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So much of our life is measured by hands on a clock. How long was your workout? What’s your ETA? When will you be back in the office?
While minutes and hours are universally measured units of time, their value is not. We receive constant feedback about WHAT’S TAKING SO LONG?!
This is Trixie stalking me during yesterday’s coaching calls, staring me down with a glare that says “WTF? COME TOSS THE BALL WITH ME, GODDAMMIT IT!”
To Trixie, a one-hour Zoom is interminable. But to my clients, it may be barely enough. Who’s right?
They’re both right, of course. And we make constant assessments of whose opinion matters more. This is where the juice is.
Who owns creative timekeeping?
When it comes to idea making, we’ve put the wrong folks in charge of time. Ideas are living, breathing things, birthed through a group effort that can’t be predicted or rushed. Trying to shrink and templatize the birth of an idea is like trying to make sure all your sneezes come out in 3-part harmony. It’s meddling with a natural process.
Mother Nature knows better than Father Google Calendar
Years ago, my agency had a client launching lactation support for new nursing moms. On a hunch, I Googled how long the average breastfeeding session lasted.
16 minutes.
An absolute eternity by most attention spans these days. Yet this is how Mother Nature designed feeding. (By the way, bottle feeding didn’t differ that much — this isn’t a political issue in support of breastfeeding.)
That stuck with me. That a baby needs at least 16 minutes of dedicated holding time during a feeding. There’s likely a gastro part to this equation, but also a homosapien one. We are social mammals who need to feel safe, especially during feeding.
Do all the advances of tech and productivity change this? No. Shift how often babies need diaper changing? Nope. Can pregnancies be optimized down from 9 months to a more manageable few weeks? Of course not.
So where did we get the idea that just because gadgets and gizmos speed up processes with lots of zeroes and ones that the same should be true of creative endeavors? That you should simply be a more efficient Pez dispenser of ideas because you were born during a tech boom? Like your brain has some software upgrade that makes it bypass pesky things like burnout, sleep, inspiration and group collaboration?
Let things take the time they take. Sometimes it will be faster than expected, sometimes slower. But when it comes, it’ll be right on time.
Until next time, remember that culture is the new creativity.
Thanks so much for this — right now in the midst of talking about how to make the creative process more efficient, and you’ve given me words for arguing against whittling it all down to nothing!