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Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
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.
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
Make it attractive to do more creative work
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.
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
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.
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
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.
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
In the execution phase there is a linear relationship between time and work output. The more time you put in, generally, the more work you’ll be able to get done. In the execution phase it’s also easier to put in the time.
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
Connecting into why it’s valuable. Sometimes you get so lost in a project that you forget why you started it in the first place, or why doing this kind of work is important to you at all. If you reconnect to that, you’ll raise the perceived value of doing the work in your brain—and it will make it easier to stick with. Try writing about why the wor... See more
Dan Shipper • 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
... See moreDan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
Non-productive is often framed wrongly so
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.
Dan Shipper • Why You're Not Doing Creative Work
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