Time is the currency of productivity. At the end of the day, if we’ve spent it in the right place, we win. If we’ve spent it in the wrong place, we lose. Whenever we fail to do what’s needed, we accumulate a debt that will have to be repaid at some point. After all, our work isn’t going away, and someone has to do it. At the same time, we often obsess unnecessarily about our time because we grow paranoid that we’re constantly losing ground or that we’re somehow going to fall behind and never be able to dig out of work debt. For many creatives, this mind-set results from the fact that they are constantly reacting to the workload rather than giving themselves the space needed to get ahead of it.
This insecurity about time is one of the main things that causes us, even unknowingly, to cram work into every available crevice in our life. We are perpetually thinking, moving pieces around in our head, and problem solving. We feel the pressure to produce, and we know that we need to use our time wisely to do so. But as mentioned earlier in the book, this always-on mind-set unknowingly causes us to forfeit our best work.
Of the five elements of rhythm discussed in this book, time is the most significant pressure point for many creatives. It’s where we feel the biggest crunch, because it’s the most concrete resource that we need to allocate toward our work each day. It’s also the one element that provides the foundation for our practices in each of the other areas. As a result, developing a healthy mind-set toward your time is critical, and not just in terms of how you crank through tasks or how efficiently you conduct meetings. While these things have their place, you need to be just as mindful of what’s not present in your life and how this is affecting your creative capacity as well. Though it’s counterintuitive, the solution to feeling overwhelmed or crunched for time is often not to remove something from your life, but to add something that raises your level of effectiveness in those activities you’re already doing.
With all this emphasis on study and reflection, you don’t want to neglect actual experiences. You absorb much of your understanding of the world through sensory interaction and experiment, and to ignore this would be to cut yourself off from the most significant source of inspiration. You need to regularly seek experiences that will enlighten you, help you see the world in new ways, and open you to new ways of thinking.
Much has been written regarding the importance of play to our growth and development. Play is the primary way children learn, and recent research has shown that play can contribute significantly to the learning of adults as well. Play helps us maintain emotional stability, too, which can be important to our overall energy level and capacity for good work.
Many of us are caught in the same routines and patterns day after day and week after week. We rarely venture outside these routines because they have proven effective for us. While it’s admirable to be disciplined and focused, we don’t want to leave great creative insights on the table simply because we’d rather stay in our comfort zone. We must deliberately build new, different, and challenging experiences into our lives. This means setting aside time to put ourselves in stimulating and even purposefully uncomfortable situations so that our minds are forced to see the world in new ways. Here are just a few suggestions for how to do this:
The goal of study is not simply to absorb a lot of new information. You want to process and assimilate it, then apply it to your life and work. If you don’t cultivate insights from what you take in, then the value of stimuli in your life decreases dramatically. Taking good notes on your observations, insights, and experiences with a reliable thought-capture system prevents them from disappearing into the ether.
Staying alert and paying attention to how you’re reacting to an experience, a book, or a conversation also forces you to stay out of ruts that could prevent creative insights. Rather than mindlessly moving through your day, you can actively engage by learning to reflectively ask questions and record your responses. Here are some questions that can serve as a starting point for making your notes more effective:
Are there any patterns in what you’re experiencing (or reading) that are similar to something else you’re working on?
Often the solutions to your problems will come in the form of analogy or metaphor. If you look for similarities between your day-to-day experiences and the problems you’re working on, you may find unexpected connections. Even works of fiction, movies you watch, or conversations you have may contain patterns that can be helpful in solving your creative problems. You just need to be mindful to watch for them and take good notes when you notice them.
Maintaining a study plan will help you cultivate the kinds of stimuli you allow into your life and ensure that you are putting the most important pieces in place first. Our minds are excellent at receiving new information, forging new patterns out of it, and then assimilating those patterns. But the more random the information you absorb, the more effort is required to process it and utilize it in your creative work. Variety is certainly helpful in forcing you to look outside your normal handful of solutions to the creative problems you face, but it can also lead you down irrelevant rabbit trails or cause you to feel overwhelmed. If you are more purposeful in how you structure the stimuli you experience, however, you can gently nudge your mind in a direction where creative insights are more likely to occur.
