Work alone for optimal creativity
[Source: mymind Caedon]
[This article promotes the idea of working alone to improve creativity as working alone gives you a peace environment without distractions that divert your focus and distract you from your own thinking and creating. Work alone to launch your optimum creativity. Collaborate after.]
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Today’s professional world is a mess.
Collaboration denigrates originality and creativity
We’ve been driven to such high levels of collaboration, there’s almost no escape. Cursors follow our every move. Slack messages pull us in every direction before we even get to the office. Meeting invites, all-hands and morning stand-ups fill our calendars, ensuring we don’t have a single waking minute alone to think or actually… do the work we’re talking about in the meetings.
Today, “working together” means something much different than it used to. It’s like we no longer trust our own brains to think autonomously. We need the feedback, the Zoom calls, the handholding, to feel like we’re accomplishing something.
But what are we actually accomplishing?
The Google calendars I’m seeing these days are almost funny.
Dance of the cursors
This age of collaboration is lessening the quality of our work, along with our personal sense of creative capability and accomplishment. How can we possibly be doing our best work when we don’t trust ourselves or each other to do it without ten different voices weighing in at every stage?
This is not the creative process. It’s not even collaboration. It’s a dance of cursors, a volley of words that amounts to very little really.
Creativity requires time alone
Ask any writer, artist, designer who’s ever lived. They’ll tell you their best creative work happened in solitude. Where they could actually think. Where no voices were interrupting, no eyes were watching, no Slack messages were asking why they didn’t answer an email. Where the fragile embers of an idea could be stoked, get air and grow into a warm, burning fire.
Think of a theater performance, a true work of collaboration. The play didn’t start with everyone in a room tossing ideas around and critiquing each other’s work. It started with a solo writer with an idea. They wrote their script. They probably wrote a dozen scripts before they shared one with anyone else. A director sat with the script on their own before meeting with the writer to give feedback. The actors read the script, studied and memorized it on their own as well. Only AFTER all of that did they meet in the same room and bring it all together.
Solitude is where it all begins
Solitude is where it should all begin. You first have to spend time with yourself, with your own thoughts, to bring anything of value to the table with a team.
The natural desire to reach consensus inside a group tends to eliminate both bad and great ideas. It’s a filter for both the terribly bad, but also the incredibly good. Consensus likes to settle somewhere in the middle — something we like to call the mediocre. (Literally, the word comes from the Latin “mediocris,” which means “moderate” or “in the middle.”)
Where collaboration is needed
Collaboration is necessary, to a degree. And it’s of course inevitable for most of us working in an agency or company setting. We do need meetings. Collaborative software has made work more efficient. These things are necessary for one part of the creative journey. But right now, they’re feeling more like a cheap distraction from meaningful work.
In the design and tech community, the world in which I work, I see the impact most with our software and tools. It started with helpful and much needed collaborative features, like comments or shared canvases, that allowed us to more easily hand off project phases and files to each other. These were meant to solve organizational problems (remember telling everyone you saved “presentation_final_FINAL.pptx” to the server with your additions, which would then become “presentation_final_FINAL_reallyfinal” and so on?).
Then it evolved to live collaboration features, where we could literally put a live view of our face inside our cursors, allow others to live-follow those cursors, and talk in real time while we worked. Then it turned into twelve cursors flying around a board working on the same project at the same time. Which again, isn’t all bad. I enjoy jumping into a jam session with my team now and then when we’ve reached a certain point of a project. But it’s certainly not where I begin.
“The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind. Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born.” — Nikola Tesla
To arrive at a good idea (and ultimately, good work) you have to spend a lot of time tossing around bad ideas and just trying things out. When you’re moving from meeting to meeting, waiting on approval and consensus for every move you make, you lose freedom, independent thinking. There’s pressure to perform, to agree, to self-censor, to compromise and solve problems on the spot. This is why we see so much work out there today that feels like nonsense to everyone but the people who worked on it for a year over Zoom calls.
I truly admire my company’s (mymind) privacy mission given the state of work and culture today. From the very start mymind has been about giving people a private place to think from themselves. The tool offers no collaboration, social feeds or share features, even though it makes it much harder for us to grow that way.
The Oasis of Aloneness
I like the idea of it being my sacred creative space – a private oasis of ideas, notes and references. I go there often to take notes, reference inspiration or think through ideas on my own, without anyone watching. I don’t need to curate it because no one ever sees it. I’m not over-analyzing myself at every step because someone’s looking behind my shoulder, ready to offer feedback.
As a creative person, this is incredibly valuable. Writing, designing, art, any creative practice comes from a “connection to yourself and your own mind.” Between our work culture, social media and the constant stimulation of being a person in the world today, many of us have lost that connection with oneself.
This is just one way I’m trying to reclaim my own sense of creative agency. I’m also asking myself (and my co-workers) if some meetings could just be an email or require fewer people. And if I really need to send that Slack message, or if I can answer the question myself. And if my work is indeed ready to share and receive feedback, or if I should spend more solo time trying more things out before entering collaboration mode.
“You”…the place to start
It doesn’t matter where you work, what tools you use or what systems your company has in place. We all have to carve out a space for our creative selves to run wild in, in whatever form that means for us. A quiet place to let ourselves actually think. A place where we can start with our creative journey, and when we’re ready, take those ideas to a more collaborative space.
