Why You're Not Doing Creative Work

Reframe non-productive time. One of the reasons the exploration phase of the work is low value is that most of it doesn’t look like work. It’s lots of reading, and sitting and thinking, and doodling, and trying things that lead to dead ends. Non-productive time feels like a waste—but it doesn’t have to! One way to think about this kind of time is

Do it right when you wake up. This goes along with reducing or eliminating distractions. When you wake up your brain is reset, and there won’t usually be as many other pressing sources of reward present. If you can reserve time in the morning to do your creative work you may have an easier time staying focused.

The Neuroscience of Value

Every goal you have gets assigned a value by your brain. It’s done by a piece of the brain called the orbitofrontal cortex or OFC. Your OFC figures out what kinds of rewards you’re likely to get by achieving a goal. It’s also highly connected to the amygdala (the fear circuit in your brain) which means it’s responsible for

In the exploration phase, everything is different. There’s a non-linear relationship between time and work output. You’re not really sure what you’re making or whether it will be good. It’s harder to see the thing in your mind.

The reason it’s hard to do creative work in the exploration phase is that it’s so uncertain that there aren’t many perceived rewards for accomplishing the goal, there’s little punishment in not accomplishing it, and there is a higher perceived value to pursuing other unrelated activities.

The reason it’s easy to do creative work in the execution phase is because you’ve reduced the uncertainty about the work enough that your brain calculates a lot of rewards for pursuing that goal

If all you had to do was the execution phase of creative work, you’d be able to do it between meetings no problem. But the truly hard, terrible, nasty truth is that you need to do the exploration phase in order to get to the execution phase.

This gives us a roadmap to doing more creative work. What we need to do is, in the exploration phase, raise the perceived value of doing the work, raise the perceived costs of not doing the work, and lower the perceived value of doing other things.