by Todd Henry
One member of our online coaching community, AC Engage, relayed that simply having her Big 3 regularly in front of her had markedly increased her productivity. “From this practice alone I was able to double the number of children’s book illustrations I did in the six months before—just because the Big 3 was always in front of me.” We’ve found that the refined sense of priority that accompanies the use of the Big 3 frequently yields this kind of productivity boost.
No one else needs to know about your Big 3, even if you are using it to help you lead an organization. I introduced one manager to this practice, and he has been using it effectively for quite some time to clarify his team’s creative priorities, even though no one on the team is aware his Big 3 list exists. He relayed that it’s brought a great amount of clarity to his team’s process because his increased focus has trickled down into his conversations with team members.
Once you experience a key insight that you were looking for with a project, you can remove the item from the list and add something else. It’s also possible that something will come along and become a higher priority before you’ve achieved your insight. That’s fine as well. There are no hard-and-fast rules for this; it’s not intended to be a task list or a Project Queue. It’s simply one effective way to keep the conceptual hurdles we still need to jump squarely in front of us as we go throughout our day. It’s a lens through which to process the world. This sets us up for unexpected insights and creative breakthroughs.
CLUSTER: CHUNKING SIMILAR TASKS
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.
Many of us reflexively place items according to intelligent adjacency all the time in our own lives as well. We place items in convenient proximity to one another in our workspace and in our homes in order to save time or energy in some way. As I sit here typing, most of the tools I would need for working on this chapter are within my reach, such as my research, pens, notebooks, index cards, and a stapler. I make sure that I don’t waste time getting up and walking across the room each time I need to take a note or check something. It’s natural for us to think about basic usability when it comes to our physical surroundings, but how often do we think about how conveniently our workflow is structured? Have you ever considered clustering work projects that require similar kinds of thought into the same blocks of time? Many of us don’t do this, with the result being that we waste precious focus shifting gears between different kinds of tasks. For example, we may spend all day on e-mail, jumping in and out of our inbox or even checking e-mail while we’re in the middle of doing some other kind of work. But each of these little mental breaks causes us to lose creative traction and can ultimately add up to less than optimal work.
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.
▶ UNEXPECTED BREAKTHROUGHS
As you cluster similar work you will begin to notice reoccurring patterns and areas of potential overlap. You may also find that there are similar issues you’re facing on different projects that stem from the same source. As a result, clustering can lead to conceptual breakthroughs. For example, a discarded idea for one project may be perfectly appropriate for another, or research that you’re doing for one client may yield an unexpected insight for another client. These breakthroughs may never have occurred if your workflow was fragmented rather than clustered.
▶ IMPROVED FLOW
Because you are focusing for longer periods on similar work, you will experience a greater sense of immersion in the work, making it more likely to have a breakthrough (and more likely you’ll enjoy the work). You can dive deeper with an oxygen tank than if you have to resurface every few minutes for air. The net result is that you will spend more concentrated time thinking deeply about the problems you are facing and will be more likely to get to the brilliant ideas that often take time to emerge.
Here are some ways I’ve seen clients apply this practice to great effect:• Set aside an hour in your day to do strategic thinking and plan your projects. It’s much easier to maintain a conceptual, strategic mode of thinking than it is to try to regain it once you’ve switched over to more concrete tasks.
• Cluster meetings as much as possible, and make sure to leave large blocks of uninterrupted time open each week. People tend to spread their meetings throughout the day, with fifteen minutes to a half hour between them. This practically eliminates your ability to engage in deep thought. To immerse yourself in a problem requires stretches of time, and if you’re allowing for only small pockets of time to think creatively, you’re probably wrapping up just when you’re getting to a place where you’re likely to start experiencing insights. In addition, you may want to schedule your strategic thinking time ahead of meetings if possible to avoid the energy lag that often happens in their wake, and so that you’ll have time to think ahead about the issues you’ll be discussing.
