Some days you feel like absolutely nothing can go wrong.  You’re on fire, unstoppable.  Ideas are flowing, confidence is high, and you’re walking around with your chin up and your back straight.  There’s no better feeling than knowing you’re at the top of your game.  The world is your oyster.  Everything you touch seems to turn to gold and you wonder how you were ever stagnant before.

Until the past few years, I had really only been able to identify these times when looking back.  Now I’m acutely aware of them when I’m in them and I grab onto them and try not to let go when that train is rolling.

But these feelings never last long. Maybe a day or two, maybe a little more. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a full week of this superhuman ability to create things out of nothing without obstruction.  Sooner or later things will return to normal and there’s no explanation why this happens.  You just can’t self-motivate like you were able to the day before.  Ideas are at a distance, just out of reach.  You aren’t feeling flow and a day’s worth of work is taking two full days instead of just three hours.

It’s crazy frustrating when this happens. You try and recreate the environment, the feeling you had, and you just can’t. Your mind has moved on, your thoughts are elsewhere, and your current experience has been altered in some inexplicable way. And you don’t like it at all.

What happened?  Well, nothing at all.  It’s perfectly normal for creativity to ebb and flow like this.  It happens to every single creative person dozens – even hundreds – of times throughout a year. It’s just not possible to keep anything running at its highest capacity all the time.

But are there ways to keep it running for as long as you can?  Maybe.  There are things you can do that will help but only in the sense that they may be able to prolong that window.  There’s no guarantee that these things will work every time, but if they buy you an extra few days or a shorter period in the downswing, it could be worth it.

First you need to realize that any extended period of creativity comes down to the amount of energy you have and are able to apply to your task at hand. Remember that life is the sum of what you focus on, and in order to focus you need to have the energy (and the skill) to be able to do it. Energy is one of our most important assets.  If we have appropriate energy, that foundation will at a very minimum keep us going through the inevitable dry spells – and could even make peak creative output sustainable over the long run.

Tony Schwartz, speaker and author, says in his epic and highly recommended book, Be Excellent at Anything, “human beings are not designed to run like computers—at high speeds, continuously, for long periods of time. When we try to mimic the machines we’re meant to run, they end up running us.”

He recommends a ‘pulse’ approach.

See, our bodies themselves are pulsing all the time. Our blood flow, our brains, our muscles. Virtually every part of the immensely complex human system is pulsing between times of increased output and decreased output, and it’s because of this rhythm that our bodies and minds are able to perform at their best when they need to. This, of course, is assuming you’re working with your body and mind on its natural rhythm and not sabotaging it!

So how does this relate to creativity? Creativity comes down to maintaining energy, and energy comes down to effective “pulsing” – balancing renewal with hard work and making sure to keep some fuel in the tank for later. If you can do this, chances are you’ll be able to eek out a little more of that flow state when your creativity train starts to slow down (as it always will).

Here are three basic things you can do immediately that can work wonders.

Train for your brain every day.

Move your body every single day in some way. This can be through basic movement – stretches or light exercises you do at your desk every 30 minutes, it can be brisk outdoor walks, or more formal gym time. There’s so much research that shows the positive effects of exercise across the board, that it can be almost overwhelming to dig into it (don’t bother, just exercise instead).

Yet the thing that many people still don’t realize is just how important exercise is for your mind itself. Studies with lab mice have shown that brainpower improves when the mice are given the ability to run as freely as they would like. When the mice are pushed to their limits (think: lab technician as personal trainer of mice) the cognitive ability of the mice improved even more.

The same happens with us. We’re able to strongly improve our cognitive capacity – the range in which we’re able to flex our brain muscles – with daily exercise.  If you consider yourself a creative person and you’re not exercising every day, you really should try it.  Here are some specific suggestions to start with:

Exercise for 30 minutes each and every day with an alternating approach. Stretching, yoga, biking, strength training, boxing, gymnastics. They all have their benefits and they’re all worth doing. Remember, think of yourself as an athlete and look at how serious training translates directly to real life. Also, skip the slow-go cardio training and switch to interval training. As a proponent of using intervals for almost 15 years now, I can vouch that it’s the single best way to improve performance, health, and overall fitness when done with progressive resistance. You’ll be astounded at how fast your mind starts working after just 20 minutes of interval training.

