Modes of Work
If you do any creative work and are also responsible for a few others' work, or even if you are not directly responsible but you know a lot, which means people need your input on their work, you are familiar with a huge issue. The problem of being thrown out of the zone. Which zone? Your creative zone, or as Mr. Csikszentmihalyi would call it, your flow.
Creative work requires deep focus and a block of uninterrupted time. Whether you need to write text, code or design a solution, concentration is what you need. However, when you are part of a team that needs your feedback on various subjects, either asking on the spot or requiring you to attend a meeting, finding this uninterrupted time becomes a major challenge. Depending on the task that you work on, after one context switch, it might take a long time for you to get back to where you were in your creative work (coders know this very well, they also know very well about context switch.)
This can be a major challenge to overcome. If you isolate yourself, which is not usually possible if you work at the same location with the rest of the team, then the team will miss your valuable advice and input. The overall efficiency of the team can go down. If you are available to the team, it could become impossible for you to do your own creative task.
Years ago, Paul Graham wrote an essay about this topic called Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. His suggestion for this problem is strict office hours so that the individual can attend meetings only on those specified time slots and knows that she won’t be interrupted during the rest of the day. Other team members should also know when that person is available.
This must be easier to do today when most teams are working remotely. It is much easier to be away from the rest of the team in your own cave when no one is around you physically, and you can disconnect the digital communication channels, if you manage to do so.
I still think that Paul’s solution is still very valid today. Although, I am curious to know how other creative leaders solve this problem.
It can be argued that, even if others are not involved, we personally have different modes of thinking. John Cleese, the famous comedian, has talked about two different modes of thinking when it comes to creativity, “Open” and “Closed”. He says:
“We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed.
The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous.The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned.
Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. Not that the closed mode cannot be helpful.
If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies.
When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don’t waste energy trying to see the funny side of it. Do it in the “closed” mode.
But the moment the action is over, try to return to the “open” mode — to open your mind again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is need to improve on what we have done.
In other words, we must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent.”
Some “Design Thinking” literature even divides thinking into three modes, Open, Exploring and Closed, as mentioned in this article.
Whether alone or working in a team, the crucial thing to consider is to not mix the different modes. Always make sure we have a dedicated time available for each. Mixing modes means spending a lot of time and not having any valuable output. We need to be careful with interruptions.
An excellent book that talks in-depth about the need for deep uninterrupted work is Deep Work by Cal Newport, which I highly recommend. Reading such books reminds us how problematic our modern world is when it comes to focusing and doing high quality work.
