EPISODE DESCRIPTION: We live in the construct of time. But is nodding to the constraints of time a good or bad thing when it comes to creativity and productivity? The answer isn't as black and white as we like to make it. Join me today as I explain things from my perspective.

Episode theme song ‘Grin and Skip’ by Bamtone

TRANSCRIPT

Hey, happy Monday. It’s a holiday week! Yes! 

Today's fleeting thought upon which I shall expound is pretty apropos for a Monday. 
 
So for several weeks earlier this year, I adopted a new schedule or routine, if you will. It was done with the intention of more productivity, which I think is why we do most routine, other than, you know, living in constraints like time, right?

Like [time] that’s a manmade construct that we came up with because we wanted to partition the moment of ‘now.’ 
 
I think we've scared ourselves about time, right? There's all these scary sayings that “If you love life, don't waste time for time is what life is made up of” 

Uh, no it isn’t. 
 
Or “It's really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”

Really? That's our most precious resource? 

So we've created these like scary things about time running out. “ost time is like a run in your stocking. It always gets worse.” 

You know, like if losing time or losing track of the constraint and the confines of hours and minutes and seconds suddenly disappeared…

…like we're not honoring it like this sacred thing, then we're somehow going to miss out. 
 
I'm talking about using time as a motivator for a constraint we have to live within. It's very tricky, this thing about time. 
 
And I wanna speak specifically about time when it comes to a routine, right? Like I know there's only so many years I have left with my parents on the planet, so I’m going to spend time with them. So it's not like I'm saying time is irrelevant, but when we are talking about it relative to productivity, I think we get it very skewed.

Back to the productivity piece. Once I got busy again after the pandemic mayhem, I was finding that I not only had my clients’ projects to work on in a 24-hour period, but also my own projects that were gaining momentum.

And on most days I realized, “Hell, 24 hours isn't enough time to work on everything I need to work on,” let alone throw in the eight or nine hours my body needs to sleep. 
 
So I engaged in a new routine hoping to help with this—but what I noticed was it became more of a constraint than it was helpful. 
 
I gave it three weeks, aiming for 21 days so that it would start to form a habit in my life. But it started feeling more like it deteriorated my creativity. 

So what I realized is that this is another area where mindset and how we buy into our thoughts can influence outcomes. This is also one of those areas that can hamstring us rather than empower us when we use routine for the sake of productivity.

And what I've come to call productivity for the sake of productivity is ‘pushing energy.’ Pushing energy when you're trying to push a CrossFit medicine ball across the floor is one thing, but pushing energy when you're trying to be more productive gets to the point where it actually disrupts the creative flow.

Let me just backtrack and tell you how it all began. 

So my weeks went like this: I got up at 5:00 AM. I meditated. I would then write for my own projects. And then when it got light outside, I would go for my hour-and-a-half walk and then I would come back and I would work on my own projects because a lot of my passion projects in the past had been taking a backseat to my work.

And because I'm focusing more on my personal projects now, I decided, at the suggestion of my girlfriend years ago, finally decided that I would start my day off with my own projects, where I would write, record my podcasts, and then end the day with my clients’ work. Which sounds lovely, right? Taking time, putting myself first. 
 
But it also made me anxious that my clients weren't getting first billing, considering that they were the ones that are primarily funding my life. 
 
 Backtrack even more in the past 30-plus years, with the exception of when I took a job with a company from 2016 to 2020, I've worked for myself.

Taking a job with a company was a huge shift for me, both in having a boss because I'd always been my own boss and in having a fixed routine. 
 
There was this expectation, as was typical of companies back then, even only a few years ago, that if you weren't in the office between 7:00 and 7:30 AM it was kind of interpreted as slacking.

As most companies, they had an expectation of when you should be in the office. 
 
In those three years and 11 months, I felt a bit off-kilter, and interestingly, I felt off-kilter mostly, I believe because of that routine. Now, flashback, even before then, I spent eight years in Seattle where I would commute from West Seattle to our studio downtown by taking the water taxi past the sun (or rain) bathing sea lions, or I'd bike downtown. A lot of times I'd take the bus because Seattle has amazing public transit and you know, all the cool kids use it. 

I worked with creative guys and gals that I really loved, and my days often unfolded in these very relaxed waves of creativity. 
 
Now, what was built into those waves of creativity?

On occasion, not every day, were these increments of 90 minutes that the guys that I did video with and with whom I worked in this creative collaborative would support one another in accomplishing these sprints of 90-minute focused segments of work. 
 
Now, this co-working space was complete with an open bar. We had espresso, all the beer and wine and alcohol you could drink, and we would partition our days into these 90-minute segments, and at the end of those, we would take a shot of be it espresso, make ourselves a bloody Mary, or you know…we weren't drinking alcohol all the time, but we would give ourself a reward if you will.

