Creativity to Manage Your Day-to-Day
Creativity to Manage Your Day-to-Day – I came across this book as part of the 99U book series from Behance, a platform dedicated to empowering the creative community through stories and inspiration to approach one’s work with a creative mindset and to build a better career no matter the field of work.
This book is a great read on managing the daily grind of routines that happen in ordinary life and work. It is in the details of daily life where creativity emerges.
Four skill sets are needed to achieve success, and there is a chapter dedicated to each of these areas:
1. Build a Rock-Solid Routine
2. Finding Focus in a Distracted World
3. Taming Your Tools
4. Sharpening Your Creative Mind
Think of this as a playbook of best practices based on the writings of twenty of the best creative leaders of our time; authors like Elizabeth G. Saunders, Seth Godin, Leo Babauta, Cal Newport, and Gretchen Rubin to name a few. Throughout the book, one is encouraged to find and utilize what is helpful. The following insights are my highlights from the book, tips that I utilize in my every day creative work.
1. Build a Rock-Solid Routine
- How, when, and where you show up is the single most important factor in executing your ideas
- Visionaries stick to a daily routine
- For great creative achievements, you have to put in the hours of work and make time every day for those work hours
- Building a routine is about persistence and consistency
- Over time, the unglamorous habit of frequency fosters productivity and creativity
- Working on creativity every day keeps your momentum going
- Creativity arises from a constant churn of ideas
- Tackle the most important task first
- Do your most meaningful work first
What I do every day matters more than what I do once in a while. – Gretchen Rubin
2. Finding Focus in a Distracted World
- Attention is our competitive advantage
- Creative goals require uninterrupted focus
- Start with small blocks of focused time and gradually work to longer durations
- It takes self-control to work in a chaotic environment
- Excellence requires observation, refinement, adaptation, and endurance
- Capitalize on the present moment, here and now
- Spend your focus time when you are most fresh
Tell me what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are. – Jose Ortega Y Gasset
3. Taming Your Tools
- Questioning how we work is an essential part of the creative process
- Purposeful action requires clear intention
- Focus on fulfilling your core needs and help others to do the same
- How are we using technology to cultivate our creativity?
- There are not shortcuts – any technology-aided shortcut robs you of your creative process
- The process is the goal
- Be conscious of your bandwidth
You can do anything, but not everything. – David Allen
4. Sharpening Your Creative Mind
- To stay creatively fit, keep your mind engaged and on the move
- A good idea is a network
- Explore the possible
- Preparing for insight is about being persistent
- Try to do the most difficult things early in the morning
- Our brain is good at repetition
- Let go of perfectionism
Creativity is not a talent. It is a way of operating. – John Cleese
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