Get up and move every 30 minutes. Stretch your arms, legs, and neck if you’re sitting at a desk for a prolonged period of time. Switch to a standing desk if you can, and try to use every opportunity to walk to work (or while at work). As I mentioned last year, I have lots of my 1:1 meetings outside while walking.

Eat small snacks of protein, low-glycemic carbs, and water every 3 hours. While its impact on bodyweight is debatable, this is something I’ve been doing for 15 years as well – and it’s hard to argue with its impact on energy. Maintaining blood glucose is critical to maintaining energy. If you’re subsisting on a muffin and a latte all day, you simply can’t expect to be performing at your best. You need to start treating your body like a high-performance vehicle and fueling it!  Here are some ideas.

Singletask every day.

Remember that multitasking is a total joke, and that it’s impossible to apply real brainpower to two or more tasks at the same time.  What you’re really doing is just switching really fast so that it appears as if you’re doing more than one thing at a time.  And of course, if you’re like 99.9% of the population, both of the things you’re trying to do aren’t being done well.

As I wrote about in Multitasking vs. Background Processing:

We’re not really multitasking, we’re just context switching really fast. Think about the last time you were interrupted in your office as you were deep in thought. You stopped to pay attention to someone and your focus shifted. Then when the conversation was over, you went back to what you were doing. That’s quick context switching, not “multitasking”. Whatever it’s called though, it will impede your efficiency.

Here are some ways to get out of the habit of multitasking and start focusing on one thing at a time:

Harness the ultradian rhythm. A powerful concept discussed in Be Excellent at Anything, the ultradian rhythm is based on the principle that during the day we oscillate every 90 minutes or so from higher to lower alertness. Which means we should focus our energy on a single thing for 90 minutes, and then stop, take a break, and after some time refreshing, prep for another 90-minute sprint. I know that when I focus for 90 minutes on a single thing, I can get the equivalent of 3 or 4 hours worth of “normal” work finished!  That’s how I wrote this post.

Use RescueTime for a week or two to see just how much you’re switching between tasks every day. This service will literally track what you use on your computer, for how long, and you’ll quickly discover patterns for yourself that you may not like to see. You may think you only use Facebook for 15 minutes every day, but what would you change if you found out that it’s really an hour of usage every day? We fool ourselves – and data is reality.

Get the time wasters out of the way first. This is counter to lots of advice, but it works best for me. If you know you’re going to be “pulled” into email, RSS feeds, or Facebook – then just timebox your usage, allow yourself to do it for that set period of time, then get up, stretch, grab a cup of tea, and settle in for a 90-minute sprint of real work. This structured play time will keep your mind from wondering “what’s happened” in your many inboxes, and instead you’ll be able to focus immediately on your task.

Renew every day.

Pulsing between high levels of output and low levels of output effectively means you need to allow yourself to have low levels of output, even when you’re on a roll. Making sure you have some downtime means that you’ll be better equipped for times of flow when they make themselves available to you.

Meditate using mindfulness. Meditation comes up in virtually every book on happiness, wellness, or even leadership and productivity these days. There’s a reason for this: it’s a vital habit to form if you’d like to become more in touch with your thoughts, emotions, body, and train your brain to stay in the present moment. Just 15 minutes of mindfulness meditation every day is preparing your brain to pay attention to the present moment in a way that’s non-judgmental and non-reactive. It’s literally exercise for your brain.

After just a week or two of mindfulness meditation, you may find that your mood has improved, your energy levels are higher, your work is higher quality, and your relationships have more purpose. Seriously. Check out Mindfulness for Dummies for a crash course (yes, I realize it’s a ‘dummies’ book – but it’s good).

Take your micro-vacations. Creativity is restored with exposure to nature and with downtime. In Take Micro-vacations to Boost Focus, I defined a micro-vacation as “Daily activity lasting at least 15 minutes that can’t be considered “work” by any sane, rational human being; purpose of which is to recharge and increase overall focus for the next few hours”. Aim to take a few micro-vacations every single day, and really strive to get Downtime with Nature while doing so.