Again, this was a creative collaborative, so it's not like we were getting into the office at any particular time. 
 
Me and my best friends liked to get in early. So James and I would take the water taxi over or we would drive over in his cool FJ. Or some days I would go solo and ride my bike, whatever it was, right?

Take the bus, whatever we were going to do, but it wasn't fixed. We would always just kind of say, “Hey, tomorrow I'm gonna be on the 7:00 AM water taxi” or 5:30 AM water taxi. I'll meet you there, or I'm going to sleep tonight, or whatever. So it was kind of this free-flowing, creative pace at which we worked.

Well, that worked for me.

It worked for most of us. But what was really imperative was that we had, we found this out by experimentation, right? Because we had a lot of things to do as producers and editors and cinematographers. We knew what our structure needed to be. We knew that we had this amount of time to get these things done before this production had to go on location and we had to film.

So there were things that we knew we had to do if we weren't on location. So we would create these 90-minute focus segments and it was beautiful because again, the day when we got in, what we'd started our day with, what we ended our day with, the times that we started and, and ended some days, we'd take four hours off in the middle of the afternoon and go play because the sun was out.

And Seattle, when you got a sun break, you took advantage of it, knowing that in those four hours we would play, play, play, and we'd go back to the office at 5:00 PM and work until eight and then go have a drink or have some dinner and then head back home. So it was a beautiful life. I loved my life, it felt like a vacation there and it was incredibly productive.

But one of the things that we framed into these free-flowing, creative days were these 90-minute spurts of focus. Time we had a task. We determined what it was, right? It was an individual time. Sometimes we'd say, take 90s and work on a collaborative piece. All three of us. or not, but it was either writing scripts, sometimes it was storyboarding, editing, research—whatever it was, we dedicated 90 full minutes, and then after those 90 minutes, an alarm would ring.

We'd come together and talk for a while, and then we'd, you know, later on do another 90. And so most of the people in the creative collaborative would see these as, Hey, we're gonna do a 90, don't talk to us. Or we'd put up some sort of an indicator that we were in the middle of a 90. So it meant out of the 16 people that worked in this co-working space, they knew, “Oh, they're in the middle of a 90, don't bug ‘em."

Or “She's in the middle of a 90. Don't bug her.” 
 
 Routine, my friends, can work. It can also get incredibly rigid. So what I'm suggesting is that it is all, again, a state of mind, right? What's really beautiful about our corporate entities is they're not looking at productivity as a 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM anymore. They're not even looking at it necessarily as you must be here under my nose in order to get things done.

They're looking at it as, oh wait, we had to shift, pivot, the most overused word in the last three years. And recognized through that, that our people are more productive. Now, there are statistics and there's information out there that says otherwise, right? And I think that's really depending on what your agenda is, getting people into the office or allowing people to just have the freedom to be productive on their own, depending on what side of that coin you're on, you're providing that information or listening to that inform.

But there is true evidence that some sort of a free-flowing, more vacillating work-from-home structure or lack thereof is working. 

So what I'm taking away from this experiment that I did is two things. One, at this point in my life, I know that my body. Does better waking up on its own. It's just the way my natural biorhythm serves me best.

I think actually most humans are better off not waking up to an alarm, but I get why people have to use alarms. I mean, that's part of, you know, we've got time constraints. We're still living—we haven't transcended time yet. 

What I want us to take away today is looking at reframing whether routine is serving you or whether it's hamstringing you, and only you can tell, right?

This isn't a one-size-fits-all right? None of anything I say is one size fits all that I'm clear about. There is no universal truth for any of us. It's specific and individual too. But what I'd like for us to all take away is look at the constructs that we give our day. Make sure that somewhere in there, if you're doing a “must do,” “have to,” that somewhere in there is built-in time for a passion project, or time for a free-flow daydream.

And then the opposite side of that, like us, the creatives that you know, lived in Seattle and carried to and fro in our free-flowing little lives, we needed structured timeframes within that free flow. So I think it's a vacillating give-and-take. 

Routine for the sake of routine. I think it's hamstringing, I think it's non-productive. I think it's actually debilitating to our creative flow. 

But then a free-for-all with no constraints, with no, like myopic focus of—basically focus—can also hamstring us. 

So again, it's a mindset, right? Like you can go into the day and like be like, “Good morning Universe” and then move into these, this rigidity.

Or you can say, “Good morning, Existence.” And then you move into the day and wonder “What’s the day gonna hold?” 

And I bet you if you peppered in more of those kinds of days in, your life would get a little more fulfilling. 

Something to think about. Something that I've taken to heart and seen for myself over the past few decades.

And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to do a 90. 

I will see you tomorrow.

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The podcast is hosted, produced, and edited by Jenée Arthur.
Cover art by Jenée Arthur
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