Good Life Project - Unlock Creativity: Time of Day Matters

Episode Date: September 3, 2015

Is creativity tied to your biological clock? A 2010 Global Chief Executive Officer study by IBM revealed the most sought after trait in emerging leaders. It’s not work-ethic or efficiency. It’s not motivation or productivity. Creativity is the trait most desired by those in charge. Understandably so. Because the ability to come up with new ideas, […]The post Unlock Creativity: Time of Day Matters appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's Good Life Project riff is entitled, How to Find Your Peak Creation Windows. So damned if this stuff doesn't work. I've been studying the relationship between natural attention and cognition cycles, creativity and productivity for years now. I know the data, but being the classic cobbler's kid, never really took the time to pay serious attention to my own organic attention and cognition, meaning thinking cycles, and then shift my working efforts to leverage these rhythms rather than war against them. And that's been a big honking mistake.

You know, coming home from a whole bunch of travels, it really led to a lot of rethinking because that tends to jar my schedule and I need to sort of recommit to doing things right. So I decided to really spend a few months completely retooling my own life optimization and work and creation process through a series of experiments. One of the first ones was paying attention to what times of day I'm most organically creative and productive. Identifying when kick-ass stuff literally cascades out of me and also when I can't drum up a half-decent thought or sentence or line or image to save my life.

Within a few days, I'd pretty much verified what I intuitively knew but didn't always do. Mornings are peak creation times for me and actually the research shows for many people. Three to five-ish, not so much. And I have an evening creation cycle that could potentially be insanely productive, except that it completely conflicts with my desire to be present with my family. So I picked up on this when I was working on my last book and I started to structure my days to leverage these windows to create huge amounts of content in a very short window of time. But once the book was in, I drifted away from that schedule. You know, I'd still roll out of bed and

meditate, hang out with the wife and kiddo for a bit and then move my body in the morning. But then without being deliberate about it, I'd spend the next three to four hours on email and social media and phone calls and the other yada yada stuff. That is an awful, terrible, no good decision by default. Using peak creation cycles for email stifles innovation, performance, and progress. I was inadvertently doing maintenance and production work during the window where I should have been in hardcore creation mode. By the time I'd roll into late morning, early afternoon, my organic, hyper-creative window was cycling down and I had nothing left to do the work that makes me come alive and that people most value. Malaise would set in. I'd find it harder and harder to come up

with ideas or posts or podcasts or creations or art and solutions when my day was structured this way. So what do you do? Well, I would respond by making a simple shift. I still do check email after I get done with sort of my basic morning ritual routine. But it's a quick scan. And unless there's a true emergency, I step away from email and technology and Facebook and connectivity, pretty much anything else that beeps, vibrates, or taunts me to respond. And I sit down to create. And that could be written creation, art, solutions, business, whatever it may be.

The mode doesn't matter as long as it's all about ideation and output. So not only does my creative output return when I do that, but my idea list explodes along with my output, which of course raises the whole other challenge of entrepreneurial and creative ADD. So here's your takeaway from this. Pay attention to your organic peak creation windows. We've all got them along with other windows where tweets, conversations, and emails are about the only thing we're capable of doing.

So if you don't already intuitively know when your peak creation windows are, run an experiment for a few days at a time. Try moving your creative efforts into different windows throughout the day and just see how you respond. Spend a few days with your revised schedule so you can really gather good data and also rule out aberrant events that might fool you into confusing peak creation and admin productivity windows. And then shift your task windows to leverage your peak creation windows.

Take note of how easily ideas and solutions flow at each time. And I strongly recommend also creating or at least keeping for a one week window while you're doing this and more weeks if you need sort of a peak creation window journal. So you can kind of say, okay, what's the time of day? How easy was it for me to actually get into this date? And what was the quality and the quantity of my output? And if you work for yourself, this is pretty easy to do. But interestingly, it's also pretty easy when you work for someone else. Nobody forces you to read your email and blast through all the admin stuff first thing in

the morning. For most people, it just becomes a default mode. It's just as easy to spend time in ideation and creation mode. For the most part, the world will wait, especially after you mysteriously start churning out extraordinary work with less effort in less time. But yes, there's always a but. And this is an interesting thing I want to just mention here, because this is my reality and many of our amazing community.

The question comes back to me very often, well, what if you work on your own or what if you have kids? So here's where it gets interesting. As I mentioned above, I noticed that I also have a second peak creation window late in the evening. When I was in law school, actually in a very past life, I'd often study from 11 PM until about three in the morning. Because my brain drops back into this sort of almost altered reality, hyper-focused, otherworldly creation state again during that window if I'm awake. And I also tend to have a window from about seven to 9pm. But with rare exception, I don't leverage these windows because if I did, I'd be taking time away from my family and I'd be a mess in the morning also. So I make a deliberate choice. I make that choice because my greatest creation is the connection that I

cultivate with the people who make my life amazing. And that starts with my family. So it's really about first identifying those windows and then identifying any potential conflicts. And then you hold that up to the lens of your values and what you hold dear. And you make decisions with intention and deliberation rather than by default. So my question for you is what about you? When are your peak creation windows? Take a little bit of time, start to track them and journal and find them and then build your creative, your contribution life around leveraging those windows for maximum creative outcomes. I hope you've enjoyed this week's Good Life Project. As always, it's my great pleasure to be sharing some time with you guys.

I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.