“When I am productive, I am no longer creative!”
“When I am productive, I am no longer creative!” This was what I said to my Airbnb host during a trip in Brighton almost three years ago, when I quitted my job from a fast food restaurant. In a fast pace environment, I learnt more than one task and had to manage them to raise my productivity under high demand.
I could do great jobs and was appreciated by my team leaders and boss. But this is just a small part of the story. Those positive feedbacks reinforced me to continue growing, but not in the long run so that I resulted in burnout and had to quit unfortunately.
Is productivity the enemy of creativity? As we know if we can live 80 years, we will have 4,000 weeks. As we ain’t robots, it’s impossible to keep the best performance throughout our life. We, of course, can reach the peak performance, and it’s okay our performance can drop to an unacceptable level.
The main issues are that we are obsessed with extreme productivity and we feel ashamed if we can’t maintain. We overlook creativity which provides alternatives and better options in our life, as well as rest, play and sleep. We try to look for the best tools to save our time, but we end up doing more and more than without tools.
There are two takeaway points:
We misunderstand that rest, play and sleep are lazy behaviours. We tend to believe that laziness will deteriorate our ability to adapt faster pace and uncertainty. More and more scientific researches show the opposite and we have more and more cases of burnout after people push themselves too hard.
Yes, we can’t write without a pen, a notebook or a laptop. Softwares can help even more but they can have diminishing returns. The so-called powerful apps with variety of choices and functionality won’t bring us better self and life except looking nice and selling well.
A few years ago when Evernote launched its biggest ever update, the app was so unusable that I needed to quit and looked for an alternative. Notion was my first to try, and at first I was satisfied until I realised I was working on a private website rather than taking notes for my better life. I then tried other apps like Bear and Craft, as well as plain text apps like iA Writer to outlive commercial models so that I won’t need to switch apps and fulfil the so-called “future proof”. Minimalistic apps are another extreme of complex apps. Both of them are too complicated.
That’s why I just have a few fine liners with my sketchbook when I am drawing, because I am clear I am sketching rather than testing different tools. The same case as note taking as I perceive it as a way to clarify and understand my self in my life. What I need is to write and record easily on my phone and laptop and save my pieces of writing so that I can revisit them and connect my dots. My apps serve me, NOT me who is serving tools. A good app should be able to fulfil my self-actualisation but there are many apps making us spend more time on building a system with beautiful fonts and formatting within the digital world. We call it the set up, which looks like a better preparation of better productivity, but it’s an illusion.
As this article states:
Most productivity systems fail because they prioritize storing information over actually using it. They work with the symptoms, but not getting to the real problem. And the real problem is that there is a boatload of information flying around from millions of apps and websites hunting for our attention.
That’s why I no longer spend much time on refining my productivity tools, workflow or system. I don’t want to let storing information (which leads to works like organising folders or tags inside, formatting notes or homepages to make them more beautiful) dominate my real life. Default apps like Apple Notes and Reminders are already more than enough without undermining but enhancing my creativity.
If you want to be more productive and creative, the answer is always simple: rest well, sleep well and play well! It’s okay to be “lazy” before working as you can’t be lazy forever.