• Set aside a dedicated time each day for responding to e-mail. Rather than living perpetually in the inbox, cluster all your communication in dedicated blocks of time. This will help you focus more deeply throughout the day rather than being constantly interrupted by the demands of others. If you need to do frequent e-mail checks throughout the day, that’s fine, too. You can schedule ten minutes at the beginning of each hour to address your inbox. While there are certainly exceptions, there are very few e-mails that will cause our world to come crashing down if not addressed within an hour.
• The same advice goes for phone calls and face-to-face encounters. Whenever possible, try to clump these together so that you avoid the energy drain required to gear up for and gear down from personal interactions.
• Separate your conceptual/creative time from your concrete /task time. When you fragment your day with fifteen minutes of design or writing, ten minutes of invoicing and time tracking, five minutes of e-mail, et cetera, you are paying a significant task-switching penalty. Try to give yourself—as much as you are able—no less than a half hour of uninterrupted time whenever you are doing design, writing, or other largely conceptual work, and an hour is preferable. If the projects don’t require that much time, try to cluster a few together. Not only will this help you stay focused longer, you will also regain a significant amount of time wasted by switching programs, moving windows around on your screen, and quickly checking that funny little headline that caught your eye.
This is not an exhaustive list, and I’m certain that there are many other opportunities you can see for how to cluster your own work. Regardless of the level of flexibility in your schedule, there are always small ways you can more effectively structure your work so that you’re minimizing task-switching cost.
Gaining focus and quickly establishing a game plan gives us a significant advantage in our creative work. The better we become at weeding out irrelevant information and staying alert for potential insights, the more likely we are to experience creative breakthroughs. Similarly, the better we are at defining and refining the problems we’re trying to solve, the more likely our minds will do what the
y do best—identify potentially useful insights.
5.
RELATIONSHIPS: BEING BRILLIANT TOGETHER
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 potentially 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.
Many of us don’t think much about whom we invite into our lives or how we manage those relationships. Instead we treat the connections we form with others as something that happens naturally as a matter of circumstance or convenience. Coworkers and family are the only people many busy creatives take the time to connect with. And though they love their families and like their coworkers, this can quickly lead to a situation where relationships feel more like obligations than anything else. Our relationships will eventually grow stale unless we are diligent about directing and cultivating them.
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.
In his book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson states that many of the brilliant and innovative ideas throughout history have resulted from networks of creative people sharing, collaborating, and challenging one another to explore the adjacent possible. He says, “The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.” Johnson says that a key way to get more parts on the table is to put yourself in networks of other creatives who are striving for the same thing. He continues, “What kind of environment creates good ideas? The simplest way to answer it is this: innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.” We can put ourselves in these kinds of environments—and experience creative accidents more consistently—by being purposeful about how we cultivate the relationships in our lives.
The key to cultivating creatively stimulating relationships is threefold: you need relationships in your life in which you can be real, you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to risk, and you need relationships in your life in which you can learn to submit to the wisdom of others.
CREATIVES AND INTROVERSION
The workplace demands a lot of us. We are frequently balancing the demands of multiple personalities (sometimes within the same coworker), processing various communications, and dealing with difficult conversations. Navigating all this can take a toll on our mental and emotional reserves.
It’s not a rule by any means, but many creatively gifted people tend to display a natural tendency toward introversion. Perhaps the isolated nature of a lot of creative work is what calls many of us to our chosen profession to begin with. We love to get lost in the process of moving big conceptual rocks and developing exciting and elaborate new systems, strategies, and ventures. Due to this natural tendency toward introversion, collaboration and dealing with others throughout the day can drain our batteries pretty quickly.
Introversion doesn’t mean that we don’t like being around people; it simply means that we derive our energy from being alone rather than from being around others. We may prefer to curl up with a good book after a period of intense interpersonal interaction, or find a quiet conference room to do our work in peace. These are important and effective methods for recovery, but the slippery slope of introversion for the creative is that we may isolate ourselves more than we should. We sometimes begin to see the act of maintaining a relationship as an obligation that pulls us away from our important work, rather than as an opportunity to stretch ourselves, explore new possibilities, and take advantage of collaborative opportunities within our team. If we want to thrive over the long term, we must reclaim the power of relationships in our life and establish practices that help us leverage the gifts and accountability that only thriving relationships can provide.
