that I have this week. And I'm flushing out every single thing that I have to do and I'm handwriting it because I want to make a real physical connection to what I have on my plate this week. Anybody can just add stuff to a digital thing and forget all about it. And then they open up the digital thing and they go, wow, I have more tasks than time today.
And you could still use those. I use Asana—if you were in my workshop last year, I use Asana every single day of the week. But I also look at it and I go, I'm going to handwrite these things out. And when it's going from Asana to me handwriting these things out, yes, it might create extra work, but what I'm doing in that weekly preview is I'm filtering out what's really important to get done that week and what maybe is not so important.
Some things are just busy work, things that you think that you need to do, but you really don't need to do. Some things are handed down to you that you think you need to do, and they do need to get done, but you can delegate those things. You can have a volunteer do it, right? So the weekly preview—you set up your—you look at the week, you're looking at your time commitments, you're looking at all the stuff that we've talked about thus far, and looking at those things, you're saying, hey, you know what? There's three things that have to get done this week.
The Full Focus weekly preview, they call it the big three or some churches call it the frog or the elephant or whatever animal you want to eat. There's three things that would have to get done this week. And if I get those three things done at the end of the week, then I can call it a successful week. All right, so that's the weekly preview.
Daily boundary rituals—what I mean here. I worked at a church in the Baltimore area for a couple years. Anyone from the Baltimore area in here? Awesome. I worked at church there for a couple of years. Loved my time there. And we, as a creative team, came up with this—you know how your phone has airplane mode and in the airplane mode, nothing can really come in or out. So we decided to basically create airplane mode for the creative team for one 90-minute block a week. And we called it our no-fly zone.
And because we're creative, we made a little graphic for it. We stuck it on our office doors and we let the whole staff know, just give us this 90 minutes this week and don't interrupt us. And we promise that we'll be more productive and more efficient because of it. And we were, and we were. And you have to get buy-in obviously all across the board, but having some type of daily boundary ritual, whether it be a no-fly zone or your actual availability.
If you're in control of your calendar and you're looking at that time and energy audit, when I look at that time and energy audit—and I do those about once a year—I was able to look at it and say, look, if I take a meeting before 11 AM, then I'm using my best brain power of the day. Carey Nieuwhof calls it "At Your Best." If you haven't read that one, add it to your reading list—Carey Nieuwhof, At Your Best. He talks about your energy levels throughout the day and knowing when you're at your best.
And for me, I'm at my best from like 7 AM to 11. You're like, so you're not at your best right now? I'm not at my best right now. I didn't get to pick when my time was. If I had got to pick when my time was, I would have put it like earlier, 11, whatever that session was. So they call that my green zone. So I try my hardest within the power that I have. I try my hardest not to schedule any meetings between seven and 11, because I know that's my most productive time when I'm going to be naturally the most productive, naturally the most locked in. So have some sort of daily boundary ritual.
Monthly audit of time spent—we've talked about this already. You can use the time and energy audit or if you're not into that, you can use a free like Harvest time tracker. Harvest is an online tool, you don't have to pay for it. You can just track your time. I still use the Harvest time tracker because as I'm developing what I'm doing, I want to know how long on average it takes me to do a certain task so that when someone asks me, can I write a talk or can I do this? And I can go, yeah, okay, I know from my research of knowing myself, it's going to take me about a half a day to really get a good feel on that. So I'm going to block out a half a day for that. But if you don't know that you can't do that. So you have to know it.
And then lastly, the quarterly ideal week. Ideal week is also a Full Focus thing. Some other people have brought it in as well, but basically it's super fun and also super sad because the ideal week—you get a blank page to look at your calendar from Monday through Friday and you get to map out like, man, it would be great if I could do this from this time to this time, and then I had this from this time to this time. And you do that for Monday through Friday.
Now, it's called ideal for a reason. It seldom happens because there's things that enter into your world and enter into your schedule that are naturally—that you didn't plan for, right? It's not, hey, this isn't ideal, but I have to be there for this person in my church. I have to be there for this part of my job. I have to be there for my family member. And so it enters in. So it's ideal for a reason. It's not the perfect week. It's the ideal week.
But I change those quarterly for me. I update them quarterly for me because seasons of life change. In the summertime, we have a lot more flexibility in our family. But right now, our calendar is a hot mess. There's just thing after thing after thing in the fall. In October to December, me and my wife just look at each other and we're like, don't move. No one add anything else to the calendar. Maybe if we're still, no one will know we're here, right? That's how it is. And so you have to understand that and how it ebbs and flows quarterly for you.
Weekly preview, daily boundary rituals, monthly audit, quarterly ideal week. I want to wrap up with this. Margin isn't what's left after your work is done. It's what makes your best work possible in the first place. If you are not protecting the margin for yourself and for your team if you have one, you are setting yourself up for consistent failure after failure.
And if you really want to execute those amazing dreams, those amazing creative ideas that you have in your head each and every week, if you really want to execute those, you're going to have to put in the work to gain that margin back, and you're going to have to lock in on discipline and communication in order to sustain that margin.
So a couple of free resources for you. Yesterday's QR code didn't work. This QR code does work. Thank you to my wife, graphic designer. So I have the DO versus DUE framework implementation. If you're like, hey, what's this whole DO, D-O-D-U-E thing? And then the creative energy audit template that I created from Dan Martell's book as well.
So today went a lot faster. I've got like 15-ish minutes open for Q&A. If anyone has any questions, we can do those now. You just shout them out and I'll repeat them back to us.
[Q&A Section follows with questions and answers about ideal week implementation, moderating time estimates between team members, dealing with scope creep, intake forms, handling last-minute leaders, and whether to skip intake forms for direct meetings]
I'll stick around afterwards. I know there's one final main session for y'all as well. Thank you so much for your time. Grab the free resources. If there's a resource that's not there that you need, you can contact me on the website. I'm here for you, I believe in the local church creative, and I want to support you as much as I can. So feel free to reach out. Y'all have a great day.