The Creativity Lie You Will Fight to the Death For (The Deadline Lie)

I’m way more creative under the pressure of a deadline.

No, you’re not. My apologies, really, to mess up this one for you cause I’m sure you, like everyone else, really dig it. It’s the source of one of my favorite cartoons, in which Calvin professes this lie so perfectly. 

I used to be believe it too. It’s such a great procrastination excuse — I’ll be much more creative under pressure. I was also convinced I was way more creative under the influence of … Well, anyway. Now I know neither works. Nobody gets better ideas at the last minute. It may seem like it. But that’s a cognitive distortion brought on by no sleep, too much caffeine, hyperfocus, or some other direct effect of the all-night rampage to get the work finished. Or else it’s just luck.

“Last minute panic” is healthy for productivity, because it focuses the mind, by shutting out distractions like Facebook or sock drawers. And that’s the problem. Productivity is not creativity. Creativity demands distraction.

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.” — Einstein

The Ideation phase of the Creative Process has three main steps, and two of them are about doing nothing. The best ideas almost always come after a period of stepping away from the problem and letting it incubate. Einstein was a master of distracting himself; he played the violin, took long baths, went for walks. Lots of famous creatives enjoy/ed long walks (Asimov, Beethoven, Freud, Faulkner, Kafka, Descartes, Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky, Darwin, Dickens to name a few greats). Richard Feynman jotted notes at strip clubs — I had to get that in. 

Surely you’ve had a similar experience: remembering that name you couldn’t come up with while you’re on the gym bike, or thinking of exactly what you need to say at tomorrow morning’s work meeting while you’re cooking dinner tonight.

Creativity happens best when the mind is closer to sleep. Dali often put himself into a hypnagogic state when beginning a work session, by sitting in a chair holding a heavy key and meditating until he nodded off, dropped the key, and woke, sort of. Many creatives prefer to work as soon as they wake up, before the needy and narcissistic world barges in.

Daydreamers score higher on creativity tests, according to Jonathan Schooler at UC Santa Barbara. And his research is only one among several studies that show that daydreaming is a critical part of our creative thinking process. We spend up to half our waking lives in daydreams aimed at solving real-world problems we’re not dealing with in that moment. And deadline time is not daydream time.

Another problem with deadlines of course is that our first idea is not often our best. A great example is the famous design for the “I LOVE NEW YORK” tourist slogan by Milton Glaser. His first submission (not of course his first design internally), a cursive full-expression of the phrase, was loved by everyone and immediately approved. But Glaser didn’t quite love this I Love version, not 100%. He continued to think about it for weeks after the job was supposedly done. Then one day he was in a taxi stuck in midtown traffic when he saw the version we all know today, and sketched it quickly on a scrap. This logo is now one of the most iconic in history. And it was way after the deadline.

And then there’s the epic saga of 3M’s invention of Post It notes, which meandered for years from a seemingly useless weak glue to become those tiny scraps that now fill corporate towers and landfills. Had the team been tasked with solving the weak glue problem on a firm deadline, we might all still be writing notes in the margins with pencils.

There are counterexamples. Stefan Sagmeister likes to try to complete one of his album designs for musicians within the space of a single work session. And Belgian graphic designer Valeri Potchekailov did the One Project a Day Challenge in which she completed a full project every day for a year. I’m not sure, though, that either of these is really about a deadline as much as, again, a self-imposed goal — which is really different.

Because self-imposeddeadlines can actually promote creativity. Edison set up that kind of situation as a basic principle. He expected his teams to crank out “a minor invention every ten days and a big thing every six months or so.” This didn’t live for them so much as a deadline as a regular schedule , a promise, a target, a goal — almost like a modern agile approach. 

This kind of thinking offers a great method for you if you do have to deal with deadlines for creative work. Break the task up into steps. Follow the process. Leave enough time in your schedule for daydreaming and incubation. You might find that working the deadline as if it isn’t quite a deadline can open your mind without any panic at all.

ML

www.createyourcreativity.tv

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