How to Plan for Creativity: Effective Time-Management Plans for Your Large-Scale Creative Projects

I'm going to talk now about plans, as in sort of largish-scale plans over weeks perhaps, perhaps months, for creativity. Say, for creativity, for innovation – the  words have slightly different meaning, but for things where you need a creative step, but not necessarily – I'm not thinking Einstein here; I'm thinking more the kinds of creative step you need

in your day-to-day user experience, software development, whatever particular aspect you're in, you're after. Crucially, innovation is often attached to risk  and creativity is attached to risk. And typically, when people say 'risk', they're thinking high gain but also a possibility of failure. And that's fine – apart from sometimes you can't afford to fail.

So, what you really want, ideally, are *high-gain, but low-risk activities*; so, things where you're guaranteed to get something but you might get something really good. And that's what I'd like to talk about – ways to achieve that. So... high risks or innovative strategies seem to be risk of failure, conservative ones low-risk but not very exciting.

Can we get the best of both worlds? The typical way, when you think about  plans – if you're going to go and you write your Gantt chart or whatever, you think  of them as not necessarily linear; you might have parallel activities, but lots of small steps where you're saying 'I'm going to do this on these days; these on these days; this person's doing this; this person's doing that.' All pre-planned, guaranteed outcome – you know that you can achieve each of the steps. You know that you do each of the steps, you get to the end and you've got your result.

Brilliant! But maybe a little boring. So, again, can we do something a bit better than that? Well, of course, there is a creative plan. So, a classic – and this is both  something you might informally do, but also I have seen formally written plans like this, which you can think of as the 'spark from heaven' plan. So, you have a series of activities that perhaps happen up front. And then, your plan,

I said you might not write it down, but your plan is basically that you *wait for the spark of creativity*. There's the big bright idea; once you've got your  bright idea, you move on. So, I've seen things like research or development plans that say, 'First of all, we're going to review what's there. And then, we'll invent the new method, the new toolkit, the new way of doing something. 'Spark from heaven' plans: brilliant when they work, disaster when they don't.

So, this is a classic high-risk plan. So, how can you modify this kind of bigger bright idea plan to make some things more likely to succeed while still having the opportunity to produce really good things? One kind of plan that works quite well, I found, are *incremental output plans*. Now, this works, perhaps – well, we'll talk about some examples actually later.

If you're writing, it might be about writing things that come in units so that you can deliver things. If you're producing software, it might be producing something minimal and then additional parts. But the basic idea is you have a linear plan – or it doesn't have to be linear; it can be a branch, but think of a linear plan, *with multiple stages*, where each stage might require little sparks inside, but smaller sparks;

so, smaller sparks spread out; but then crucially at each stage, so you've got those high-risk elements; I said normally they're  dangerous, but because you've broken them up, the likelihood is that one of them will happen.  And this can be highly linearized, so you have to have the first one first. But if it's smaller bright ideas, you're more likely to have it. Or it might be actually you could do things  in different orders and be a bit more speculative about which order you do things.

But crucially, each stage, when you have the spark of insight related to that stage, has a related output. And so, at every point from the first stage or two, you  actually have something that you could *deliver*. Now... from an overall management point of view, from a project management point of view, knowing you've *got something*, even if it's not what you'd really like, is *brilliant*. So, and it's particularly good if you've got a limited  time, so there are different kinds of constraints

in time. Sometimes it's the amount of time you've got to spend on it in total, but often there's a *hard deadline*. If there's a hard deadline, if you have to deliver something by that deadline, then actually a plan that's guaranteed to give *something*, even if it's not the most wonderful thing at that deadline, is a good plan. The more of the stages you go through, the better the plan you have. And if you fail on the last one, so what?

You've missed a little bit, but you've still got something pretty good. Examples of that – in Agile development methods, I'm sure a lot of you have worked with Agile development teams. You're often based around a user story or a scenario-based one where you take a particular user story and say, 'We're going to, this week, this fortnight (2 weeks), this month,' – depending on how long you do your sprints over – 'we're going to implement this slice of functionality.' You implement that one; then you move on to a different one.

You need to have a level of innovation, a level of – I mean, this is true both from the development point of view, from the user experience design point of view. You need your sparks for those (inaudible). But each one is a relatively contained  thing that you can finish. The other thing is that if you have, shall we say, a 'palette' of them, what you might do is during... your weekly review meetings about where you're at,

you might actually choose to do the story where you've got a pretty good idea of what you're going to do. So, effectively use the sparks to drive the order in which you do the stories. So, you have a number of stories that you want to implement. They're part of what you'd like to do; you do those. Now, this is related to the whole idea of a *minimum viable product*. So, is there something you can produce that you can get out there that does the job? And then you've got a roadmap (inaud.) wish  list, that you might do in a particular order, and then it's a matter of waiting to do those  creative steps for each one.