Give yourself a “tech-free” hour (or more!) Wow, is this a hard one for me. My time revolves around being connected; I have 6 PCs and Macs, an iPad, a Windows Phone, a Kindle, a Kindle Fire, and about a dozen more gadgets that connect me to the outside world (don’t judge, it’s part of my job!) Yet even I will admit that being attached to the web via a Matrix-like brain implant isn’t the healthiest thing. So every day, I make sure to have at least one tech-free hour. I never take my smartphone with me to the gym, so sometimes this qualifies – but most of the time, it’s the time I spend with my family that I prefer to be most present. This is an explicit goal for me to improve on for the new year.

And of course, I’ve covered sleep before on Refocuser and that’s indeed a big part of renewal. Get your sleep!

Tony Schwartz goes into a lot more detail (352 pages worth) on many of these concepts in his book, Be Excellent at Anything. I had the opportunity to chat with him briefly after a seminar a couple weeks ago and I came away impressed with his approach to human performance – you may too.

Let me know how things go!

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While on the island, I’ve been doing everything I can to unwind.  I’ve been devouring scones, French fries, margaritas, Oreos, bacon, Frosted Mini Wheats and other junk I don’t allow myself to even consider eating most of the time.  I’ve stopped tracking my habits.  I’ve exercised just once if you don’t count swimming and chasing my kids; a short run near the beach on our first day here.  I haven’t spent any time checking tasks off of my lists; in fact I had moved them all over to a "Post Vacation" category before we left the mainland so I wouldn’t even stumble upon them accidentally.  I haven’t done much writing, stretching, or flossing, and I’ve had a metric ton of Maui Coffee.  It’s been great!

Yet I’m not too concerned about slacking off, or at least not as much as my Type A personality would suggest.  Though I’m itching to get back into my routine, I’m not worried about what would normally be viewed as a setback.

Planned breaks like these are required to reset my passion meter from time to time.  I try and force myself to "unplug" from my (somewhat) normal intensity to help me remember why I do what I do to begin with.  It’s hard to hit the ‘off’ switch… it’s frankly just as hard as turning it back on again, but I try and view it as sort of like stopping at a gas station before a long road trip; breaks like this fuel me for at least a few months, and after six days of gluttony and objective laziness, I always realize that it’s not the permanent life for me.

But what you do for a few weeks out of the year doesn’t define the year, and it doesn’t define you.  It’s what you do most of the time, not just some of the time, that makes the difference over the long haul.  Have consistency in the fundamentals (modulo a week here and there) and personal growth is inevitable.

Times like these I also do more reading than normal.  Between Audible and Kindle books, or just stopping to think while walking the beach, my mind is still completely active.  Thinking and reading lead to ideas, which lead to goals and objectives, which lead to plans, which eventually may lead to new ways to experience flow.  Even when I’m not doing anything of substance, I still feel like I’m creating.  I jot down more thoughts and learn more new things while on vacation than at any other time throughout the year.  It’s part of what I look forward to about these breaks.  It’s not a surprise that while on vacation I’m also closest to nature (more on that in a minute).

Recreation, or "creating and bringing forth again", is an essential part of leading a full life.  It’s no surprise then that recreation means ‘creating again’.  Without time to reflect, unwind, and just plain BE, it’s hard to maintain any sort of pace in your normal life. Creativity is sapped if you’re not detaching every once in a while.  Whether it’s fifteen minute micro-vacations or weeklong actual ones, human beings can only thrive when they have regular periods of downtime.

As discussed in the past, focusing attention is a lot like exercise (what isn’t?) – after enough directed attention, you just can’t focus any longer.  You’re sapped.  Your willpower and focusing abilities weaken to the point of being utterly ineffective.  This state as it relates to attention even has a name, it’s called Directed Attentional Fatigue (DAF) and it’s described as a "temporary fatigue of the inhibitory mechanisms in the brain.”  The symptoms of DAF include feelings of distraction and even forgetfulness, leading to poor judgment and an increase in stress levels, high blood pressure, and irritability.  It’s what happens when you wait too long to relax.  Hit this state too often and you’ll eventually burn out.

Taking time out to regain perspective and recharge your batteries is critical.  Fifteen minutes here and there make a huge difference, and of course longer periods of time help as well.

While it’s important to take this time when you can, you’ll also benefit greatly by feeding your innate biophilia, or ‘attraction to living systems and natural settings’.  When you picture your perfect place to be, all other things being equal, chances are you are NOT picturing a packed New York City subway car.  It’s probably some place deep in nature surrounded by water, trees, a breeze, and the scent of nature uninterrupted.  We’re hard-wired to be one with nature.  Returning to it can make a difference.

