123rf.com: Citalliance
This past fall, I was involved in a major website redesign project. Budgets and timelines were tight. There was a lot to do, and we were expected to be creative with a capital “c.” Perhaps feeling for our plight, our project manager sent us the link to an excellent Harvard Business Review article on unblocking your creativity. What every copywriter and design professional could use, eh?
Ron Friedman paints a wonderful picture of the stuck brain and the tendency to gut it out and persist when you’re experiencing a block. This, by the way, is a distinctly different scenario from when a project is going well and you really should hang in there. (In fact, Friedman has posted a terrific piece on “the perils of task switching,” which should do a lot to debunk the myth that multi-tasking really works.
So what to do? According to Friedman, there are three things you can try:
Switch tasks
But be judicious. Be discerning in recognizing when you are feeling stuck. The benchmark is 15 minutes of struggle, Friedman says. “When we let go of a problem, our perspective expands. This explains why we discover so many solutions in odd places … “ A brief distraction can jog your creativity better than deep concentration.
Break it up
Friedman advises scheduling frequent creative thinking sessions over several days. You’ll alternate between deep thinking and shifts of focus elsewhere. This is a great approach if you’ve got the time, at least in my opinion. Otherwise, I think judicious task-switching will serve you well. And I think it’s a fabulous idea when you’re involved in some personal brainstorming, rather than paid client work.
Wander productively
Keep a list of things you need to be creative about and think about them in the shower (not if you live in California!) or on a walk to your favorite lunch spot. As Friedman puts it, “A new context can lead to a fresh perspective.”
These are all great suggestions. One thing about this article really struck me, though, and that’s that we often feel stuck when, in truth, a project is going relatively well. More likely we’re bored or antsy and subconsciously find the prospect of staying glued to our seats until we’re done unappealing. Or perhaps we’re mildly attention-deficient. The key, I think, is figuring out which is which and acting accordingly.
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