Creative Productivity - Infusing Happiness Into Your Life
I am not a creative person.
I like structure.
I like honing my skills in areas I am familiar with.
I like doing things by the book, having a procedure, and a sense of automaticity to things.
Creative endeavours aren’t typically my jam.
But, I’m trying to branch out into more creative endeavours or understanding and acknowledging the creativity in my routine.
Why? Cause It’s Worth Being Happy.
There are real benefits to creative work and successfully and intentionally designing a life around a creative outlet.
There are real-world happiness and mental health benefits to doing creative things daily.
Conner, DeYoung & Silvia (2018) suggest that everyday creative activity leads to increased well-being in young adults. According to the study, people felt more enthusiasm and higher flourishing (defined as feelings of purpose and meaning in life, engagement, and social connectedness) following days when they were more creative than normal.
There seems to be a positive feedback loop whereby engaging in creative behaviour leads to increases in well-being the next day, and this increased well-being was likely to facilitate creative activity on the same day.
So being happy made you more likely to try a more creative activity, which in turn made you feel happier.
Now, just a few years after that study was released, we had everyone lock themselves in their homes for several years. Mental health and feelings of connectedness were put on the back burner as people tried to deal with the global pandemic. Needless to say, coming out gradually on the other side of things, mental health and well-being are especially important and highly sought after facets of our lives.
Satisfying our psychological needs not only keeps us resilient and equanimous but can foster growth and productivity during otherwise challenging times. Creativity feeds our psychological needs because it taps into autonomy, competency and belonging - things that are attributable to meaningful hard work and are not necessarily addressed with mindless productivity.
So what is creativity?
It can feel like a fairly nebulous concept.
But, there is a surprising level of unanimity in the field of Neuroscience when it comes to a boilerplate definition of creativity. Two elements are consistently identified in the definition. Firstly, it reflects our capacity to generate ideas that are original, unusual or novel in some way. The second element is that these ideas also need to be satisfying, appropriate or suited to the context in question.
Embrace the Apparent Disharmony
Creativity and productivity can, on gut instinct, feel at odds with each other. By today’s standards, modern productivity metrics define creative endeavours as unproductive and, at worst, worth cutting out.
That is because we don’t have a great measure for the trickle-down intangible benefits of creative work. We feel guilty about any moment of intangible production and of wasting time - that anything that doesn’t immediately create tangible benefit in money, tangible product, or obvious benefit is not worth the time. Furthermore, if we don’t immediately see the connection to the original objective, it isn’t worth pursuing.
We are very dismissive of opportunity and growth but rather pessimistic about all the ways things can go wrong. There’s too much at stake to lose, fail, and regret.
But it’s worth understanding and embracing that creative pursuits and veering from the straight and narrow path can be productive, can be effective uses of time and can be worthy of attention.
Real World Creative, Productive Endeavours
Michelin Guide - In 1900, fewer than 3,000 cars were on the roads of France. To increase the demand for cars and, accordingly, car tires, car tire manufacturers and brothers Édouard and André Michelin published a guide for French motorists, the Michelin Guide - which had nothing to do with car tires.
Now, if one were focused on car tire production, material use, efficient tire design and the like, the Michelin guide would appear like a complete waste of time, a distraction from the business focus, and a deterrent to productive work. It very clearly is not productive work for a car tire manufacturing company in the traditional sense. But it is through creative ingenuity that the Michelin guide became a marketing vehicle for their car tire product, car tire maintenance, because those advertising points can be embedded into their guide to restaurants along the countryside of France.
It is clear that driving and faraway locations are intimately associated through the means of travelling, but the creative association between car tires and enabling that experience of faraway places as well as the ingenuity to become the company that publishes that book is the creative outlet.
Vaseline/Petroleum Jelly - In 1859, Robert Chesebrough, a chemist, learned of a residue called rod wax that had to be periodically removed from oil rig pumps in the oil fields in Titusville, Pennsylvania. He observed that the oil workers had been using the substance to heal cuts and burns, took samples of the rod wax back home, extracted the usable petroleum jelly, and began manufacturing a medicinal product called Vaseline.
Now, the product he created is based on the byproduct formed on an oil rig. He was marketing it as a medicinal product with applications in wound healing. At first glance, a knee-jerk reaction would suggest that nothing you find on a rough-and-tumble blue-collar oil rig job would be of practical retail inspiration or use. In fact, the rod wax was a harmful byproduct needing disposal because it caused equipment malfunctions. Tunnel-visioned productive work would focus on how quickly and efficiently the rod wax could be cleared and disposed of - nothing more. But Chesebrough had the creative capacity to pivot with this discovery to have beneficial implications in other industries.
How To Design a Life Around Creativity
So what practical things can we apply and do to build creativity into our lives?
Schedule opportunities for creative thinking. Block off time in your schedule to acknowledge, prioritize and allow for creative work. If you are a knowledge worker who needs to perform creative-based work, there is an inherent practical application for this. Give yourself space to explore your creativity. If you don’t have creative knowledge work employment but wish to still develop that aspect, assign yourself creative time. I try to do something new once a week and write about it to keep myself accountable.
Recognize creativity when giving feedback. Whether it is feedback for yourself or your direct reports, while evaluating production and performance, besides acknowledging productivity and efficiency, acknowledge creativity, even if an idea fails. There is value in acknowledging and pursuing creative efforts even if they have failed. The courage to pursue creative endeavours and the willingness to try are valuable. Reward those initiatives with encouragement and recognition of how creative thinking contributes to success.
Recognize What Makes You Creative And Invest In Those Things. Particularly in the COVID-19 era, remote work plays an integral role in our new normal. The negative impact of this transition, though, is the access to creative collaboration and ultimately, to productivity. According to Lucid’s first-party research, 22% of remote workers surveyed noted that working from home has hurt their creativity, and one in four managers agree. The reason? Isolation. Since virtual interactions lack behind in-person interactions, there needs to be a conscious effort and clear, tangible means to augment video conferencing. Whether that is virtual whiteboards, breakout groups, or anything else that can recover and enhance lost in-person collaboration, investing in that recuperative effort is important.
References
Kaufman, S. B. (2019, January 4). The Neuroscience of Creativity: A Q&A with Anna Abraham. Scientific American Blog Network. Retrieved March 18, 2023, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-neuroscience-of-creativity-a-q-a-with-anna-abraham/?utm_source=pocket_collection_story
Report: How collaboration and creativity are suffering in the wake of covid-19. Lucidspark. (n.d.). Retrieved March 19, 2023, from https://lucidspark.com/blog/report-collaboration-and-creativity-during-covid
Tamlin S. Conner, Colin G. DeYoung & Paul J. Silvia (2018)Everyday creative activity as a path to flourishing, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 13:2, 181-189, DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2016.1257049
Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, February 23). Petroleum Jelly. Wikipedia. Retrieved March 19, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_jelly