How to be creative when there’s no time to do it properly.
Creativity takes time. The fact is that the most original and powerful creative thinking occurs when you enter an immersive flow state, where your pushy prefrontal cortex takes a break from bossing the thinking process, and all the other parts of your brain are allowed out to freestyle, connecting up wonderful and crazy half remembered object d’art and reforming them into ‘dancing stars.’ But that state takes time to get to. As well as real discipline and no interruptions to stay there. It’s also a state where time doesn’t exist. Or at least, a state that isn’t governed by time.
‘Productive people move through the tasks they have to accomplish in a systematic way. They make steady and measurable progress toward their goals. Creative enterprises rarely involve steady and measurable progress. Instead, being creative involves trying lots of different possibilities, struggling down several blind alleys before finding the right solution.’
‘Time Pressure and Creativity in Organizations: A Longitudinal Field Study' - Harvard Business School Working Paper
This seminal paper in 2002 was the first to prove that time pressure prevents creative thinking. They found that under extreme time pressure, your ability to think creatively plummets by 45 per cent. The trouble is, the need for creative thinking has never been in greater demand across all forms of business and industry, whilst, as the world speeds up, the pressure to think fast has never been more intense. And frustratingly, our evolutionary brains are failing to keep pace. We need to find ways to short circuit them until they can.
So, I thought it might be helpful to share six ways that I’ve discovered over the years to help my brain keep pace with progress and keep creativity levels high when time is against me.
New and improved: There is never enough time to panic. So, take some of the time that you have, no matter how short it is and go and do something completely new. Play a trumpet. Ride a unicycle. Juggle. Anything will do. As long as you enjoy it and you’ve never done it before, and it forces your brain out of autopilot. Your neural pathways will start lighting up like a pinball machine. It’s a bit like a neural double espresso.
Walking: (Yup, just plain old walking.): Not everything in life has to be tech enabled to speed it up. The Stanford University Walking Study is proof. Creative thinking and creative brainstorming are both powered up when you go for a brisk 20+ minute walk. Walking acts as a catalyst for creativity by liberating the brain from the confines of a structured, static, environment, allowing for the exploration of fresh and changing stimulus. This mental liberation provides prompts to approach problems from fresh angles, leading to innovative and imaginative solutions.
Upcycling: One of the quickest ways to find creative solutions is to borrow from other peoples. No, I’m not suggesting that you just take them wholesale and claim them as your own. That’s not creativity. As Jean-Luc Godard once said f ideas: “It’s not where you take them from, it’s where you take them to.’ Surround yourself with brilliant creative stimulus. If you’re designing a shoe, look at the best 25 shoes ever designed as your start point. Your brain will explode with new ideas.
The Einstein Sprint: Be really clear what the brief is. As Einstein once said, if I only have 1 hour to solve a problem, I will spend 59 minutes understanding the problem, and 1 minute solving it. Be certain what you’re trying to achieve. Then achieve it. The process of trying to fully understand the issue will give you countless potential answers to choose from when it’s time to start answering the brief.
The Over Stimulated Sprint: If the Einstein Sprint hasn’t provided the answers, try the Over Stimulated Sprint. It’s the same, only inside out and fuelled by coffee or your stimulant of choice. (Mine are Jelly Babies.) Spend as much time as you have available coming up with as many ideas as possible and stick them on the wall. Doesn’t matter how good they are. Just keep them coming. Until you are exhausted. Then stop, take a moment, do a couple of star jumps, throw cold water on your face, and go back to the big pile of nonsense on the wall. Amongst it will be a couple of rough diamonds that are twinkling away. And with a bit of polishing will be just what you need.
Improv-storm: This is a much more productive form of brainstorming. (It cuts out the timewasting disagreements and endless debates.) And is also a lot more fun. Get a small group of people who like and trust each other and build on the last person’s idea. Doesn’t matter if you think it’s rubbish. It’s not about critical judgement it’s about engaging your brain in free-form connection finding. And as the mighty Steve Jobs put it: ‘Creativity is just connecting things.’ You’ll end up in all sorts of places that you wouldn’t have reached otherwise. Just make sure that someone is taking notes.
Whilst creativity will always benefit from time, and I would advocate taking as much as you possibly can, there’s a lot to be said for mixing up the process, keeping your brain on its toes and forcing it to think quick sometimes. Think of it as interval training for the brain. So, to make sure you’ll never be short of an idea again, I’ve gathered up a whole host of simple and fun ways to get creative when time is short. Most of them have been developed, trialled, and thoroughly tested during a lifetime spent chasing deadlines in the advertising industry, so that I know that they work in the real world. And they are all available in a fast paced interactive 90-minute talk. A breakneck, less interactive 60-minute talk, if you’re in a hurry. Or a blink and you’ll miss it 45-minute talk. No coffee breaks or lengthy intros required.