Selective attention is incredibly beneficial to us in that it allows us to focus on what matters in a complex and dangerous world. But for creatives, this kind of behavior can also cause us to lose sight of the big picture, and what’s really going on in the grand scheme of our life, for the sake of what’s immediately urgent or pressing. Often we unconsciously compartmentalize data as relevant or irrelevant to the problem at hand, conceptually dividing our life into various “airtight” chambers that don’t interact with one another. We like to think that the various areas of our life are like file folders that we can pull out of the cabinet, explore, then replace without affecting the other folders in the cabinet. We examine the various areas of our life and work, make commitments on them, and generate ideas for them, in isolation.
To reinforce this, the preponderance of self-help literature over the past few decades has focused on effectiveness in various areas of our life. There are books on managing work, managing home life, and effectively managing time by dividing responsibilities into categories. But this kind of “divide and conquer” technique is destined to fail because it ignores the interconnectedness of all areas of our life and the effects that a commitment in one area has on another. We need to build the practice of occasionally stepping back to examine our life as a whole and establishing a rhythm around energy that accounts for all the commitments in our life. This will help us avoid the energy drains that zap our capacity for regular insight.
The Fallacy of Compartmentalization
Because we tend to divide our life into buckets, we talk about things like our “work life” and our “home life” as though we can somehow slip out of our skin and assume another identity when transitioning between them. But trying to compartmentalize the various parts of life can take a toll.
Few of us think much about how our energy level affects our ability to create. Energy consumption is more difficult to measure than time management and other markers of productivity. Also, our energy is a renewable resource, so many of us believe that it is perfectly acceptable to race through our week until we crash, spend the weekend recovering, then start the cycle all over again.
But this mind-set is deceptive. Creative work requires that we stay ahead of our work. Tomorrow’s ideas are the result of today’s intentions. When you rely on a “just-in-time” workflow, you will quickly find it difficult to do quality work—and you’ll also find yourself lacking the drive to do anything about it.
Creative insight is frequently the result of conceptual momentum, and the most difficult thing to do in the early stages of a project is to gain traction. Building momentum requires excess energy. When we lack the necessary energy, mobilizing around insights can be difficult. In fact, sometimes we overlook the small clues and stimuli that may yield insight because we simply lack the energy to pay attention to the nonessentials.
There are three strategies that can help you be more purposeful about your relationships. Each is designed to help you achieve more interdependence, inspiration, and accountability in your work.
START A CIRCLE
Many of the greatest creatives throughout history have gathered in small groups to stay focused and engaged, and the practice continues to benefit those who go to the effort to instill it. If you are organizing a circle, you should invite members you think will inspire you with their vision, their strategic thinking, and their track record of executing great ideas.
Your circle get-together will revolve around each member answering three questions.
Creative work isolates you because a substantial amount of it must be accomplished alone. But your relationships with others are some of your most valuable creative resources. If you neglect these relationships, you are starving yourself of a substantial and potential game-changing influence on your creative work. When you neglect your relationships, you limit yourself to your own experiences. But when you approach your relationships with purpose, you will be able to draw on many lifetimes’ worth of experience for insight and inspiration.
Investing in healthy, thriving relationships yields long-term benefits for everyone involved and can be especially beneficial in allowing you to see the world from new perspectives, exposing you to unexpected creative insights and helping you stay inspired.
Keith Ferrazzi, author of Never Eat Alone and Who’s Got Your Back, believes that relationships are the key to success, enhancing our ability to thrive over the long term in our life and career. There are two critical elements of any successful relationship: intimacy and generosity.
There is a practice in retail management known as “intelligent adjacency.” It means placing complementary items next to each other, like toothbrushes and toothpaste, so that when a customer finds one item, the proximity of the complementary item makes it more likely they’ll buy both.
The practice of clustering is about finding intelligent adjacencies within your work and clustering your efforts to keep you engaged and focused more deeply and for longer periods of time. By doing this you minimize the psychological cost of switching tasks and constantly having to refocus your efforts. There are several benefits to clustering your work:
Limiting Focus Shifts
Each time you break from what you’re doing to focus on something else, you lose traction, and regaining it takes more time than you may think. If you cluster similar kinds of work into blocks of time dedicated to the work, the penalty for these focus shifts is minimized. For example, clustering all your e-mail into one session, or several sessions broken up throughout your day, prevents the focus shift that occurs each time you leave your creative work to see what’s in your inbox.
On my (Todd Henry) office whiteboard you will see “The Big 3” followed by a short list of my current creative priorities. The Big 3 refers to the three things I need to gain creative traction on right now. They aren’t necessarily my biggest projects, though they often are. Rather, the Big 3 is best described as the three most important “open loops” in my life and work. They are the three most important items that I’m still looking for critical insight on.
Your mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. If you don’t refine your creative priorities on a regular basis and focus in on a few things at a time, your mind will go into a full retreat, and you will become overwhelmed with all that’s left undone. By choosing what you’re going to focus on, you’re relieving your mind of the pressure to resolve every creative problem simultaneously. You are giving yourself permission to lock in on only three problems at a time rather than the dozen or more that may be on your plate.
This also applies to a team context. Clarifying the top creative problems yet to be solved helps the team know where to put its energy and eliminates the guesswork often required to establish priorities. One of the greatest gifts any creative leader can give to their team is to regularly refine focus by utilizing the practice of establishing the Big 3.
Inventor Charles F. Kettering famously said that “a problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” We can spend a lot of time spinning our wheels if we’re not clear about what we’re really trying to do. There’s a difference between having a sense of where the project is headed and truly understanding the objectives, and this is where many of us go off the rails. We may know enough about a project to get moving on it, but we never really stop to think deeply about what we’re trying to accomplish and how we’ll know when we’re done. So we set off in a vague direction fueled by vague objectives. This often means that we waste valuable time and energy trying to gain clarity later in the project or course correcting when it’s much more expensive and stressful to do so.
In any project, there is the main problem we’re trying to solve, but there are also many subproblems. One effective way to gain traction quickly is by positioning project objectives in the form of questions designed to surround the problem. We call this establishing “Challenges.”
One of a leader’s most critical roles is to identify the Challenges for each project. Setting out four to six Challenge questions for each project will help the team surround the problem and ensure that all critical aspects are given adequate attention. The more quickly you can focus your mind on what you’re really trying to do, the faster you gain creative traction.
As you strive to gain focus, there are three modes you can fall into in your work. In order to work effectively, you must broaden your focus enough to allow you to see potential connections, but not so much that everything seems random and you are unable to gain traction.
DRIFTERS
A Drifter is someone who does whatever work they feel like from moment to moment. In this mode, a creative floats from objective to objective and task to task without really thinking about how any of them connect. You might be answering e-mails one minute, writing a few words on a proposal the next, and then making a phone call or two. Your work is fragmented. While you might get things done, there’s no overarching sense of purpose behind how you approach your work, and you don’t really have a prescribed plan for how you will get things done.
To the Drifter, finishing a project feels a lot like pushing a wall forward because you have no priorities—your efforts and attention are spread thin across everything you need to do. You waste effort on task switching and may have a difficult time deciding what to do next. This is not say that you’re not productive; Drifters can accomplish quite a lot. But your approach is so scattershot that you aren’t able to leverage critical opportunities. While no one wants to think of themselves this way, many of us stumble into Drifter behavior from time to time.
