Are you creative or are you productive?
The question is a trick one. Very little in life is a binary choice, an “either/or”.
Some may say: “the most creative people don’t work to a schedule”. Well, whilst I believe it to be true that if schedule every moment of each day we may be highly “productive”, but we don’t need to be completely unscheduled to be creative.
I’m a “both/and” person and I believe it is a matter of balance. Another way of putting it, it is about finding a balance between being totally unscheduled and being scheduled for every moment of each day. Another way of putting it is to choose where we are on that spectrum of Scheduled=Productive vs Unscheduled=Creative.
For this reason I love the graphic above as a simple visual depiction for us to bring awareness to, then choose from there.
A few thoughts as to what works for me:
- First, I recognise that if I take on too much, I will need to be highly scheduled in order to do the work and make deadlines with work of the right quality.
- So, seeing as much of what I do (and what I love to do!) involves working creatively, I choose not to ever take on too much.
- Specifically, I never work with more than 6-8 ongoing clients at a time, capping my client time at no more than 30% of my overall time working each week
- That leaves 70% of my time, what do I do with it?
- I like to think I choose an “Unstructured Structure”. I do “block out” time for focussed work and also for what allows me to be creative.
- Sometimes that is a long walk (yes, I block time out during the middle of the day sometimes for long walks. Full daylight in midwinter here is really only 9am to 3pm, call me crazy, but I prefer to walk in daylight.
- At other times that block of time is a few hours to read, listen, research then write articles (like this one, I do write every day, after all)
- Much of the time my creative time is simply having interesting conversations with interesting people. I love to do that and it comes at different times of the day (depending on time zones)
Beyond those specific notes, the key for me is to be aware a) that I need to be creative rather than only productive, and b) that only happens if I bring attention to it and create my “unstructured structure” for work accordingly.