Creative Reaction

Interruptions, at the very least, cause a loss of traction and a loss of time. The more complex your work is, the more likely an interruption will completely detour you, preventing you from returning to your task unless you are reminded of it. For creative work, interruptions are simply devastating; creative reaction is broken. Ideas can be lost entirely. Setting aside blocks of uninterrupted time is of utmost importance.

Creating blocks of uninterrupted time often requires explaining their importance to those around us, whether at home or at work. Guidelines need to be established and respected.

Take a minute to read this excellent essay from Harvard Business Review’s Peter Bergman to find out how you can reduce and eliminate interruptions and create more effectively.

Managers, are you allowing your creatives uninterrupted blocks of time? Are you protecting your creatives from interruptions? Are you leading by example?

John Cleese gave an excellent presentation at the Creativity Worldforum in Belgium and excerpts of it are embedded here.

Cleese’s background as a scientist has allowed him to observe his own creative process and present some ground rules for creativity.

It’s encouraging to find that he is in 100% agreement with that we’ve been presenting here at Creative Reaction for the past three years. He speaks of the dangers of interruptions. He also speaks of creating the proper environment for creativity; creating boundaries in space (separation from distractions) and boundaries in time (setting a start time and a time to finish). Without these conditions, creative reaction will be inhibited.

Most importantly, for managers of creatives Cleese offers two profound insights. The first is “to know how good you are at something requires the same skills as it does to be good at that thing.” And the converse is true as well. ”If you are absolutely hopeless at something, you lack the exactly the skills you need to know that you are absolutely hopeless at it.”

In other words, we are all blind to any lack of expertise we may have. There’s no point in bluffing. Those who truly excel can call  you out.

The second insight describes a pandemic issue in many advertising agencies.

“If the people in charge are very egotistical, then they want to take credit for everything that happens and they want to feel that they are in control of everything that happens and that means consciously or unconsciously they will discourage creativity in other people.” I’ve seen this first-hand. The impact this makes on creative output as well as morale is devastating. (In fact, it explains some of the career choices I’ve made.)

Humility, a willingness to learn, and giving others credit are not only valuable lifelong skills, they are also the basis for collaboration and learning together as a team. Without them, everyone is working against everyone else. Managers beware!

Be sure to watch John Cleese’s presentation.

A great follow-up to Last Friday’s post, Focus on What’s Important, Not What’s Urgent, is an article which explains a system to do just this.

Using Time Effectively, Not Just Efficiently offers a great explanation of the “Urgent/Important Matrix” aka the “Eisenhower Matrix”.

It is a tool to keep us working on what is important, even while faced with things that are urgent (and inevitable interruptions). Focusing on the important is what enables us to meet long-term goals. Worth reading!

Chris Brogan has a great post in which he asks, ”Have you ever stopped to consider how various communication tools impact the person receiving the communication? Have you ever thought about the various friction and interruption costs of various products?” He suggests determining:

1. How important your message is.
2. How quickly you need a response.
3. How willing you are to interrupt the other person.

Every workplace needs to train its employees to ask such questions and establish guidelines. And if possible, allow times for employees to go off-line and actually get some work done.

Based on the number of comments, the article seems to have struck a nerve. Check it out.

The romantic notion of being a creative recluse in a cabin by a lake in the woods is far from the day-to-day reality of a collaborative creative business. Time management as well as the “management” of interpersonal relationships is an integral part of work.

Making Time to Make by Merlin Mann of 43Folders deals with exactly these concerns from the creative person’s perspective. We’re going to repurpose Merlin’s article to take a look at meeting creatives’ needs from a managerial perspective.

One of the keys to productivity is making a conscious choice to determine the most important thing to be working on at any given time. Of course, this choice alone is not enough; structures and conditions must be present to shelter creatives from distractions and the office environment must be conducive to creativity. Ultimately, it is up to managers to ensure these conditions are present.

Merlin’s article is primarily about interactions with people and determining what is appropriate; specifically, interacting with people “enough”, yet not so much that work is inhibited. It asks a series of questions (and I’ve added a few of my own) to optimize both work and creative output.

Environment/Conditions:

• What kind of environment does my talent need to do its best work? The needs may change depending upon personalities, moods, energy, and even the time of day.
• What can I change today to protect that environment for extended blocks of time?
• How much busy work is expected of the creatives? Meetings? Paperwork?
• Does the busy work support the creative work by optimizing blocks of time or inhibit it?
• Can you assist with the busy work or hire an assistant to do this for the creatives?

