by Todd Henry
Question: What experience will you structure into your life this week in order to stretch your thinking and challenge your perspective?
With ever-expanding access to entertainment and news, it can be tempting to snack on information all day indiscriminately, but if you want to be sharp and do your best work, you must become more purposeful about what you are putting into your mind. Purposefully structuring the stimuli in your life provides the foundation for your work and increases the chances you will experience creative breakthroughs.
Don’t feel the need, however, to be overly strict about this. Just like with our food diet, it’s all right to eat junk from time to time. There’s nothing wrong with surfing the web or reading pop culture magazines for pleasure. In fact, many great ideas will come from these activities, but it’s important not to make the junk a staple of your diet. The really effective stimuli are the ones that shape your thinking, increase your knowledge base, and stretch your understanding of the world. You need to be purposeful about building these kinds of healthy, capacity-increasing stimuli into your life.
8.
HOURS: THEY’RE THE CURRENCY OF PRODUCTIVITY
Since the invention of the clock, people have been obsessed with time. Walk through any bookstore and you’ll find advice—on saving it, organizing it, squeezing more out of it—filling shelf after shelf of self-help literature. There are countless time-management philosophies and systems available, and new gurus appear on the scene practically every day promising to help us put some order into our hectic life. Websites that share “life hacks” and promise to make us more productive get millions of visits per year. Much of this advice is predicated on the assumption that time is a finite resource and that we must maximize every spare moment of productive capacity. Many of us are looking for a system or a trick to help us do just that.
There are so many demands on your time, it’s easy to feel no control over where your time is spent. We all feel the persistent ticking of the clock in the back of our minds. Seconds are slipping away and with every moment we’re getting closer to our deadlines. After all, isn’t there something else you should probably be doing right now instead of reading this? Is this really the best way to spend your time? Isn’t there something more productive that you could be doing? Shouldn’t you check your e-mail, make a quick call, or review your task list?
“We say we waste time, but that is impossible. We waste ourselves.”
—Alice Bloch
To be honest, it took every ounce of resistance in me not to check my e-mail in the middle of writing that sentence. Why do we feel a constant pull toward things like e-mail and task lists? Sure, it feels good when we can check something off our list or send a response to an e-mail that’s been staring us down for a few hours, but what we often neglect in our pursuit of productivity nirvana is that some of the tasks we gravitate to are interfering with more important, capacity-building work. We unwittingly become slaves to the task.
Driving this insecurity is the belief that 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.
I think a lot of us feel this way, whether we realize it or not. 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.
ALL MINUTES ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL
There is much advice on how to organize your time to conquer your tasks, but it is mostly predicated on the assumption that your goal is simply to get through the work, with little regard to the quality of that work. But this is simply not the case. As a creative, you are held to account for the quality of your work, not just the quantity.
Each project you take on makes demands of your time. You are forced to make priority calls about where you’re going to spend your hours, and because of the pressure of scarcity, you probably frequently feel like you have one chance to get it right. What we often overlook is that one hour effectively spent can produce better results than five hours spent on a lot of frenetic activity. Breakthroughs can happen in a brief moment, but these kinds of sudden breakthroughs result from a lifestyle of structuring your time according to an effectiveness mind-set rather than an efficiency one.
“Lost time is never found again.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Warning: In the rest of this chapter I will be asking you to commit time to specific practices that will make you more effective. You will be tempted to think, There’s no way I could do this stuff—I don’t have the time. I’d like to challenge you to focus on how you can incorporate these disciplines rather than on all the reasons you can’t.
THE PORTFOLIO AND THE SLOT MACHINE
As creatives, our value to the organization is determined by what we create, not for how much time we spend creating it. We have only so much idea generation time to go around, so we need to get the most out of what we have. It’s counterintuitive, but if we want to increase our productive output, we need to let go of our stranglehold on time. We must learn to spend our time effectively rather than obsessing about efficiency. To spend our time effectively means that we are willing to view our time as a portfolio of investments, not as a slot machine.
We put our money in a slot machine hoping that the next pull of the lever will pay off. The more coins we gamble, the closer we think we’re getting to a jackpot, but the odds of the game remain the same. No matter how many pulls we make, chances are we will nearly always lose our money. This is akin to a creative who is perpetually working in the desperate hope that simply plowing through in an always-on, nonrhythmic manner must eventually produce results. Certainly, some results will be generated—just like small jackpots that keep gamblers pumping coins into the machine—but over time this kind of activity only drains our creative bank account.
An investment mind-set, however, is focused on the long term. We know that we might not see an immediate return on our investment, but we know that we will see significant returns over time if we work the plan. When we build practices into our life that align with the underlying dynamics of the creative process, we will find that our overall capacity to create is growing. We will achieve long-term returns on our investment.
To spend our time effectively means that we are willing to view our time as a portfolio of investments, not as a slot machine.
ESTABLISHING IDEA
TIME
If you want to have a lot of great ideas, you need to structure formal time into your life to generate them. Sounds intuitive, right? Again, common sense is not common practice.
In every talk I give at conferences or companies, I ask the question, “How many of you would say that great ideas are critical to the future of your career or your business?” Without hesitation, nearly every hand in the room goes up. I immediately follow with the question, “How many of you had time on your personal calendar this week dedicated exclusively to generating ideas?” Crickets. Nothing. Maybe an occasional hand or two goes up.
Why the discrepancy? After all, if ideas are that important, why don’t more of us spend time trying to generate them? I think there are a few reasons. First, many of us wouldn’t know what to do with the time. We imagine hours spent staring at a blank piece of paper or standing in front of an empty whiteboard. Just the thought of it is enough to trigger the fight-or-flight instinct. Many of us don’t do well in situations where there is a danger of feeling inadequate or unprepared; we’d rather do something we can at least check off of our to-do list than waste our time on something that might not help at all (or just make us feel stupid).
Second, I think that many of us have only experienced idea generation as a team sport. The only time we really spend trying to come up with new ideas is when we’re in formal brainstorming sessions or staff meetings. Common practice in the workplace is that we generate ideas as a team, then go off to execute on our own. Sure, we may occasionally have individual flashes of insight as we plug away at our work, but we believe that kind of thing is accidental, a result of serendipity, and can’t really be systemized. It either happens or it doesn’t. Mostly, if we want to come up with ideas, we need to pull the team together and get out the flip pads.
While it’s true that we can generate ideas effectively in a team context, to think that this is the only context for effective idea generation is simply false, and this is one of the skills that our company teaches. The fear of the unknown that prevents us from exploring creative problems on our own puts a cap on our creative output. While it’s uncomfortable to think about wasting an hour thinking about the creative problems in our life and work, spending our time in this way can be infinitely more productive than filling that hour with e-mails and minor tasks.
No matter what you say about your priorities, where you spend money and your time will prove them out.
As the old saying goes, if you want to know what’s really important to you, take a look at your bank statement and your calendar. No matter what you say about your priorities, where you spend money and your time will prove them out. If you really believe that ideas are important to you, start putting your resources behind it. Begin by setting aside time for the sole purpose of generating ideas.
How much time? I recommend beginning with an hour a week. One hour, predictably scheduled, no exceptions and no violations. It’s an appointment with yourself, a commitment to spend uninterrupted time on generating new ideas, not working on old ones. If you’re like many creatives, you probably spend much of your week in execution mode. This time is not about execution or pragmatics; it is purely about new possibilities.
This is not time to strategize, write copy, design, or in any other way execute an idea you’ve already had. This is not time to do work; this is time to think about work. You are generating new ideas, not developing old ones. You are tilling the soil and planting seeds. While you may not always reap a harvest during these times, you are investing in future insights.
It’s best to spend your hour of Idea Time working on one issue. I encourage clients to begin with their Big 3. Choose one of the items on your list and dedicate one uninterrupted hour focusing on generating ideas. How much could your work change if you made this a practice? How much could one idea change the trajectory of a current project?
I often face resistance from high-level managers or creative leaders when I suggest that they block off an hour per week to generate ideas. One fired back at me, “What?! You just want me to sit around and think?!” I reminded him that his company compensates him for the value he creates, not for the amount of time he spends in his e-mail program. I responded, “You can create an infinitely greater amount of value for the company in an hour of focused, skilled thought about critical problems than by responding to that e-mail slightly faster.”
This may sound almost too obvious, even silly. “Put time on your calendar to generate ideas.” It’s so simple that it’s tempting to dismiss it. But it’s the small things that make you effective. It’s your attention to details that sets you apart. Knowing does nothing for you—it’s doing that matters. (Special thanks to Yoda and Mr. Miyagi for that valuable life lesson.) If you want to thrive you must dedicate yourself to doing the things that few people are willing to do. You need to go beyond hacks and quick fixes, and instead develop practices. Practices not only develop skills, they increase your capacity. They form the banks that allow the river to run deep.
When you begin to treat idea generation as a rhythmic practice, you begin to experience growth in your ability to generate ideas when you need them. Just like consistent repetition of any activity will give you mastery, you start to know what a good idea “smells” like. You build confidence in your creative ability and you do it in a low-pressure environment. (Who cares if you come up with terrible ideas? You’re the only one who will see them!) These capacities are developed through patient repetition and regular practice.
GETTING STARTED WITH IDEA TIME
It’s best to set aside time on the calendar when you are least likely to be interrupted. For years I have scheduled my Idea Time early in the week and early in the morning, before anyone else was in the office. This not only allows me to attack important creative problems before the stresses and logistics of the day have zapped my energy, it also starts my week off with new ideas that I can share with the team. (There’s nothing more de-motivating than having an idea at 5 p.m. on Friday afternoon, then having to wait over the weekend to share it!) Your rhythms may vary, but the most important thing is to establish a time and stick with it.
If you don’t think your manager will allow you to set aside time for generating ideas, you may need to make a case for why it’s a good practice. Share the projects you’re working on, the kinds of ideas you need to generate right now, and then show how you think this will benefit the organization. If you can show that the output of your Idea Time will ultimately make your manager look good, you’re likely to get the go-ahead. If not, you can always plan time early in the morning or at the end of the day, or get permission to adjust your schedule to accommodate an hour a week of uninterrupted thinking.
What do you do in your Idea Time? The most critical thing is to begin with a clearly defined problem, preferably in the form of a question. (As we learned in chapter 4, about Focus, we call these Challenges.) Phrasing your problem as a question immediately gets your mind working on solutions rather than on the pragmatics associated with the project. For example, “Find new markets for XYZ” can easily be rephrased as “How can we expose more potential customers to XYZ?”
Once you’ve established the Challenge, use a large piece of paper or a whiteboard to record your ideas. (A few years ago I had a wallsize whiteboard installed in my office, as I was always running out of space to record thoughts!) A method that we’ve found especially helpful to process-oriented creatives is to surround it with a series of questions to stimulate new ways of seeing the problem.
Future. What would a solution to this problem look like? What would it feel like? What is the ultimate state that would describe that the problem has been solved? Write a few words, then start generating ideas off of them.
Past. What are some assumptions that are presently keeping us in gridlock around this problem? Are there any assumptions that need to be challenged or that could serve as a starting point for idea generation? Try to challenge one of these assumptions by generating ideas designed to di
sprove it.
Conceptual. What are other problems and corresponding solutions that I know of that are similar to this one? Are there any learnings from case studies or other items I’ve been exposed to that could apply to this problem? Try to force a connection between something you’re familiar with and the problem you’re currently working on.
Concrete. What are the specific and concrete attributes of the problem? Can the problem be broken down into three words? If so, do these words give me a new way of perceiving or attacking the problem? Free-associate new words off these concrete attributes and see if they spark any new ideas.
Take for example the Challenge “Make Commercial Air Travel Fun.” (A tall order, no doubt.) The first thing to do is to make four columns on the page with the headers “Future,” “Past,” “Conceptual,” and “Concrete.” Then make a list under each header of words that immediately come to mind when considering the problem from that angle. In other words, free-associate—just write down whatever comes to mind.
Future (a few words indicating what a solution could look like): game, surprise, show, competition, entertainment, thrill, et cetera . . .
Past (a few assumptions about what air travel is like): challenging, boring, inconvenient, expensive, rude, uncomfortable, et cetera . . .