Nature’s ability to restore is backed by science as well.  Marc Berman and his colleagues at the University of Michigan have found that even short periods of exposure to a metropolitan street can affect one’s ability to focus, but spending time in a natural environment – or even just looking at pictures of a natural environment – can help restore attention (a 20% improvement!).  I guess it’s not surprising that so many people have the ocean and trees as their PC desktop backgrounds. 

The Japanese have a term for this focus on nature as restorative.  It’s Shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing.  A short, leisurely visit to a forest to help improve or restore attentional powers.  Related to the benefits of natural aromatherapy, forest bathing has also been shown to boost immunity, lower blood pressure and resting heart rate, and help reduce stress due to "phytoncides, the airborne chemicals that plants emit to protect them from rotting and insects".  Being around nature even increases neuroplasticity, or the brain’s ability to form new connections (strangely enough – or maybe not – that’s another post I wrote while in Hawaii!)

Attention Restoration Theory, developed by Rachel and Stephen Kaplan also of the University of Michigan, asserts that concentration improves with exposure to nature as well.  Shifting into a state of "soft fascination" as the Kaplans call it, seems to help the most to restore focus and attention.  Soft fascination – cloud gazing or just strolling on the beach or in the woods – is in stark contrast to “hard fascination” where your attention is overwhelmed by stimuli.  Yet people tend to turn to things that require directed attention in order to “relax”, like sporting events or television, without realizing that they’re not restorative.  Getting out into nature, however short the time may be, is a great way to return to your normal, focused self.

This doesn’t really feel like something we should need science to tell us, but like so many things, proof serves as a reminder.  Recreation and time spent in nature don’t require long trips to tropical locations of course, just short daily walks outside in a natural environment close to home or work can help restore energy and vitality.  Give it a try for yourself!

Back to the beach…

Note: One of the things I’ve realized while overloading on white carbs and drinking a bunch of empty calories is that I want this blog to be a little more… well, personal.  Looking back over the last two years (by the way, happy 2nd birthday to Refocuser!) the entries I’m most proud of are the ones that relate concepts back to my personal reality.  The entries I’m least proud of feel like my old Psychology textbooks; impersonal, bland, and preachy.  So I’ll be working on this more as Refocuser enters Year Three.

Related posts:

1. Focus: How Rapt Attention Changes Who We Are

The reason I started this project (Refocuser) in 2009 instead of 1999 when I first had the idea is because I spent 10 years fighting with myself about how to make it perfect, all the way down to how I’d organize the site’s content on my hard drive.  Ugh!

Naturally, striving for your best work isn’t a bad thing… most people would never want to swing to the other extreme where quality and pride in the work are void, because that’s a real slippery slope to mediocrity.  But I’ve found that for me, that’s pretty much a non-option given my personality.  Keeping my perfectionist tendencies in check doesn’t have to mean that the quality of my output is going to suffer.

What I focus on instead of perfection is doing enough to get the most out of my efforts.  The second I start trending towards the familiar “over-focusing”, I force myself to stop in my tracks and self-evaluate.  More time spent on an activity very rarely equals higher quality in the kinds of projects I do – in fact, many times, it ends up being counter-productive – so not being a perfectionist can actually improve my work.

More is lost through indecision than wrong decision – Carmela Soprano

In his great book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Barry Schwartz describes research as it relates to consumerism – and the findings indicate that people with perfectionist tendencies often have higher stress levels and are at greater risk for depression.  Schwartz describes two types of people with respect to buying behavior: Maximizers and Satisficers and how their approaches differ.

Maximizers go to extreme lengths to make a purchase decision – they research for days, they compare all the models, and then get second and third opinions from friends before making what they believe to be the perfect decision.  They’re caught up with unrealistically high expectations resulting from their output.  Satisficers know what they need in order to be content, and once they feel those needs can be met, they take action.  This can sometimes be the very first option that meets their criteria.  But the key is that they make a decision and they don’t second guess it.

What’s interesting is that Satisficers rate their overall happiness with life significantly higher than Maximizers.