Time to Create:

• How can we allow our creatives to be “unavailable” for blocks of time?
• How can we keep interruptions away from them?
• Can we shield them from phone calls, e-mail, IMs, and meetings?
• How can we structure work schedules to allow blocks of time to work?

We need the entire company as well as clients and collaborative third-parties to understand the reasoning for this.

Finally, creatives need to be trained to be social and yet stay on task. “Creative breaks” such as foosball or video games are healthy in small doses.

• Which kinds of interaction with clients and co-workers are necessary?
• Can we encourage mealtime interaction?
• Do co-workers make unnecessary demands on your creatives’ attention?
• Can we run interference if need be?

We may need to be the bad guy for them. Enforce a kind of elitism where you help shape interaction to focus on the bigger picture, whether that be the current project, client service, or long-term career decisions. Some requests for attention do not even deserve a response.

Ultimately, this is about keeping perspective. Creatives’ ideas are our company’s products; they’re often the primary source of income. Everything that gets in the way of ideas is a waste of precious talent, so let’s allow creativity to flourish!

As information aggregator Kosmix grew to thirty employees, its team started suffering from e-mail overload and workweek creep; it was time to rethink its communications. Stop Email Overload and Break Silos Using Wikis, Blogs, and IM details their efforts.

It seems Kosmix was relying primarily on e-mail, even for things which e-mail is not well-suited for. (For a primer, look here.) This is sort of thing is often the case with startup companies, where, in my experience, off-the-shelf Macs, procedures and free services “work” without design or strategy, then suddenly buckle under the load as the company grows.

Now at Kosmix, Blogs and RSS feeds are being used for status updates (making many meetings unnecessary!), Wikis are being used for “persistent information”, and IM is being used for live communications from diverse locations.

My second favorite thing is that employees are allowed to set their IM “status” to “Do Not Disturb” when interruptions are especially unwelcome. My favorite thing is that technology being used smartly and is aligned with business needs.

(My only concern as an IT professional is that they are using Yahoo for IM, which is likely not the most secure choice, and there’s no mention of using a VPN to connect to the office.)

I like that there’s a healthy realization that “Kosmix is certainly not the first company to use internal blogs, wikis, and IM for corporate communication” and that “as Kosmix grows further, even this model will break down at some point and (they) will have to look for new communication models.”

The results “have been immediate and very visible. They include a lot less email and almost none on weekends; better communication among people; and 360 degree visibility for every member of the Kosmix team. After we instituted these changes, everyone on the team feels more productive, more knowledgeable about the company, has more spare time to spend on things outside of work.”

Now who wouldn’t want that?!

This boston.com article largely covers ground we’ve covered here at CR before, even quoting a few experts we’ve already mentioned; yet we need to remind ourselves and our employees that constant interruptions by e-mail, IM, meetings, conference calls and text messages get in the way of getting actual work done.

According to the article, “workers get an average 156 e-mails a day… they switch tasks every three minutes on average… spending more than a quarter of the workday… dealing with interruptions and their needed recovery time”

Furthermore, “there’s a strong connection between trying to do lots of different things at the same time, and feeling overwhelmed,” says Ellen Galinsky, of the Families and Work Institute. There’s no need to explain that constant interruptions are stressful, and therefore unhealthy.

Are we fostering creativity in our workplaces? We need to allow ourselves and others to disconnect for blocks of time to do what we are paid to do, especially if that means being creative.

A drawback of technology is constant connectivity and constant workplace interruptions – to the point that many of us have lost our weekends. I came across Take 48! today in which entrepreneur John Battelle details this very struggle; “The weekend is when I catch up on work I can’t get done during the week, in particular work that requires long form thinking”. The result? “In an odd and most likely not very healthy way, the weekends have become two more workdays.”

Battelle, along with two other senior leaders at his company, have made a step in the right direction; they have agreed to not send e-mail (which they rely upon heavily) from 6 P.M. Friday until 6 P.M. Sunday.

The result? “by golly, it really worked… it felt as if (the company), as an institution, was taking time to breathe, to contemplate, to relax and feed itself.”

Reading between the lines, this company really needs to take further steps, though they should be given credit for recognizing a problem and taking action to solve it.

Let’s all aim to limit the workweek to its M-F boundaries, enabling ourselves and our staffs time to think and work within those boundaries. Having evenings and weekends to spend time with our friends and loved ones, and to take care of our responsibilities is what’s best for all and what’s best for our businesses.