The practice of deliberate study plays an important role in the development of your capacity to think and to process new information. When you assemble a study plan, you cultivate a queue of stimuli designed to grow your creative capacity. Your ability to synthesize new ideas is largely influenced by your depth and breadth of knowledge in diverse domains of expertise. As you study you develop networks of understanding that connect various bits of data in your daily life into meaningful patterns. The more you strengthen these networks of understanding through study, the larger they grow. Similarly, as you diversify your areas of study, you are able to make connections between various domains of knowledge. The net benefit of this greater understanding of the world is that you are capable of generating more novel and appropriate creative insights. You can more easily derive metaphors and see the similarities or connecting points between problems you’re facing. As this understanding grows stronger, your platform for creative expression grows proportionately.
Another key benefit of being purposeful about the stimuli in your life is that you can direct your mind to begin working on problems before your need for ideas becomes urgent. For example, if there is a big project on the horizon that requires you to have an understanding of a specific topic, then it is a good idea to get a head start on the project by choosing stimuli that will lay the foundation for that understanding. You may want to do a little research to find the highest-rated or most recommended book on a particular subject. You may want to start reading a blog or two that covers emerging trends in this area and their cultural effects.
Our minds require time to do their best work, and the more of a head start and the healthier a perspective we can give them, the more likely it is that we will uncover novel and relevant patterns. Not only that, but the more grounded we are in the subject matter, the easier it is for us to discern relevant versus irrelevant data. It’s almost as if we gain a sixth sense about problem solving once we are deeply immersed in relevant stimuli.
With the ever-increasing deluge of information we all face, the task for each of us is to discern which inputs are relevant to our work and which are simply noise. We face tremendous pressure to keep up and the vast majority of creatives say they are constantly on the verge of information overload.
I (Todd Henry) call the information and experiences we absorb “stimuli” because these are the raw materials that stimulate thought. Each creative idea is the combination of previously existing ideas, or bits of stimuli, into something new. The stimuli we experience can stretch us to think differently, to open our eyes to new ways of seeing the world. But many creatives don’t give much thought to what they allow into their minds. E-mails, reports, web videos, TV, magazines, and more flood through their life with no one keeping watch of the gate. Over time this can result in an overall lack of focus or a general numbness to potential inspiration. Discerning what is useful and what isn’t in a world without filters on our stimuli becomes a difficult task. After all, a drowning man isn’t thinking about what he wants for dinner, he just wants a life preserver! In the same way, when we lack structure around the types of stimuli we experience, we lack the space and focus we need to apply our experiences to the work we’re engaged in.
Pruning is best practiced in your monthly and quarterly checkpoints. You are looking for projects or commitments that you believe are inhibiting your ability to effectively perform the red-zone activities in your life. These commitments may be very good things that you took on with the best of intentions and sincere optimism but that are now beginning to become more obligation than opportunity. They may also be brand-new ideas or opportunities that you feel a strong urge to act on but that are ill-timed because of the lack of hours or resources to devote to them.
Some questions to ask when evaluating potentially prune-able activities are:
Is this having a negative impact on my red-zone efforts or my overall ability to stay energized in my life and work?
Has this become more obligation than opportunity? Have I lost my passion for and interest in this?
Could this be deferred until later and have a greater effect?
Am I unhappy with my current results?
Do I have a nagging sense that I need to go in a new direction with this project?
If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then you may want to consider eliminating the project from your plate. As you do, you will likely find that the increased space in your life yields new insights and ideas for your more pressing projects.
A second energy-management practice closely related to whole-life planning is pruning. We all live with the illusion that we can have it all. But the people who are living the “have it all” have learned the secret of energy management, and especially the practice of pruning. They are concentrating their energy and creative efforts on a select group of activities that provide them with the maximum amount of productivity. And because creative insight and productivity are cumulative, they continue to maintain forward momentum as long as they are mindful of their energy.
If you want to have the energy to creatively engage with the important things, you need to carefully choose your creative priorities. We each have a threshold for how many creative problems we can effectively manage at a given time. Taking on any additional obligations or commitments will decrease your overall effectiveness, and removing too many will mean you’re settling for less than your full potential. You want to feel stretched but not overextended.
Identify Your “Red Zone” Activities
In American football, the red zone is the area on each end of the field inside the twenty-yard line. What happens in this area is a key determining factor in a team’s success or failure. Teams that easily advance the ball down the field but can’t score in the red zone will lose games. Teams that play great open-field defense but can’t prevent scores in the red zone will lose. Performance within this very small sliver of the field often determines the overall success or failure of a team.
