The Key to Creating Remarkable Things. No one likes the feeling that other people are waiting – impatiently – for you to get back to them.At the beginning of the day, faced with an overflowing inbox, a list of messages on your voicemail, and the to-do list from your last meeting, it’s tempting to want to “clear the decks” before you start on your own most important work.
When you’re up-to-date, you tell yourself, your mind will be clear and it will be easier to focus on the task at hand. The trouble with this approach is that you end up spending the best part of the day on other people’s priorities, running their errands, and giving them what they need. By the time you finally settle down to your own work, it could be mid-afternoon, when your energy has dipped and it’s hard to focus on anything properly. “Oh well, maybe tomorrow will be better,” you tell yourself. But when tomorrow comes round there’s another pile of emails, phone messages, and to-do list items. Here are a few tips to help you make the switch: 10 Laws of Productivity. You might think that creatives as diverse as Internet entrepreneur Jack Dorsey, industrial design firm Studio 7.5, and bestselling Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami would have little in common.
In fact, the tenets that guide how they – and exceptionally productive creatives across the board – make ideas happen are incredibly similar. Here are 10 laws of productivity we’ve consistently observed among serial idea executors: 1. Break the seal of hesitation. A bias toward action is the most common trait we’ve found across the hundreds of creative professionals and entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed. 2. When our ideas are still in our head, we tend to think big, blue sky concepts. 3. Trial and error is an essential part of any creative’s life.
To avoid ‘blue sky paralysis,’ pare your idea down to a small, immediately executable concept. 4. When working on in-depth projects, we generate lots of new ideas along the way. 5. 6. 7. 8. Few activities are more of a productivity drain than meetings. 9. The Top 5 Qualities of Productive Creatives (And How to Identify Them!) A recent BusinessWeek article reported that, “According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM’s Institute for Business Value, CEOs identify ‘creativity’ as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.”
While the study’s results will come as no surprise to hard-working creative professionals, they do raise an important question: How do we identify – and hire for – the qualities that add up to creativity? By our lights, the notion of “creativity” can’t be separated from the skills required for creative execution. So our analysis of the characteristics crucial to creativity focuses particularly on the skills that facilitate putting ideas into action. Below, we outline five key qualities of particularly productive creatives, followed by some recommendations for how to uncover them in potential hires, co-workers, and collaborators. 1. As Albert Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”