Work better this year (or don’t, it’s your life)

Schedule your bathroom breaks

There’s only one obvious way to hold yourself accountable for the new year – setting detailed goals and timeboxing them. By compartmentalising creative fulfillment into bite-sized tasks, you’re setting smaller goals towards a larger objective, and attaining creative success (however daunting) becomes a simple matter of meeting deadlines and following steps.

How many commissions are you getting this year? Are you going to streamline your process? Will you achieve all this within the first quarter? Goals have been proven to help us stay on track. It gives us a sense of purpose and focus, powering us through the not-so-sexy parts of the creative process. Groundbreaking, I know.

Establish a painfully elaborate routine

Now, how does one motivate oneself to begin with? I find rituals helpful, power posing, too. Stanford’s design school recommends being “calm but alert” when you’re first exploring an idea. Harvard Business School says getting in a “flow state” helps boost creativity. Either way, your emotional and mental state is key – when you’re in a good mood, you take in more information.

In performing tedious routines, we’re conditioning our bodies to – as the kids say – lock in. Through regularity, you create space for creativity by freeing yourself from the burden of making trivial decisions. Haruki Murakami once told The Paris Review that when he’s working on a novel, he first gets up at 4 am to write, then goes on a 10 km run (or a 1500-metre swim), before listening to some music and going to bed at 9 pm, everyday, without variation. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerise myself to reach a deeper state of mind,” he said. This isn’t to say you must have your ice pack on while doing stomach crunches by the crack of dawn. But some routine will help.

Quantity over quality

Ah, the only indicator of productivity. Once you’ve taken your ceremonial shower, force yourself to draft a couple dozen ideas. Draw mind maps, loads of them. Throw things at a wall to see what sticks.

Brainwriting, a technique popularised by marketing expert Bernd Rohrbach in the 1960s, recommends setting aside some time and generating as many ideas as possible within that time frame. It differs from brainstorming in that it encourages variety in multiple ideas, rather than expanding on one. By verbalising all the bad ideas, the thinking is that only good ones would be left.

AI chatbots might also be helpful here. Amidst the ceaseless debates over the threats of artificial intelligence, there lies a less conspicuous silver lining: generative AI might have the potential to produce decent ideas, but it is definitely capable of generating horrible ones. Prompting AI for solutions may give you an inkling on where to start. The band Yacht once created an album titled Chain Tripping using only Google’s music generation AI, MusicLM. In an interview with Billboard, they described how the algorithm’s creative choices – unorthodox as they were – helped the band articulate their creative vision by pushing them to specify what did or did not work across an abundance of generated clips.

Bad ideas can be the perfect sounding board. You just need a ton of them.

Stop. Working.

Just go do something else, or do nothing at all. Distract yourself – screen time isn’t actually that detrimental to creativity. Mindless activities help re-energise us. It gives us a “mental reset”. Focus drains energy, says Dr. Sirin Pillay, author of The Power of Fucking Around.

I like to think of this as a modern take on the classic “go for a walk”. Dr. John Kounios found that mindless activities (eg. showering, grocery shopping) taps into the part of our brain that understands jokes and metaphors, better known for welcoming eureka moments. Turns out, our brain blinks (in a way), momentarily cutting out distractions to draw unexpected connections across your subconscious. If the purpose is to give ourselves a temporary refresh, why not find fun ways to kill time? We know that strategically disassociating helps spark inspiration.

Climb into someone else’s bubble

If the guilt of not being so-called productive is setting in, give yourself room to forage for some new inspiration. Lean into your competitive side. Comb through art school catalogs, browse Are.na – a riff on Tumblr for digital inspiration. Here are a thousand other freelance creatives, making the most of their time, producing quality work. By plunging into the realm of those more put-together, you can turn envy into motivation.

At the very least, exploring digital libraries can help you escape your algorithmic bubble. Finding fresh inspiration these days is tough when everything on our explore pages look like different fonts of the same thing. Venture beyond your Pinterest tabs and TikTok pages. Exercise your free, non-algorithmic, will.

Go yap

At this point you’ve tried everything. No one will blame you if you took another well-deserved break. Hit the pub! Meet some friends! Anything you come up with now can’t possibly be something you’d be happy with.

In the very technical world of tech, programmers are encouraged to talk to a rubber duck whenever they feel stuck. By walking a rubber duck (or any equally inanimate object) through their problem, programmers are forced to clearly and comprehensively articulate their predicament, externalise thoughts as facts, and more objectively evaluate their position. The human equivalent – articulating a problem to a fellow programmer – is known as confessional programming.

Who knows? Maybe you’ll find someone somewhat inanimate, drinking at noon on a weekday, to “confess” to. And even if your audience is lucid, studies have shown that informal feedback boosts creativity. Oppenheimer did say: “there is no better way to learn than to teach.”