Boost Your Creativity With Delayed Multitasking

To do two things together in a haste is to do neither.

Dhawal Pagay
Change Becomes You

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People often overcomplicate the idea of creativity. We make it seem as though it is some unthinkable fleeting thought which needs to be held on to. And that’s what makes it so difficult to sustain a level of creativity over a prolonged period of time — our perception of it.

Everyday Creativity

Essentially, a creative idea is nothing but taking an idea and putting it out of its original context. The idea can be generated from literally anywhere — be it an object around you or a conversation that you happen to eavesdrop.

Ideas are hiding in plain sight, all you need to do is to train your mind to perceive them.

That is what forms the crux of thinking outside the box. Enough said, let’s get down to trying this for ourselves. Who knows, maybe this exercise can help you generate a great idea for your next post.

Stop right in your tracks and take a moment to observe your surroundings. Any setting is essentially governed by objects, activities, and people to occupy the space. Try listing these down under the same heading.

For example, this is what my list looked like-

Objects- Tables, chairs, stationery items, laptop, clouds, cars.

Activities- Conversations, staring, jogging.

With the help of this simple exercise, you were able to brainstorm enough topics to last you a week. Don’t see it still?

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A gruesome crime scene with the criminal fleeing the scene and onlookers are in shock.

Now you see it! All along, these great ideas were in plain sight, and yet we always managed to overlook them. The notion that your Eureka moment cannot be so trivial is what makes us ignorant, ultimately lulling our creativity. After all, if folklore is to be believed, even Archimedes understood the concepts of buoyancy while sliding back into a bathtub. If that is the setting of his inspirational idea, I don’t see why it needs to be any different for writers of today.

Make sure to pen down random thoughts so that you can access them in the future- conversations or social settings that you may be faced with. Anything and everything can be a source to a potential idea.

Avoid Overtrying

Imagine trying to solve a crossword. There is one clue left after which you will be done but no matter how hard you think, you just cannot get the right answer. Wrong answers keep lingering in your head and make it almost impossible for the right answer to come forth.

What you would do is not necessarily what you should do.

Not that you will not arrive at the answer, but battling through the mind-block is not something you should do- the process is more mentally taxing.

Instead, a better approach here would be to STOP. Try diverting your attention to something else, be it another project that you are working on or getting some fresh air. These act as ‘refresh’ buttons to your neural network.

It is okay to STOP. Take a break and try coming back to your mind-block after a ‘refresh’

Sustaining The Creativity — Delayed Multitasking

Whether we like it or not, all of us end up multitasking and it is usually due to the lack of time. We want to get a lot of things done in a short period of time and end up getting nothing done to the level of input required.

This is exactly how to NOT multitask.

Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

According to research, a trait that is common in highly creative people like artists, scientists, and others is the concept of delayed multitasking.

Delayed Multitasking

If I were to tell you to work on a scientific project that would span for over 44 years, would you accept to be a part of it? I wouldn’t. But that’s what differentiates me from Charles Darwin. His final work, ‘Formation of Vegetable Mould Through The Action of Worms’ took him 44 years to complete.

To understand how Darwin used this technique successfully throughout his life, we will have to rewind the years back to the 19th century. As per the research done by Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, we can say with a degree of confidence that Darwin was part of different projects during his life.

Photo by Photos Hobby on Unsplash

Delayed multitasking is efficient when you actually dedicate time to it. Onboard the Beagle as a naturalist, Darwin took up a project that would span five long years. As a perfect intersection between his interests of zoology and geology, as an initial project, he took up researching the coral reefs.

Investing time into this project diversified his thinking and his interests branched out to include psychology and botany too. For the rest of his life, Darwin would move back and forth in these different fields.

He never quite abandons any of them.

Other projects included that of study of earthworms the analysis of which he penned down in a book called ‘The transmutation of species’ and he took up reading economics. During the time he was reading the works of an economist, Thomas Malthus, is when he had his eureka moment.

In an instant, he realizes how species could emerge and evolve slowly, through this process of the survival of the fittest.

It all comes to him, he writes it all down, every single important element of the theory of evolution, in a notebook.

Cross-training your mind

As proven by Darwin, our minds can be trained in a particular discipline that somehow opens up an array of possibilities in another discipline. Ask an athlete the benefits of a cross-training regime, why can’t we cross-train our minds to boost our creativity?

Sustaining this creativity in a particular field can be exercised by indulging in another discipline (that’s the core concept of creativity). Try learning music or anything else that interests you. You will be pleasantly surprised to see the effects it will have on boosting the creativity around other projects.

The modern world seems to present us with a choice. If we’re not going to fast-twitch from browser to browser, we have to live like a hermit, focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.

That’s a false dilemma. We can make multitasking work for us, unleashing our natural creativity.

We just need to slow it down.

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Dhawal Pagay
Change Becomes You

Final Year Student At IIT Roorkee | Writer | Sports Enthusiast | Blogger | https://articleandeverything.com/