Schwartz makes it clear that a Maximizer isn’t a true perfectionist.  In his view, a true perfectionist is always looking to get better but realizes that perfection is unattainable.  The example he gives is Tiger Woods.  Tiger is continually striving to up his game, but doesn’t put off playing in a big tournament because he isn’t getting holes in one consistently.  These “perfectionists” strive for good enough.  Unfortunately, this isn’t the same definition everyone else has of a perfectionist, which is generally looked at as a bad thing to be.  To me, a Maximizer as it’s described is the same as a perfectionist as we all understand it to be.

Dr. Paul Hewitt, a researcher who has spent 20+ years researching perfectionism at York University, agrees that there’s a difference between “the desire to excel and the desire to be perfect.”  The former can be healthy so long as it’s mapped to life goals (the Tiger Woods example) while the latter is a “vulnerability factor for unipolar depression, anorexia and suicide”.  The research backs this overwhelmingly.

Now, tips for perfectionism is a broad topic, but here are 11 things I’ve learned about it recently:

1. Perfectionism doesn’t have to conflict with “sweating the details”.  It’s natural to assume that just giving up on perfectionism means you’ll no longer have any attention to detail.  But that’s absurd.  There’s a difference between awareness of detail and expecting perfection in order to finish something.  It’s still possible – in fact desirable – to stay on top of things to the level in which you need to in order to ensure a high-quality output, but this doesn’t mean you get to be unreasonable with respect to the overall outcome.
2. Striving for perfection means you’ll only do 10% of the things you want to do.  When you focus on finishing one thing before you can start another, you’re bounding your creativity and productivity.  If you spend too much time “perfecting” something, you’re likely doing it at the expense of moving on to the next thing.
3. Perfectionists have higher blood pressure, anxiety, and mental health problems.  This almost goes without saying and has been backed up in numerous studies, but if you expect perfection, you’re going to have higher stress levels which will affect your overall mental and physical health.  Relaxation, meditation, and “slow days” are hard to come by for people who are always pushing to make everything perfect.
4. Just doing something over nothing puts you in an elite group of people.  In so many cases, just doing something is enough.  Signing up for a class even if it’s not the perfect time, turning in an assignment even though you know you could have done more, etc.  There are hundreds of examples where the majority of people will agonize until things are perfect and never do anything at all, while you can get something “good enough” out for the world to see.
5. Perfect is the enemy of good.  I love this Voltaire quote and use it in software development all the time.  It’s too easy to strive for perfection and lose sight of the fact that you’re, in many cases, doing this at a huge overall cost.
6. Failing fast can shorten your learning cycle.  Sometimes it’s best to take an iterative approach and ignore perfection as a means to learn.  “Fail fast” is a famous Silicon Valley maxim when it comes to new businesses, because if you’re going to fail, it’s best to do it early at a time when you have the resources to turn it around.  If you’re striving to be perfect, you could fail when it’s too late to anything.
7. Focusing on perfectionism takes your focus away from the things that really matter. If you’re doing anything you can to perfection, you could be missing out on your top three focus areas completely.  Balance is a good thing.
8. Just doing something will start to expose shallow fears.  Similar to failing fast, you may not know what you fear until you give something a shot.  You thought you were afraid to fail, but maybe you’re really afraid to succeed.  The sooner you can identify your fears you can put measures in place to work through them.
9. Collaboration and perfection don’t mix.  Have you ever tried to work with other people on something but first demanded your contribution to be “perfect”?  That’s a sure-fire way to a failed partnership.  Collaboration requires iteration and being open to feedback in both directions – if you’re shooting to be perfect, or if you believe you are, you’re not going to play well with others.
10. It isn’t what you do all or some of the time, it’s what you do most of the time. Something I live by which I first read in Body for Life by Bill Phillips.  There’s never a “perfect time”, and you can never execute something “perfectly”.  But if you’re able to perform well most of the time, it can make up for the times when you’re not “perfect”.  Perfection isn’t possible, but spending more of your time doing something well is.
11. Perfection is impossible.  Every physical thing is in a constant state of change, so even if you think something’s perfect, it won’t be perfect for long.  Give it up.

Are you a perfectionist?  Do you have any other tips or tricks on perfectionism?

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Everyone has probably heard these phrases:

• Winners make the time!
• If you don’t have the time, you don’t want it badly enough.

