We Need More Time for Thinking in Our Culture
This morning, I awoke and went through my regular routine. I sipped my coffee, got a decent workout in, rolled into my work environment, and settled into my desk for a barrage of Thursday morning zoom meetings. There seems to be a natural tendency for my calendar to fill up with much busy work and meetings that deliver questionable value to my life and work. It has always been a priority for me to minimize this tendency and make sure that I have time on my calendar for the real work that I need to do. Protecting and blocking as much time as possible for thinking, doing, and creating along the way. The avoidance of recurring meetings, especially those that appear as status meetings has become almost a religion for me. I avoid them as if they were highly likely to give me a communicative disease. Over the years, I have seen so much wasted human potential squandered by leaders who want to feel important by demanding attendance to “status” meetings where their minions show up to show off all their great accomplishments and report status on their plans.
When I ask my people for the greatest source of their stress, a common answer that I get is “time.” If you take a hard, honest look at your historical calendar, it will often belie your stated priorities. Where you spend your time shows what you make important. If creativity and accomplishment are important to you and your environment, you have to ruthlessly defend the time you need to think. You are always a product of how you spend your time.
In chapter two of Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with A Thousand Faces,” he distills this concept down from all of the historic texts and into the hero’s journeys eloquently.
All who hesitate are not lost. The will to introversion and contemplation is one of the classic implements of creative genius. It can be deployed as a deliberate device. — (Adapted) Joseph Campbell (1949)
It occurs to me that all of these great hero myths are onto something important. All great change comes from contemplative time spent in what Campbell describes as “the abyss.”
The call to action here is for you to refuse the call of others’ egos (the title of chapter two of his book,) and get after your work. If you are the leader, demand that your people purposefully carve out the time for creative exploration. Empower them to defend their mind space and time. It is only through hard, meaningful work that you, and your people are able to grow and it is only from spending time in the unknown that creativity can arise.
People need creative space to achieve great things. They need to be present with the task at hand and to spend time toiling with the problems.
It is in the toil of marinating thoughts, recombining ideas, and learning through recurrent failure that ideas occur and it is only from these ideas that innovations emerge. To bring more things from what is unknown into our domain of mastery, we need empowerment, autonomy, and a clear connection to the meaning behind the work. We need the time to explore, create, and the space to fail.
It is in this creative time that people will have their best work experiences and derive the most personal satisfaction from their work. The science of “Flow,” and the brilliant work of the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi demonstrate this clearly across domains. When you become more purposeful with creative time, it will contribute to your well-being, the well-being of those you lead, and the motivation level of your entire ecosystem. Dr. Amishi Jha has shown how attention works using FMRI studies, has clearly demonstrated how poorly most of us use it, and how we might make subtle changes in our lives to move toward more “Peak-Mind” experiences, as her book is titled. Essentially, she says that we are not good at multi-tasking and we only have 100% of our attention, of which, we typically only use about 50%.
Imagine how both our individual performance and the performance of our teams might improve if we purposefully and regularly made the space for creativity.
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REFERENCES
Luft, J.; Ingham, H. (1955). “The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness”. Proceedings of the Western Training Laboratory in Group Development. University of California, Los Angeles: The diagram is based on the Johari window.
The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (1949)
Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD (1996)
Teams that Grow Together, Flow Together, Sean Flaherty (2021)
Why We Do What We Do, Ed Deci, PhD (1996)
Peak-Mind, Amishi Jha, PhD (2021)