INTIMACY AND GENEROSITY
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. As he explained to me, there are two critical elements of any successful relationship: intimacy and generosity.
Intimacy is when we regularly share our life with others, and they in turn share their lives with us. By allowing another into the inner circle of your life, you not only give them the opportunity to learn from your experiences, you also learn how to better communicate those experiences to others. Relationships are messy because they force us out of our comfort zone, but they also help us see problems and opportunities from a new perspective. When we invite others into our life, when we allow ourselves to be intimate, we quickly come to realize that there is an entire sphere of experience that we miss when we live in a silo.
“Anyone can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathize with a friend’s success.”
—Oscar Wilde
The other crucial element of successful relationships is generosity. The creative process is an inherently generous act. Whether we are developing a strategy or crafting a piece of art, creating is primarily about sharing our insights and perspectives with others.
My friend Jeni Herberger has a theory about the nature of generosity and relationships. Jeni posits that there are two types of people in the world: those who live to fill other people’s buckets and those who are always looking to get their own bucket filled. For the latter, even the act of complimenting someone else is an inherently selfish act because they are somehow secretly trying to take credit for the other person’s work. When they offer up, “Hey! Great job on executing that idea! It’s a lot like something I did last year. Did I ever tell you about it?” it contains a subtle pat on their own back. They’re looking to fill their own bucket.
But there are other people who derive their energy from filling other people’s buckets. They love the thrill of seeing other people come alive, of collaborating, of giving away their ideas and subsequently the credit they deserve. They recognize that more ideas will always come, but investing in relationships and maintaining an ethic of generosity yields results we can’t gain when we hold tightly and selfishly to what we think we deserve. These are the people others flock to and who invigorate an entire room with their creative energy. They thrive because they make it their mission to help others to thrive. I agree with Jeni—these people are the meaning makers, and in my experience they eventually come out on top because everyone wants to work with, and for, them.
When we obsess over getting our own buckets filled, we not only find ourselves disappointed with the results, we also regularly disappoint everyone around us. Our best creative work comes from a mind-set of abundance and generosity rather than one of scarcity. When we clamor for credit and fight over resources we perceive to be scarce, it infiltrates every area of our life and work.
When we obsess over getting our own buckets filled, we not only find ourselves disappointed with the results, we also regularly disappoint everyone around us.
THREE STRATEGIES TO ENRICH RELATIONSHIPS
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. We are not wired to do life alone; the more we can network ourselves with others, the better. In his book The Neuroscience of Human Relations, professor and clinical psychologist Louis Cozolino says that “without mutually sti
mulating interactions, people and neurons wither and die.” In other words, we need others as much as they need us. He continues, “From birth until death, each of us needs others who seek us out, show interest in discovering who we are, and help us feel safe. Thus, understanding the brain requires knowledge of the healthy, living brain within a community of other brains: Relationships are our natural habit.”
Relationships give us perspective on our unique strengths, on which of our ideas are most likely to gain traction, and on how we can most benefit the world around us. Our relationships play a vital role in helping us understand how we can get moving on, and devote our best effort to, the work that really matters.
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. It’s something that I’ve done for years, and it’s been an immeasurable source of inspiration and accountability for the work that I’m doing. These small group meetings can stoke your passion, help you stay aligned with what matters most, inspire and give you new ideas or directions for projects, and simply feed you emotionally in ways you may be lacking.
The size of the ideal circle varies. Some people prefer a smaller circle for the increased level of intimacy it provides, while others prefer to have a larger group in order to leverage a greater diversity of thought and experience. While the composition of your circle can vary, you want to invite people whom you believe you will have the ability to connect with in a meaningful way and who also want to do better creative work. Examples of circles that I’ve seen work very well include the following: • A circle of aspiring entrepreneurs who gather to discuss their work, share tips on what seems to be working, and provide much-needed encouragement to one another. There is one such, called Continuous Web, that was a source of encouragement and even helped me find a few collaborators for early projects I was launching.