Achieve Full Focus to Generate great creative work

Full Focus is an approach to creative productivity, wherein you arrange your creative work according to mental states, to always be fully-focused on the task at hand. It’s inspired by my experience reinventing Google Calendar.

When you Generate creative work, you’re doing the stuff that is generally considered your work. If you’re a novelist, you’re banging out prose. If you’re a logo designer, you’re making logo designs. If you’re a coder, you’re writing code.

You know you often get stuck when you sit down to Generate. The Resistance will push self-doubt to the surface of your consciousness, and give you “shiny object syndrome”: That new project suddenly looks more appealing than the one in front of you.

To make Generative work happen, you need to disarm The Resistance, and isolate Generative work from the other components of your work, to be fully-focused.

Here’s how to optimize Generative work.

1. Build a Generative habit. When you build a habit, you keep The Resistance away by eliminating distractions. This isn’t the time to check Facebook, this is the time to create. Meanwhile, you get better and better at your craft, and carve the neural pathways for focused creative work. Start small, and build the habit first.
2. Work in your peak creative time. Generative work requires insightful thinking—the ability to connect disparate elements from disparate regions of your brain. Research shows that your ability to solve creative problems is actually highest when your energy is low—mornings, for most people. Build your habit when you’re most creative.
3. Eliminate distractions. Your habit helps protect you from distractions, which is especially important because your peak Generation time is when you’re also the most vulnerable to getting sidetracked. I wear earplugs and face a blank wall in my morning writing sessions. I don’t check email or Twitter until I’m done. If you give yourself permission to attend to distracting things later, you can be fully-focused in the moment.
4. Stay in a Generative mental state. There are subtle but important mental states that make up creative work. If you’re writing, you’re likely to come across something that needs to be researched, or, an example you need to come up with to illustrate a concept. These mental activities can get you off-track, and drain your reserves. [Write something in brackets], and keep moving. You can polish your writing later, in the Refinement stage.

Eventually, you want to have a 1–2 hour Generative work session every day. You may need to get started with a simple 10-minute hack. If you get rolling, you may find yourself working for much longer. But, you need Exploration for the raw material of creative insights, as well as the other components of Full Focus, to make your Generative work sessions more productive.

Remember that The Resistance will always be there. With these methods, you can at least make it weaker. The important thing is that you focus on building the habit, rather than having an overly-ambitious quota that will lead to burnout, making you vulnerable to The Resistance.

If you follow these methods, you can optimize your creative productivity, and boost your creative output. You’ll bring urgency to the present moment, find your rhythms, and be fully-focused on the task at hand.

Listen to behavioral economist Dan Ariely talk about the science of self-motivation »