Naturally I agree with those statements in theory, but it’s always a lot harder to turn them into practice.  How do you make the time when there are a thousand other important things pulling at your attention?  The “answer” to that question is bigger than this one post – it’s the focus of this blog – so for now I’m going to cover the “rule set” I’ve followed for sitting down and writing this blog.  These rules have worked well for the (very) short amount of time I’ve been employing them, and I expect they’re just the start of a longer list over time.  They cover writing as an activity but could also be extended to just about any creative activity – simply replace the word writing with painting, dancing, graphic design, or whatever else you’d like to focus on.

Before jumping in however, it’s important that you’ve already made the commitment to yourself that whatever it is you want to invest in creatively is important to you.  Do you consider it an important part of your core values or mission?  Is it one of your top 3 focus areas?  Do you have both long-term and short-term goals relating to this activity and have you written them down?  If you’ve answered no to any of those questions, you have to ask yourself if you’re actually going to “make the time” for something that doesn’t align with who you ultimately want to be.  Do you “want it badly enough”?  Think about it before taking the next step.

This is how I’m finding time to write this blog with a demanding full-time job, a family at home, an active martial arts and fitness schedule, and a strong desire to catch up on back episodes of Battlestar Gallactica before the summer starts.  Merlin Mann might call these rules “design patterns for creativity” because they’re common patterns seen across most creative work that can help increase the likelihood of success.

• Writing can’t interfere with my top three priorities: spending time with my family, building world-class software, and keeping up with other aspects of my own personal development.  While I view this blog as a key contributor to my own growth, I’m not going to sacrifice my health (nutrition, fitness) or my own ability to grow through other means just to write.  This was something I evaluated first before writing a single sentence.
• Writing every week is non-negotiable.  I’m serious about wanting to have an active blog on the topic of focus, and this means spending a few hours every week writing in isolation – even if I don’t “feel like it”.  Sometimes this is easy and sometimes it’s not easy at all.  But if I can write for just a few hours each week, I can post at least twice weekly on a regular basis.  This is a commitment I’ve made to myself and one I intend to keep (feel free to call me on it!)
• Writing for 2 hours straight is far more productive than 6 sessions of 20 minutes.  As anyone who has attempted any sort of creative work knows, it can take 20-30 minutes alone just to get into the flow of it.  The startup cost is just far too high for this type of work, so it’s almost always hard to do it in short spurts (although not impossible).  In order for me to contribute to this blog on a regular basis, I’ve set aside my daughter’s naptime on Sunday to write for 2-3 hours straight.  In that time I can usually get about a post and a half finished, and I use a late evening mid-week to finish up (like now).
• Writing perfectly isn’t a goal.  It’s more important to post something that’s less than perfect than it is to iterate endlessly to make something 10% or 20% better.  In other words, posting something is better than posting nothing because it wasn’t “good enough”.  People have described this as writer’s curse – and you see it in other creative disciplines as well.  In software development, you can always refactor code to be “more perfect” but at some point you need to get the code out the door and into the hands of customers.  I could spend more time editing each post than I do writing them by a factor of 10, but instead I’m focused on getting each post 80% of the way there and then moving on.
• Writing requires my “system” to be in place first.  Given the limited time I have to actually write prose, I can’t spend all that time fiddling with software instead of writing.  My laptop and the software I use to write has to be ready to go.  But just as importantly, my workflow has to be close to automatic before I start.  Just like I don’t spend a bunch of time spell-checking (because it’s automatic) I don’t want to waste time navigating through various tools and windows.  Writing has to be the core activity for the few hours I’m doing it, not configuring plug-ins for Windows Live Writer or WordPress.
• Writing with a specific reader in mind is better than writing for the masses.  While I would love it if 100,000 people stumbled upon this blog tomorrow, I’m not writing for audience.  I’m writing because I have things to say, and it’s important for me to remember who it is I’m writing for.  Similar to product design, having a persona in mind helps me when I decide what to write and how deep to go.  In many ways, the person I’m writing for is someone a lot like me; the version of me years ago who didn’t have the tools to focus and didn’t even know where to start looking.

These are the basic rules I follow to find time to write this blog.  But again, they can be applied to most creative activities with a little… creativity. 

Thoughts?  Is there anything special you do to get into creative mode?

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