3 Success criteria for creative focus
Mental focus, creative work, and the genie problem.
“Despite weighing only three pounds, your brain sucks over 20 percent of your body’s energy. You really have only four or five good hours of mental focus per day.”
I read this quote in Willpower Doesn’t Work, by Benjamin Hardy — full disclosure, he didn’t list his sources, so I can’t verify this is true — but it stuck with me. Mainly because it FEELS true, based on my own experience and what I’ve witnessed of others’ experiences.
And if you’re in a line of work where you need that mental focus to put your thinking into writing (or any other creative container, really) …
Heaven help you.
Because you’re probably also in a line of work where you spend 4-5 hours in meetings each day. And the rest of the time, you’re answering email and/or Slack, and doing your darnedest to get some small part of your job done before you try to get home in time to have dinner with your family.
This is the genie problem
Remember the Disney movie Aladdin? “Phenomenal cosmic power — itty bitty living space.” Creativity, innovation, ideation, and fresh perspective give us phenomenal power … but we have to cram it into the nooks and crannies of a real day.
I’m certainly no exception to this.
In a regular workday, I’m in meetings and answering emails and Slack a good chunk of the time. Then I’m writing for clients, troubleshooting with my team, and staying engaged with my network (some of the most important marketing work for a referral-based business like Horizon Peak Consulting).
But I have to make room for creative thinking and writing, too. Not just because it’s a soul imperative for me, but because that creativity results in delivering better copy for clients; feeds the marketing engine for Horizon Peak; drives interest in my coaching and training services and helps me improve those programs; and moves me to undertake the difficult-yet-rewarding work of writing books.
My creativity paves the way for almost everything that matters in my work life and how I contribute my expertise. I’ll bet you could say the same.
In all these years of writing and working with business leaders who also struggled to carve out creative time in their busy day, I’ve found that there are three success criteria for gaining mental focus to be creative …
Criteria 1: Environment
If you’re trying to do your deepest thinking and produce your most creative work in the same place you’re taking team meetings and customer calls, you’re going to struggle.
It’s not just a mindset issue — it’s an issue of context. Specifically, context switching.
Shifting your brain from one task context to another has a cost. And that cost is much higher when the project at hand is related to a goal that matters to you (Dreisbach & Mendl, 2024).
Simply moving to another location for thinking and creative work can help immensely. If you are in a shared office, move to an empty meeting room or the break room. If you are working from home, switch to a different desk, room or chair — or head out of the house to a coffee shop.
You’ll be surprised by how much easier it is to focus on your creative work in a location different from where you complete other tasks. And after a while, that different location can even act as a “prime” — so when you go there, you’re instantly in a creative state.
I have three different writing stations in my home right now, since I’m not leasing an external office anymore:
My computer desk where I conduct business, write client projects, and write my own marketing materials.
My writing desk where I conduct research, edit bigger projects, and write nonfiction books and articles.
And the blue recliner in my bedroom where I curl up to write novels at night after the kids go to bed.
Author Rachael Herron recently interviewed me on this topic. You can listen to that conversation here.
Criteria 2: Energy
The modern imperative to wake at 5am and “eat the frog first” makes me want to tear my hair out.
We all have unique energetic rhythms throughout the day. It’s not even as simple as being an early bird or a night owl (or a permanently exhausted pigeon). There are times throughout your workday when your physical energy is higher, and times when it takes a siesta. Only you know when those high-energy times typically happen, so only you can map out your rhythms — don’t let any biohacking gurus tell you different.
Plan your deep thinking and creative work for the time of day when you naturally have energy.
Maybe that’s before the kids wake up. Maybe it’s mid-morning. Maybe it’s later in the afternoon, or late at night. Whatever your high-energy times in a normal day, protect them as best you can, and aim to do your creative work in those slots.
“I’ll get to it when I can” is the kiss of death for creative work.
Criteria 3: Focus area
This is maybe the most underrated element of consistently producing creative work.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever opened up a blank Word doc and assumed words would come.
That’s how most people approach writing. And it’s a recipe for writer’s block, overwhelm, or a messy braindump that’s impossible to shape into anything coherent.
When you sit down to produce your creative work, you need to have two things in mind:
Your (very narrow) audience
The topic you want to address with that audience
These two elements alone will take you so far. And you’ll avoid that dreaded emotional storm of disappointment, frustration and inadequacy that comes when you carve out 30 minutes to write and have nothing to show for it at the end.
Nutshell
You need mental focus to do your creative thinking and produce creative output — but your mental focus is limited during a busy workday. Maximize what you’ve got by changing your environment, mapping your energy, and coming to the page with your focus area in mind.
Bibliography
Dreisbach, G., & Mendl, J. (2024). Flexibility as a matter of context, effort, and ability: Evidence from the task-switching paradigm. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 55, 101348. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cobeha.2023.101348