Enemies of creativity

Cleese argues (in Creativity: a short and cheerful guide, Hutchinson / Penguin, 2020) that interruptions are the greatest enemy of creativity. 

Research suggests that it might take eight minutes to regain focus after an interruption and twenty minutes to get back into a kind of deep flow. 

Of course there are external interruptions: phone calls, notifications, unannounced visitors, noises off. But there are also internal interruptions: you remember something to add to your to do list or you worry you may have left the gas on. Writing down these unwanted thoughts might help you to move on from them for the time being. 

You need to give yourself time and space if you are to do your best work in a timely manner. What are your strategies going to be? How do you turn off those notifications? Can you find a suitable work space? Is the 7am - 8am slot the best for uninterrupted thinking? Is some time blocked out in the week for this essential work?

Cleese suggests that the worst possible internal interruption comes from fear of going wrong. Maybe this idea is rubbish and the work will be terrible. He argues that if you are going to be really creative, you must suspend this thought. Ground-breaking research, new work, means setting off to explore without knowing the destination. Possibly you will get lost or end up in the wrong place. Or you might find America. You won't know until you get there. Even if you go down the "wrong" track, something usable might emerge from it. Maybe the idea isn't wholly bad. You need to live with uncertainty and confusion for a time. At one stage of the process, there are no bad ideas. The ideas need to be clarified and then assessed. Perhaps you need to start again, or maybe there's something worth keeping and working with in there. After this analysis, it might be back to creative mode and so on. Draft 17 might be good. 

For creative work, what you are looking for is a degree of focus (I am working on this) and also a degree of openness (what am I going to say or do about it). If your thoughts wander too far, you need to try to bring them back to what you are supposed to be doing but also to allow them to think about it.