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nurturing creativity
Is Structure Stifling Your Creativity?
Is Structure Stifling Your Creativity?
For many people, having structure is very beneficial to their work. Having goals, milestones, and plans on how to achieve them is a great way to keep yourself on track and focused.
However, that doesn’t mean that more structure is going to be equivalent to more or better results. In some cases, if you have too much structure, you might actually end up doing more harm than good to your creativity processes.
If you were to have every little detail of your work planned out and highly structured, down to when you’re going to do what, where you’re going to do it, and how it’s going to get done, then you’re really not leaving yourself with much wriggle room.
If you feel like doing a different part of your work on one of those days, but force yourself to follow the schedule and plan, then you’re going to be unhappy with your work and probably end up creating something that isn’t your best effort, because you didn’t want to do it.
This type of rigidity is especially harmful to your creative thinking. If you’re expected to come up with decent creative ideas on command, that’s a pretty unrealistic outlook; you should really be nurturing creativity.
Some of these ideas will have to come naturally, and you can’t really predict when you’re going to be feeling creative and when you’re going to be feeling more work oriented.
You need to have a bit more flexibility in your plans. Instead of planning day by day or hour by hour, you should instead have weekly goals to fulfill, so that depending on how you’re feeling on various days throughout the week, you can accomplish everything you need to for that week without being overly dependent on a schedule.
Of course, if there’s a case in which you’re feeling a bit too loose, and you’re unable to focus or you’re struggling, you can tighten up your schedule as needed. But when it comes to your day-to-day life, you should have a bit more flexibility and freedom to approach your work as you see fit.
Tightening up your schedule is something that you can do if you really need to see more progress, just know that when you’re in a more comfortable spot, you can let up again in order to regain a better sense of creativity.
One of your goals should be that you’re able to constantly maintain a flexible schedule, so work towards that goal diligently.
Don’t Allow Your Work Days To Bleed Into Your Time Off
Many people have begun mixing their work and off time together, so that they’re always thinking about or doing work throughout the entire day.
They might take small breaks between work, and what ultimately ends up happening is that they don’t get enough work done, but also don’t end up relaxing that much.
Instead, you should separate the two, so that you have dedicated relaxation time and dedicated work time. It’s necessary for your mental wellbeing to have ample time off to relax and unwind from strenuous work.
If you’re working all day every day, with random bits of “relaxation” strewn throughout, you’re going to be getting the worst experience of both parts. You won’t have enough focus in your work, but you also won’t have enough time to properly relax.
Work requires a certain amount of focus and effort if you’re going to do your best and get it done efficiently. Many people essentially put their brain into “work mode,” where they’re only focused on work and nothing else.
During the times that you have dedicated to work, you’re not distracted by anything else, and you can give 100% effort into getting your job done. Once you’re done with work and you’ve worked hard, you can actually fully relax without having to worry about working again until the next day.
Just as work requires your full attention, relaxation requires you to have a clear mind. If you spend your entire relaxation time worrying about the work you haven’t gotten done yet, you’re not going to relax at all, but rather you’ll just be distracted while getting more stressed out.
You should take the time you’ve set aside for relaxation and use it fully. Completely take work off of your mind and just enjoy whatever it is you’re doing. You can be watching TV, chatting with friends, reading a book, or doing absolutely nothing.
Whatever it is, just make sure you’re not letting work bleed into the time you have, otherwise you’re not going to enjoy it very much. Some people can blend their work and enjoyment together, but this doesn’t work for everyone.
If it truly works for you to do both around the same time, then you shouldn’t stop doing that. If you’re unsure, you should try to separate work and relaxation time as much as possible, because that may be what’s going to work best for you.
Get Used To Thriving With Background Noise
If you only work well in complete silence and complete focus, you’re going to need to learn how to adapt. Very few places are dead silent. Even if you have your own home office, chances are you’ll hear your family in the background, as you should.
If you’re at a café, there will be people talking. If you’re at an office, there will be background noise and voices. You need to train yourself to be able to either tune out or work well with background noise.
Only working well in near or complete silence is indicative of larger problems with focusing. You might be able to focus in those situations, but you can’t let the smallest things throw you off completely, otherwise you’re going to struggle to keep up with your work in all kinds of places and situations.
One option you have is to simply get used to it and work in places with background noise more often. Instead of holing up in your apartment or house where it’s all quiet while you work, go and work at a nearby café.
Try to go during hours when they’re not busy so it’s not too noisy, but there’s a background murmur that you can get accustomed to. Eventually, you’ll be able to work in somewhat more distracting locations, such as your home if there are a lot of residents, or in a loud office with others.
This will allow you to work under more and more circumstances, meaning that you’ll be able to efficiently keep up with your work anywhere you go. Of course, not everyone has a nearby café that they’d want to work in for extended periods of time.
Coffitivity is a website that you can use in order to better get used to working in environments with a bit more noise. You have a few free selections to choose from, in various levels of noise, and you can adjust the volume as you’d like.
