Creativity over productivity
A fixation on maximizing productivity kills creativity. In so many ways, productivity and creativity are at odds.
Productivity is all about getting stuff done more efficiently: completing tasks and projects to meet your obligations and be successful. Capitalism relies on ever-increasing levels of human productivity. It always asks: What is the most value you can bring with the least amount of time and effort?
When you optimize your habits for personal productivity, your goal is to stay focused, avoid distractions, and crank. You make lists, set up systems, and learn shortcuts so you don’t have to think too much—you can just do. You turn yourself into a machine. You move boxes around on your calendar to budget your most limited resource, time. In a productivity mindset, procrastination is a character flaw, and downtime is a reward you have to earn.
For me, feeling productive was a point of pride. I liked being a person who was known to get stuff done. There were costs, though. Staying productive required an ever-present sense of urgency, hustle, and a feeling that I could never let myself get behind. If I did, then who would I be?
A creative person is a curious explorer, versus a robotic doer. You don’t know where a creative project is going to take you, but you want to find out. Creative work is emergent, and there are lots of detours and dead ends. You don’t think about those dead ends as a waste of time—they’re more information about the path that’s showing itself to you. Creativity requires a wandering mind and an openness to new ideas and connections. Openness needs a level of calm relaxation that’s antithetical to the urgency of productivity.
Being creative means sitting down with your project for some amount of time over and over again, and not being able to know what parts will be “done” at the end of each session. In a creative mindset, you take time to notice everything around you and tune in to your inner voice. That’s how you know when inspiration arises. When it does, you grab on and pursue it, regardless of what your calendar says.
Productivity is about hustle, urgency, achievement, and winning. Creativity is about presence, noticing, inspiration, and practice.
The most inspired and productive creative people know which mindset yields their best work.