how to be productively unproductive

creativity needs effectiveness more than efficiency

Last week I had coffee with a friend who’s just started a stint at a scale-up. She described the culture like this:

Everything’s driven by “done” statements. The whole organisation operates by whether the things on each team’s list are done yet. It’s often not clear why each of those things needs to get done, but everyone’s running hard anyway.

It’s easy to get caught up in that kind of busy-ness because it fits our idea of being productive. Ticking tasks off in sequential order looks and feels like measurable progress. It’s perfect logic for an assembly line, but it’s much less useful for integrative problem-solving or broader innovation.

If, like my friend, you’re trying to do the second, the assembly line mindset isn’t helpful. Working on tasks that lack a clear ‘why’, especially while under excessive time pressure, is a recipe for killing off creativity.

Creativity takes more time than we usually give it, because it isn’t linear and the activities that go into making it happen often don’t feel “productive”. We’re social animals so when everyone around us is running hard, it’s often easier just to run too. Instead, here’s what really works:

understand the creative brain

Research points to three brain networks that interact to produce successful creative endeavors: