Sean D. Francis

Five Daily Elements to Boost Creativity

Posted on 11 July 2010

To say there are rules to creativity is hubris.  I’m reminded of that scene in Dead Poet’s Society where Robin William’s character addresses that section of the poetry book about graphing poems.

Yet we cannot deny there are some very basic elements that can be applied to enhance creativity. Creativity is not a unique skill. Just like playing chess, doing long division, baking pies, kicking fieldgoals, and listening aren’t unique skills. Each can be nurtured through time and energy.

Dan Goodwin wrote The Essential 5 A Day Your Creativity Needs To Deliciously Thrive : A Big Creative Yes to address five elements to nurture creativity: Time, Focus, Ideas, Permission, and Support. I want to share the second one with you as it is one with which I struggle.

2. Focus.

Try to take on a dozen different creative projects and your focus will be spread so thin, you won’t get far with any of them. This then feeds the belief that you’re not very creative, and you begin a downward spiral.

Instead, pick one project at a time. Give yourself an hour or two a day over a week to work only on this one project, eliminating all other distractions. You’ll amaze yourself how creative and productive you can be when you narrow your focus to just one thing like this

I am one who spreads himself thin over dozens of projects at once. Starting a new project is a form of procrastination. I’ve hit a hard part in the current project, so I jump track and start a new one. It is made even more difficult because I love various forms of creative endeavors. I love working with video and audio, I love writing and world building, I love to cook, I love building things, and I love analysis. Starting a new project is simple for me. Focusing and finishing a project is difficult.

After reading Dan’s post, I couldn’t help be think of my creative projects in terms of debt. One of the ways of effectively addressing debt is the snowball method. I translated this method to creative projects by first listing out every project I’ve started on a spreadsheet. Then I indicated whether the project is paid work or unpaid. Paid work always gets priority. After that I wrote in the deadline for the project in terms of number of days. Some projects have no specific deadline so I put that as 365 days. Finally, I fill in my best estimate of how ‘done’ the project is in terms of percentage. Everything gets sorted by Paid work over Unpaid work, then by closest deadline to furthest deadline, and then by most done to least done. At this time if there are projects on the list that are 0% done, unpaid projects, those get removed from the list and transferred to the future project list.

My project list gets transformed.  Sadly, this is just a tiny slice of my project list, but hopefully it is enough to provide an illustrative example of what I described above.

BEFORE:

AFTER:

Now I can effectively see where I should be focusing my time, working down the list. As I complete each project, I need to resist the temptation to add another project until I have enough time to do the project in a satisfying manner.  The spare time and energy I free up from completing the projects get rolled into the next project on the list and so one until such time as I have a reasonable number of projects on which I can focus and bring to fruition on time and with a quality of which I can be proud.

Do you have any tips, tricks, tried and true methods of dealing with your creative endeavors?