A recent NYT Shifting Careers blog post (Subscription required) is guest-written by Maggie Jackson, the author of a new book ominously titled, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age.

The reason for the implied and impending doom can be found in the publisher’s description of the book; “our near-religious allegiance to a constant state of motion and addiction to multitasking are eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention—the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress and stunting society’s ability to comprehend what’s relevant and permanent” and clearly, we are surround by examples of this. (CR readers have read about this issue here and here and here.)

Moving away from the gloom and doom, how do we combat distraction in our own lives and encourage our staffs to do likewise?

The issue is largely a cultural one. Jackson says, “What’s needed is a renaissance of attention — a revaluing and cultivating of the art of attention, to help us achieve depth of thought and relations in this complex, high-tech time”. According to the research she’s read, attention is “a trio of skills: focus, awareness and so-called executive attention”, which she explains this way: “You can be aware that you’re in a beautiful garden and then you can focus on an individual flower… executive attention is the ability to plan and make decisions.” For this last state to occur, we must consciously disconnect from the distractions; phone & cell phone ringers off, IM off, E-Mail Off, and if necessary, some sort of “do not disturb” sign.

Jackson continues, “to combat overload, we also need to look to our environments. That’s why a few pioneering companies are creating places or times for uninterrupted, focused creative thought. IBM employees practice “Think Fridays” worldwide, avoiding or cutting back on e-mail, meetings and interruptions. Other firms are setting aside unwired, quiet rooms.”

She ends with a quote that is bound to become another favorite of mine, “‘Wisdom is the art of knowing what to overlook,’ wrote William James, the father of American psychology research. Long ago, he identified the foremost challenge of our time: how to allocate our attention. And now, we’re beginning to discover what he foretold: that living distracted just isn’t smart.”

There’s plenty to contemplate here. Do we have work environments that enable focus and creativity? If not, what can we do differently?

“Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload. Last week they formed a nonprofit group to study the problem, publicize it and devise ways to help workers — theirs and others — cope with the digital deluge.”

Kudos to Techdirt for seeing an analogy here between The Simpsons and the above quote from an NYT article (Subscription required, don’t bother; as the article is not very coherent, let me save you some time by regurgitating it.)

We all know the dangers that cell phones, IM, and e-Mail pose to our productivity – primarily that of the constant interruptions. Of course, we already know better than the “typical information worker who sits at a computer all day (and) turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times” (if not, see here and here and here and here) though seeing an actual dollar amount, $650b (billion) in lost productivity, in the United States alone, drives the point home.

So what new technology are we getting? I hope it’s better than this “E-Mail Addict feature” in Gmail, “an experimental feature for the company’s e-mail service that lets people cut themselves off from their in-boxes for 15 minutes”. “Clicking the ‘Take a break’ link turns the screen gray, and a message reads: ‘Take a walk, get some real work done, or have a snack. We’ll be back in 15 minutes!’”. “Those who find they are truly addicted can cheat by hitting the escape key”. Ugh.

Michael Davidson, the engineer who created the feature, admits this is for people who say, “I don’t have self-control”. Is quitting your e-Mail and IM, and shutting your cell phone ringer off for an hour or so at a time really that difficult?!

This leads me to think (perhaps being overly cynical?) that the aforementioned nonprofit study group may not lead to much. All things being equal, the simplest solution is best. This is a problem most easily solved by equipping and training our employees with basic productivity skills and making sure we as managers are leading by example.

Parents can go around their homes, inserting plastic safety caps into every power outlet in sight, or they can simply train their toddlers not to stick their fingers in the outlets. I’d rather train. Besides, it’s simply a matter of a few hours or days when the toddlers figure out how to remove the caps!

Even though it’s focused on software development, Signal vs. Noise is my new favorite blog. This archived post, Getting Real: The alone time zone, articulates the importance of creating without interruptions, and offers some very practical tips to allow creatives to have blocks of time in order to experience creative reaction.

“Set up a rule at work: make half of the day alone time. From 10am-2pm, no one can talk to one another (except during lunch). Or make the first half of the day alone. Or the last half. But make sure to make the alone time zone contiguous — interruptions kill productivity.”

“A good formula may be 2 hours in the morning where you can communicate, then the next 4 hours alone, and then the last 2 where you can communicate again. No communication means no IMs, phone calls, no meetings. Emails can work as long as they aren’t expected to be answered during the alone time.”

Managers – you need to be on board if this is to happen!