Hacking productivity isn’t limited to startup founders starting their morning by injecting enzymes or cold plunges. Artists have long been finding ways to awaken the creative flow on command.
However, the rituals or habits that tap into the creative flow are different for everyone. What works for one person will result in another’s uninspired frustration, leaving them tossing and turning at night. The only consistent ingredient is taking the time to find what works — which is exactly what many of the great artists throughout history did.
Georgia O’Keeffe went for a swim every day. Salvador Dali would experiment with ways to catch himself at the cusp between sleeping and waking up to document images for his work. Tchaikovsky swore by walking for a few hours a day, according to The Guardian. The same article notes how Benjamin Franklin required “air baths” in order to work — meaning he sat outside naked at the start of each day.
Whatever habits, rituals or schedules it requires, finding ways to access a creative flow is important for artists and technologists alike. Well, maybe not “air baths” for most.
Built In Colorado spoke with a developer who let us take a peek at the habits that help him problem-solve and bring a creative flow to his work.
Identity Digital operates a portfolio of domain names, like .au and .org, in addition to a registry services platform.
How do you start your day?
Besides coffee, I start my day with learning on paper. Solving problems efficiently requires my brain to be active, creative and curious — my curiosity comes almost exclusively from being confused.
Learning on paper provides a safe playground to explore alternative concepts and solutions without the pressure to create output. Wise old developers always say, "this has been solved before." Many times, I will find a solution for a problem that comes from learning a completely different technology.
I then take my training and spend time on what really excites me: discussing solutions with knowledge owners and stakeholders. This past week, I applied knowledge from an LDAP system I was reading about to a discount structure I was discussing with our tech lead, Eric.
I believe discussion is equally important to deep thought, and developers should try to do it sooner. Deep discussions always help developers gain a broader understanding of a problem and see it with fresh eyes.
I dedicate time to heads-down, focused time boundaries as well. I prefer to work on a single screen, as the problems I fix are often hyper-focused, and I find multiple screens akin to context switching.
What advice do you have for local tech professionals hoping to build sustainable and energizing daily routines?
It's an age-old problem: developers need to dedicate themselves to communication and visibility. In my experience, it's been the biggest challenge for all teams — DevOps and product, DevOps and stakeholders, remote and in-house. Those devs, they ruined development.
The need to have highly technical heads-down time is ripe for a lack of knowledge sharing, with details often getting lost in the weeds of focused development. Finding a balance between focus time and enforcing that boundary while reaching out for plain discussion early and often is challenging, but incredibly important. Squad models are a natural result of this mentality, and even with larger agile teams at name.com, we find that we're squadding out a lot to solve this.
Other habits? I love some lofi and trap music for alpha waves. Taking breaks, physical movement, water, 10-minute creativity sessions and touching grass are equally important to banging your head against the keyboard. The hackathon approach of 12-hour days is great for some developers, but every complex problem I've ever solved was done by daydreaming away from the keyboard.
If Einstein can invent general relativity while vibing at a second location, so can everyone else.
“Taking breaks, physical movement, water, 10-minute creativity sessions and touching grass are equally important to banging your head against the keyboard.”
How did you tap into the rituals, habits and places that power your daily schedule?
Before I got into development, I was a musician and recording engineer for a decade. Working at the intersection of creativity and technology in high-pressure settings with tight budgets easily translated to developer contracts. In the music industry, you could lose clients instantly if you weren't ready to fix something with a smile right away.
At this point in my career, I've spent as much time being a leader to distributed asynchronous teams. My goal is to get answers and maintain as much visibility as possible. Developer work has so much nuance that knowledge gaps happen often. And with up to a 48-hour turnaround time on work from developers halfway around the world, it's important that the team keeps full context of a problem through documentation, stellar PR/MR notes and stakeholder updates.
In addition to visibility, I focus on clarity. I have worked with ESL teams worldwide, and it's imperative that everyone is on the same page. I tend to oversimplify my speech for this reason. Feynman was a huge proponent of this concept, famously saying, “what one fool can understand, another can.”
It's important for developers to understand and discuss a concept in simple terms.
