Taking Time to be Creative
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 12:00PM This weekend I had the unusual opportunity to have the house to myself for an entire 24 hours. No kids running in and out of my studio, no students, just a quiet rain falling outside.
As I settled into a night of working on a new song I've been writing for over a month I began to realize that the process of being creative may not be built exclusively on the time in the studio, some of it must be spent getting your mind and heart in the right place.
Before I actually sat down and started working I took time to finish a book, take a shower, relax into a pot of green tea and sit out back for a few minutes to watch the birds flit about on my back porch. When I finally hit record, I was relaxed and had an empty mind. I spent the next six hours working straight and focused on my new track, what a luxury!
The Argument against multitasking
There are many distractions that can derail a creative thought. Cell phones, texts, Facebook, kids, even personal hygiene can all take us from the task of being creative. There is growing evidence that the brain is only able to process two tasks at a time. In this NPR article the argument is made that multitasking divides the brain. The scientists in the article point to an experiment that shows the brain "can't maintain more than two tasks" at a time without pushing something out. If I'm writing my song and in my flow and suddenly my kid comes into the room and then I get a text on my phone...its over. I don't need a neuro-scientist to tell me this, it happens every freakin' day!
It takes four hours to get one hour of work done
The mental preparation it takes to get into your flow may be obvious to some people, However with modern diversions of email, Facebook, Twitter, texting, not to mention family responsibilities, it is easy to lose that singular focus and allow ourselves to get distracted. The result is a lot of small movements in many directions which rarely move us along our creative path.
In the end it really takes a concerted clearing of the mind to get into the space to be creative, a process that is not always possible to turn on or off at will. We've all had those moments when we had an amazing intuitive thought that we neglected. When we returned to it later in the day, its gone and we spend the rest of the day searching our minds to find it.
These days, my goal is to figure out how much time I have to focus creatively and then push some time out in front to clear my mind, open pathways, and turn off my email, cell phone, and Facebook!
As always, I love to hear your thoughts on creativity and practice.
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