This note will serve as a guide and I expect it to evolve.
- Get plenty of physical and mental rest.
- Make sure you information intake diet is healthy.
- Have established rituals and an environment that won't distract you when engaging in creative work.
Factors defining allowing for creative work:
- Energy levels.
- Available research materials and past experiences to recycle into creative and original work.
- Engaging in structured activities.
- Momentum
Most designers who combine their creative work with running a studio or simply staying on top of their schedule rely heavily on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which is responsible for high-order functions like focus, planning, self-regulation, and decision-making. But the PFC fatigues quickly, struggles with overload, and is highly sensitive to distraction and stress. We've structured work in a way that demands nonstop performance from a part of the brain that was never meant to run continuously. To maximize entering creative state, designers must go beyond individual hacks and start redesigning the environments they work within — especially the spaces that drive attention, behavior, and collaboration.
Maximizing creativity is achieved via:
- Maximizing number of entries into creative state,
- Prolonging time in creative state,
- Minimizing amounts of exits due to distractions, etc.
Two things to solve for:
a. How does one enter creative state
b. How does one breaks out inadvertently
Prolonging the state is therefore achieved by optimizing for a. and b. which means reducing organism depletion and environmental distractions.
Focusing on a challenging but manageable task seems to be critical.