Creativity is a strange bird. Some days I feel like painting, and others I delight in editing video. Other days I have nothing to do with a certain project, just so I can gain enough clarity to attack it later. The ebb and flow of creative inspiration is fascinating. I feel like it’s rarely understood.
It takes me a while to get in the creative zone. When I’m there, it’s as if the planets have aligned and everything goes away except for this one creative effort. Hours disappear as I tweak this one project. Everything is in harmony, and I feel alive. It’s an amazing thing.
Mom and I talk about this stuff a lot: the creative process. Mom’s an artist. She gets it.
My mother is a great painter (water-color, oil, etc.) and she throws pots well. Too bad those particular talents weren’t inherited. She tells me about her years in college, and how she churned out so much work. She just created and created and created. Mom uses the word prolific to describe this time in her life.
It’s a good word: Prolific.
The book I mentioned yesterday, Rework, talks about this to some extent. Under the heading “Interruption is the enemy of productivity,” I found some words that really spoke to what I’ve been feeling over the last few years: a struggle to get in the zone without getting pulled back out against my will.
If you’re constantly staying late and working weekends, it’s not because there’s too much work to be done. It’s because you’re not getting enough done at work. And the reason is interruptions… Think about it: When do you get most of your work done? If you’re like most people, it’s at night or early in the morning. It’s no coincidence that these are the times when nobody else is around…
Interruptions breaks your work day into a series of work moments … You can’t get meaningful things done when you’re constantly going start, stop, start, stop… Instead, you should get in the alone zone. Long stretches of alone time are when you’re most productive. When you don’t have to mind-shift between various tasks, you get a boatload done…
Getting into that zone takes time and requires avoiding interruptions. It’s like REM sleep: You don’t just go directly into REM sleep. You go to sleep first and then make your way to REM. Any interruptions force you to start over. And just as REM is when the real sleep magic happens, the alone zone is where the real productivity magic happens.
These words helped me to finally understand that, no, I’m not being anti-social when I want to find complete solitude so I can swim in a certain creative effort like video editing. And, no, I’m not crazy for getting so frustrated every time I get interrupted. And, in fact, I’m actually quite normal for needing to “warm up” creatively before diving into the thing I actually need to be doing. This can often look like wasting time, but it’s actually essential to get the job done.
Now that I better understand The Creative Zone, I hope that I can protect it a little better.
