Headspace Management
Sustaining Creative Output
The problem of a professional creative is not how to do more tasks, it's how to spend more time thinking about the problem.
I think of all problems as falling into two categories: creative and procedural, or, as the cognitive science would put it, insight and non-insight problems. A procedural problem isn't any less difficult than a creative one, it's simply that the solution is known - we've got a series of steps to it, like baking a cake. What makes creative problems interesting is that the solution isn't known - at least not to us, not when we start. Writing a good essay, making an enjoyable song, drafting a "good" research question, or deciding on a winning chess move are all, in some ways, creative problems. We don't know the solution yet so we guess at it, try things in our head, reflect on it, but it's all just tinkering ... that is, until it clicks.
And that's the core problem of the professional creative. How do we get to that moment when it clicks, the "aha!" moment - the lightbulb insight?
Task management, time blocking, productivity systems for doing more, faster, they help us optimize procedural problem-solving. On a Thursday evening, a teacher can sit down for an hour knowing full well she'll be able to grade 30 multiple choice tests - it's a known problem, a procedural task. But, what about how long it'll take to help a student understand factoring, or Hamlet? Not a chance. Time blocking a creative problem is like trying to shove a hypercube into a round hole - your solution isn't even on the right plain.
Teaching, as much as writing or design, is a creative problem. The teacher and the student work together to find all the unknowns, what does the student know, what incorrect beliefs does the student have, how does the teacher find these and reach the student with just the right metaphor and motivation? It's a creative problem. It takes time, but eventually the solution bursts out at the teacher and the student. They feel that "aha!" moment together - a shared insight.
We can time block, we can queue tasks, we can optimize for more tasks done faster **when those tasks are procedural**. But, when the problem is creative, we can't know how long it'll take or what will trigger that flash of insight. The only thing we can do, is create space and time for it to happen - to give ourselves more time to try. This is what I call: headspace management.
Headspace Management
Unlike a procedural problem, where the only option is to sit down and do the known steps - the work - insight can happen anywhere, anytime, even when it feels like you're not thinking about the problem. It's Newton and the apple, Kerouac and his 3-week marathon writing session of On the Road. Except that's just a tiny fraction of the story, though admittedly the most romantic part of the story. Insight isn't a mystical force that hits us, the muses visiting the blessed few, it's something that comes when we give ourselves the headspace to have insight - a sort of mental surface area for serendipity.
Our minds are always solving problems, especially when we're not looking. When we allow our minds to wander, when we read, listen to music, watch the cars pass out the window, our brains are processing in the background. As we read, listen to music, chat with friends, we connect stories and concepts to our most pressing problems. Even mind wandering, so often seen as a waste of time, is a useful tool our minds evolved to shake the frame a little, to help us look at problems differently in search of insight. All this is something the cognitive scientists call "creative incubation".
Headspace management is about two things: giving our minds the time to wander, and orienting our creative incubation toward the problems we care about.
Mind-wandering is a lost art. I'm sure you're sick of hearing it at this point, but boredom is vital to creativity. It's our internal drive to think and seek newness. Whether it feels useful or not, it is one of the most important tools e have to being creative. When we scroll social media or fill our time with "content" (that dreaded word), we sate our appetite for newness, we substitute creativity for consumption. The creative needs to see boredom as a resource, one that their brain spends cooking solutions for whatever problems live in their mind.
And that's the second problem of headspace management: managing which and how many problems live in your mind. Imagine a map with regions for each problem you're working on. When you're bored, your mind wanders this map, almost randomly, and each moment it spends in the territory of a problem you're working on moves you closer to insight. If you have one or two problems at hand, you'll make quicker progress on those problems than if you split that map into 20 different territories.
I've found the right number of big problems for me is 2 or 3. Any more than that and I'm dissatisfied with my progress, or it's too long between thinking sessions and I lose interest in the problem. Between writing this blog, doing my PhD, and tinkering with self-hosting things on homelab, I've got just enough on my plate I can switch things up when I'm stuck and avoid going nuts, but not so many that I lose interest (nothing drives interest like progress).
Toward Newton's Apple
Headspace management is a practice of maximizing our mental surface area for serendipity - the chances we have a moment of insight. It's about taking the time to prepare for the apple to fall on our heads and shake our ideas into place. If Newton hadn't spent his time thinking about physics, and almost nothing but physics, Newton's apple would've been nothing more than a bump on the head.
The primary problem of the creative is spending more time thinking about the problems they care about. Nobody has the muses on speed dial, but we can spend more time hanging out where they do, and we can hope we bump into them. Eventually insight comes. When it does, the problem stops being a creative one and becomes a procedural one. Once that happens, the next step is, of course, writing the Principia Mathematica ... but that's a problem for another day. For today, let's just make a little more headspace.
Guiding Questions
1. How can you let your mind wander more often?
2. What two to 3 problems/projects would you like to let your mind wander on?
3. Which of your problems are in a procedural vs creative stage?
Cheers,
Nathan Laundry