This allows you to get used to it, even from your quiet home or office. You don’t have to get used to a ton of noise. Everyone has their limit. Nobody is expecting you to work well in the middle of a theme park or at some other loud location.
The point is to be able to handle fairly common level of background noise that you would encounter in a wide variety of situations, so that you don’t need a special place to get all of your work done.
As you can appreciate, a lot of this is dependent on the way you think and if you want to know more about developing a good mindset for success, please click on the featured resource below for a free Strong Mindset report; download, read it and take action 😊
Nurturing Creativity Takes Time
When you are trying to be creative, don’t be tempted to force it because this can be detrimental and have the complete opposite effect and cause your creativity to dry up.
This will only cause frustration and can become an unending cycle of frustration and lack of creativity and focus,
Being creative takes time for most people so you need to be patient. Also, many of us lead incredibly busy lives and it can be difficult to find the time to sit down and try to get the creative juices flowing.
But if you want to unleash your creativity, it is important to try to make time in your daily schedule.
Be Okay With A Split Work Schedule
Sometimes you can get burnt out on your work pretty quickly during the day. If you’re working for 8 straight hours, then by about hour 5 or 6, you’re going to be feeling pretty worn down and ready to recharge.
Many people seem to stress getting all of your work done for the day in one block, but you really don’t have to do that. In fact, it can be quite helpful for your focus and creativity to split up your work schedule as you’d like it.
Let’s say you’re working for 8 hours each day. During that time, you likely want to get as much done as possible, so you want to be working efficiently and competently. It’s most definitely not impossible for you to work 8 hours straight.
Many people do that. However, not many people come out of 8 hours of straight work feeling happy or energetic – nor do they give it their all during the last couple of hours. What you should do is split that 8 hours of work into two halves, each only lasting 4 hours long.
By the end of each 4-hour shift, you might be a little bit tired, but definitely not as bad. You can take some time in between to nap, relax, and do whatever you want to do – such as tapping into the creative side of your brain before you get back to work.
At the end of the day, you’ll have more energy, but you will have worked the same amount total. You just gave yourself some time to rest in between, but overall, it’s the same exact amount of work.
In fact, you might actually become more accomplished because you’ll be reinvigorated in the second half of work after some time spent recharging. You can even split it into smaller chunks if you’d like.
You can do 4 sessions of two hours each, which isn’t much at all. If you’re taking good sized breaks in between, you’re going to have a much-needed rest at the start of each session and be able to work as efficiently as possible during the time that you do work.
Some people might scoff at splitting up your work schedule, because it’s not the traditional way of working. Keep those thoughts out of your mind because it doesn’t matter if the work is done all at once or not, as long as it all gets done throughout the day.
Just try it for yourself and see how it works out for you. What have you got to lose?
So, you now have put time aside to nurture your creativity. But how do you go about doing that during those sessions?
Do your sessions have to be strict and regimented or more fluid and forgiving?
This may well depend on the type of person you are, but it can be a good idea to not put too many restraints on yourself during these sessions and to get things out of your mind and tidy them up later.
Be Okay With ‘Messy’ Creativity You Can Sort Out Later
You may have encountered situations where you’re being creative and coming up with new ideas, but you spend a lot of time trying to make them more focused than they are. You might think that creativity and focus have to happen at the same time, but that’s just not true.
In fact, not only can you reign in your ideas later, but it might be beneficial to you to only be creative and not place so much emphasis on cleaning them up right away. When you’re brainstorming new ideas, they’re bound to come out a bit messy.
That’s not a negative at that time – it’s just natural. Creativity isn’t meant to be focused and structured at first, but rather raw thoughts that need to be refined later. If you’re trying to do both at the same time, you might stifle your own creativity by not allowing it to breathe, constricting it with too many boundaries.
To get the most out of your creativity, you should just let it all flow out no matter how nonsensical it might seem at the time. Whatever comes to mind, just put it all out on paper so that later on you can sort through it and find what will work best and what maybe needs to be restructured.
Your brain will often either be in a creative state, or a focused state. Each one of these has their own benefits but trying to do both at the same time can end up hurting both. Your focus won’t allow your creativity to have enough wiggle room, while your creativity will cloud your focus.
Have dedicated time for each to fully develop your ideas. Let’s say you’re brainstorming ideas for a slogan for your company. The first thing you should do is let your creativity flow and come up with whatever you can think of and write it all out.
This lets you cover as many possible ideas as you can, so that you don’t leave a potentially good slogan out. Later, you can then look back through all of the slogans you thought of, and sort through them.
You might see some that are good, but need to be changed a bit, some that are good as they are, and some that might just need to be ditched. There’s no shame in tossing an idea out later, but you want to make sure you put it out there in case it seems like a good idea when the time comes to focus.
Having a strong mindset is critical to any attempt to nurturing creativity and staying focused, so click on the featured resource below to get a free report on how to develop a strong mindset. Download, it read and take action 🙂