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Routine versus the Muse: What is best for creativity?

Common Perceptions

Here are some concepts many people agree on: Routine kills creativity, spontaneity sparks it. Routine is a prison for the mind, spontaneity sets it free. Creatives follow a muse, not a schedule.

Yet, the above is not true.

 

Routine drives creativity just as much as variety.

 

Books penned by successful entrepreneurs, innovators and creatives often share their daily routines, some as easy to implement as a daily 6 am wake-up call. Yet, all agree that these routines are the key to productivity.

 

But why do routines make us more productive?

Firstly, unwanted distractions can be the death of productivity, and the best example of all is social media. Creatives are united in their love/hate relationship of social media, the hate stemming from the how easily time set aside for, say, writing, can quickly be vampiric-ally leached away by mindless feed-scrolling. Routine eliminates these distractions. For a writer, this means scheduling a certain time every day to shut down social media and sit down to write. Routines also enable us to prioritise, which again removes distractions in the form of procrastination, where people might complete lower-impact, more mundane, and easier tasks to avoid the higher-impact, more complex and challenging ones that often involve creativity.

 

The Crux of the Situation

While others might argue that routine is a mental constraint, in fact it frees your mind for creative outlet. People without a routine can suffer from decision fatigue, where they waste time on decisions instead of focusing on action. Writing in the same place every day takes away the time-wasting decision-making process of where to write. This routine also lessens the creative-killing distractions that might come from constantly writing in a new place, for example a café that is unexpectedly noisy and busy. Without routine, life can become too chaotic and, despite the stereotypes of the wild creative, chaos and creativity are not good bedfellows.

Most importantly, routine makes creative goals a reality. Creative projects, such as writing a book, can be daunting. Waiting for inspiration to strike is a form of procrastination, an excuse that translates as ‘saving it for a good day’. But there aren’t always good days when it comes to creativity. Routine scares people because it unveils the average days where your brain is sluggish and your writing isn’t ‘perfect’, where creativity doesn’t sparkle. Yet, forcing yourself to write every day at least produces content, which leads to learning, growth, and in turn a higher frequency of ‘good’ days. A bad page of writing is better than a blank one. Writers know that the best book protagonists are active ones, and routine enables people to be the protagonist of their own creative journey, where they chase inspiration through routine instead of passively waiting for inspiration to strike, which could lead to not writing at all.

When it comes to this daunting creative project, routine makes it more manageable and actionable. This is particularly true for people who have responsibilities that can interfere with creativity, such as another job. Establishing a routine, for example, putting aside an hour at the end of the working day or during a lunchbreak to write, makes creativity a present reality that runs alongside your daily life instead of an ideological future that is incompatible with it. Motivate yourself with a routine, don’t wait for that elusive ‘feeling’ of motivation. Without routine, you rely on willpower alone to create, which requires huge reserves of energy better saved for the actual act of creating.

 

A Different Type of Routine

Often, we confuse routine imposed on us with routine we impose on ourselves. Understandably, routine imposed on us can block creativity. For example, the aforementioned job responsibilities where daily routine created by upper management in an office environment pushes aside any creative time or energy. Routine we impose on ourselves, however, gives us full control to personalise our daily schedules to what works best for us. How we create is unique to everyone, which is why retracing the steps of routines advised by famous creatives isn’t advisable. We all have different concentration spans and different levels of willpower. Some people can sit down for a four-hour long writing session without succumbing to a single distraction. For others, this is impossible, so they turn to the Pomodoro method (find out more here) to break up their writing routine into manageable chunks. Control over our routine also enables us to integrate elements into our day that help refill the creative well by boosting energy and physical and mental well-being. Making time in our day to socialise with family and friends, to exercise, and to explore other hobbies leads to better creativity. For example, a writer’s routine might include a weekly coffee break with fellow writers to gain support and share ideas; or, they might go for a walk each morning before sitting down to write to refresh the brain and create time to mull over ideas.

 

Find a routine that’s unique to you,
and be prepared for constant evaluation and reflection
to assess if it’s working or not.

 

Again, this is where routine gets a bad reputation. When people blindly follow one, they can get trapped into a rut. Routine is only productive when you repeat good habits, not bad ones. If your routine is having no impact on your progress, adjust it. If routine has led to complacency, you might become bored and unchallenged, which again can kill any energy to create.

 

Flexibility is therefore key

Creating a routine to drive creativity doesn’t mean rigidly following an all-encompassing schedule that dictates every second of your day. These restrictions remove time and space to pursue an unexpected idea when creativity strikes. Start by choosing a small and specific behaviour that you want to integrate into your daily life to boost creativity, and repeat it, such as writing for one hour every day. A positive routine also incorporates variety. Doing the same thing every day can close doors on ideas, because often ideas stem from the unexpected. Within your scheduled daily walk, take different routes. You may stumble across new places or new people that inspire creativity. Or, within the routine of always writing at home, move rooms every so often – a different view from the window might give you a different outlook. Most importantly, allow yourself moments of no routine. Despite what children are told by teachers in the classroom, we need to daydream. If our minds don’t wander, they will always walk down the same path, and never take that risk to go off-piste – the place where the best ideas are often found. Give your brain time to relax by removing the stimulation of routine and the expectations to create.

 

Engage with the World

Creativity comes from engaging with life around us, from connecting and exploring and traveling and experimenting and questioning. Don’t allow routine to control you and remove you from life, but instead create a routine that gives you control and the time to fully participate in life. Or perhaps impose routine into some parts of the day and not others. The bookends of the day, the mornings and the evenings, can be a time to add more variety. If your whole day is a routine, you might have too much pressure to meet it, and again stress is a creativity killer. Routine is dangerous when you get into a rut, and you’re repeating things that aren’t useful or are having no impact on your progress. Boredom is also a creativity killer, and doing the same things day in and day out can be boring.

 

Conclusions

So, ‘routine‘ or ‘the muse’? Drive creativity through a schedule or wait for inspiration to hit?

As always in life, it’s a balance. Too much of one or the other will snuff out creativity; melding one with the other will spark it. Variety gives light to life, but routine enables us to find the time to search for that light.