This week, I am taking note throughout the day of the thoughts that race through my head. My thoughts are heavily pre-occupied with not having enough time to get things done. I am quite aware of this (and am actively trying to get a handle on it), but I wasn’t aware of the negative messages I keep repeating to myself, such as:
I can’t get anything done.
I don’t have any time.
Angry messages to myself of, “why haven’t I done that yet?!?”
Anxiety is an inhibitor to tapping into creative flow of ideas and possibility. I have been trying to solve the problem by getting the thoughts out of my head and assigning clear next steps to each of them. However, before I do this, I need to eliminate the negative messages which are reinforcing my anxiety.
How do you eliminate negative thoughts? You don’t. You can’t force thoughts out of your head. Instead, observe them and accept they are there. When you observe you thoughts without getting attached to them, change happens naturally.
My experiments with Getting Things Done have started. (Right-brained people of the world - don’t have a heart attack… it’s just an experiment.) Objective: to use this methods for reducing stress and to become more efficient by:
Gathering all the thoughts on my mind
Processing the thoughts
Ensuring that items which need accomplishing have a clear, concrete next step attached to them
Tackling one action at a time
“Supposedly” (i.e in some far-fetched theory) by getting vague thoughts out of your head and becoming clear on the next concrete action, mental space is created to get things done. More mental space = room for creative ideas to surface.
The catch is, if I become more efficient, and that raises other’s expectations… will I find myself taking on more responsibilities to fill the new found space? This could be a disaster in waiting.
One of the biggest inhibitions to creativity and creating mindful work environments is the stress that accumulates from the looming cloud of vague commitments. In an age addicted to the hyper-speed of technology, e-mails, meetings, tasks and “stuff” flying around - the stress from trying to hang on to what we need to get done is often overwhelming.
Recently, I have ben exploring David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity - aka, GTD - a method for getting all the thoughts out of your head, into an organized system, where a concrete next-action can be supplied for each task. I discovered a free open-source package called Thinking Rock to process all the thoughts that have been eating away at my attention and energy.
For the next 21 days, I am going to use this software, to see if it really increases my productivity and lowers my stress. If I lower my stress, how will I manage to stay awake at my desk?!?
Being creative is more than letting people run wild with their ideas, as uncovered in an insightful interview with Brad Bird on Innovation lessons from Pixar, where the McKinsey Quarterly examined issues around creating a successful creative environment:
The Quarterly: How important is team dynamics to innovation and creativity?
Brad Bird: Making a film, you have all these different departments, and what you’re trying to do is find a way to get them to put forth their creativity in a harmonious way. Otherwise, it’s like you have an orchestra where everybody’s playing their own music. Each individual piece might be beautiful, but together they’re crazy.
An insightful and entertaining reflection on our educations system from TedTalks, by Sir Ken Robinson, and the essential need for schools to learn how to promote creativity.
Both the education system and the corporate work environment are not conducive for creativity, and that the structure favors following procedure and being right over the freedom to try new things and fail. Yet now, it seems that companies that can’t innovate are choking to death.
Oops.
At least it feels like a slight vindication for doodling in my history book in 3rd grade. I knew I was on to something!!!
Check out the insight from Hivelogic into Offices and the Creativity Zone. Dan discusses some reasons why the corporate work environment isn’t the right setting to be creative - through countless distractions and pressures to produce results.
Reminds me of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi… where too many demands coming from too many places, makes it impossible for us to be single-minded-ly focused on one task at a time. Although, central to the Flow concept is finding the right balance between challenge and skill level (if the challenge is to great, it causes stress, and if it is too low, it causes boredom). And I think achieving this balance is essential for accessing our most creative states.
People tend to life seriously and make situations overly complicated. Or is that just me? Does drama ever do anything remotely useful?
One approach I find to be effective in combating this is Rule #6, from Ros and Benjamin’s Zander’s Art of Possibility. The story of Rule #6 is:
An executive is in meeting at another company with one of their managers. They are sitting in the manager’s office, when suddenly the door burst open and a man comes in upset and shouting about an urgent problem. The manager says, “Peter, Peter, please remember Rule #6.” Immediately Peter calms down, says thank you and departs.
Soon after, a young woman enters, hysterical, hair flying all over the place, carrying on in frenzy about her situation. He responds, “Mary, please — remember Rule #6!” She says, “Oh, I’m so sorry”, apologizes and leaves the room quietly.
Then it happens a third time. (It always happens a third time.) At this point the visiting executive can’t keep quiet any longer and says, “Sir, I have seen three people come into this room in a state of uncontrollable fury, and then walk out completely calmly. Would you be willing to share this, Rule #6, what it is?”
The manager says, “Oh yes, Rule #6, very simply put is, don’t take yourself so damn seriously.” And so the executive says, “Oh, that’s a wonderful rule. What, may I ask, are the other rules?” And he replies, “There aren’t any.”
So… whatever it is, get over it, and don’t take yourself so god-damn seriously.
3. Expose yourself. Not after too much vodka. Expose yourself to new art – books, music, paintings – all the time. If you’re a rocker, listen to funk. If you’re a crime writer, read fantasy. If you’re a productivity writer, read something about slacking off.
8. Drink too much coffee sometimes (one of my favorite submissions).
15. Creativity is a muscle. Exercise it daily – if you only need to create once a week, your muscles may have atrophied if you don’t do it just because you don’t have to.
22. Keep a journal. It can get your mind working, and in a month, or a year, when you’ve gained some distance from what you’ve written it can give you new ideas.
- aka, GTD - a method for getting all the thoughts out of your head, into an organized system, where a concrete next-action can be supplied for each task. I discovered a free open-source package called 
, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi… where too many demands coming from too many places, makes it impossible for us to be single-minded-ly focused on one task at a time. Although, central to the Flow concept is finding the right balance between challenge and skill level (if the challenge is to great, it causes stress, and if it is too low, it causes boredom). And I think achieving this balance is essential for accessing our most creative states.