Or it might be that if you've got a road map, a wish list of things to do, when you sort of realize 'Ah! That's how we can do that one!' you get on and do that one rather than the rest. So, it's like having a *menu* of things that require *creative steps*, but each one of which when you do them, you can add to that minimum viable product, make it a more extensive one, something that's more appealing. A similar – well, it's similar in the sense that it reduces risk, although actually very different –

is what you think of as a *back burner activity plan*.  So, the idea here is you have your classic 'spark from heaven' plan where you've got something and you're waiting for the big idea. But what you do is, in addition, you have a *parallel activity* that you can get on with. Now, *sometimes that's related but not the same*. So, imagine you've got actually an application idea of your own you're trying to develop, and you think it's going to be great, but it takes time

and you certainly need a certain amount of insight to hit your head. So, what you do is you're doing consultancy work; it's in the just same general area. So, it helps *feed your brain with ideas*, but pays for your bread and butter – allows you to live and to pay your rent and everything while you develop your new bright idea; so, that might be it. Or it might be a *low-risk path to the same outcome*. So, you have a project you have to do.

And you'll think – again, we'll go back to the to-do list application; so, you have to develop a to-do list app. You know you've got to do it. You know what to-do lists look like – applications. There's a gazillion to-do list apps; so, you could just do yet another to-do list app. So, what you do is you *get on with doing that*, but at the same time you're *thinking about novel  and different ways to do it*. Because you're doing something related, it's feeding in. So, as you get on with the bread and butter

to-do list app that's sort of just doing its job but in a fairly boring way, it's keeping your mind thinking about to-do list apps. And if – and hopefully if, that will, one is, make it more likely and then if the sudden 'Ah yes!' idea comes, you then effectively shift into doing the more creative but high-risk activity. It's quite nice too if the steps that you're doing  in the high-risk activity can

feed back into the low-risk one. So, you might – I mean, that's less true if there's like one huge big idea, but the low-risk activity might itself be a bit more like the incremental would have a series of things and you might perhaps having done one of them, be able to feed some of those ideas back into your more day-to-day mundane plan for producing the to-do list application. So, the idea is to have something that you just know you can get on with, will produce a result;

you know – that result might be earning your money so you could live; it might be producing the application at the end, but something else in parallel which sort of sits there and is it what you really want to do? And when the ideas come for it, you  get on with it. Okay, that's a *back burner activity*. The other thing you can do, which is sort of  essential for the incremental one but is a general strategy, and it's sort of blatantly obvious, this, is

take that one big idea – can you break it down? Can you think of things that are smaller, but when you've done them all, either means that you've done the big activity or sometimes are just preparatory, but each one of them is of value in itself, and often the last small idea you need is how to pull them all back together to bring them back into the big idea? So, ways of breaking things down:

So, you can think about activities. I mean, there are multiple dimensions, and I'm going to push it down to two because otherwise you can't see it on a slide. Let's think about the things that you're doing in terms of two axes. One is in terms of *complexity*. How complex? Is something really simple or is something a really complicated thing? And in terms of the *amount of creative energy required*.

How creative do you need to be to do the task? Now, there are some things that are both really simple in terms of complexity and don't require a lot of creativity. So, I can go out and make a cup of tea for myself anytime. You know – that's low creativity, a low-complexity task to do. If you've got a load of those to do, one – I mean, sometimes they can be a useful back burner activity, but one thing particularly often I find myself trying to do is clear the decks of those

because they can take over your life. In the pebbles and boulders model, they're the *pebbles*. So, one is they can take over and there's too many of them. But often, the fact that they're sitting there on your head, you know you've got to do these little tasks. I often find if you can, spend a bit of time, get them out of the way – that's useful. So, there's *strategy* – so, again, you might have different strategies, but they have a particular strategy for dealing with them. Or you might say, 'I'm going to schedule a day a week for doing these,

or an hour in the morning for doing those tasks. That's it.' I mean, I prefer to produce biggest possible ones; so, I might go for the day a week. But I said it does depend on your schedule, where you work, how it's going to do. The other kind of thing, you might have *things which don't require much creativity but are quite complicated*. Now, I mean that's weird because – but things can be biggish and yet you just know that if you get on with them, they'll happen. For those, if you're wanting to do something creative, two things you can do with those:

One is you can *deliberately schedule them for later*, so you can move them off into the future. I sometimes talk about *Micawber management*. The use of procrastination, but as a positive thing. And this is an example of Micawber management. You're saying, 'I know I've got this; there's this complicated thing. It's going to take a lot of effort. What I might want to do is just say, "But I know because it's not going to require huge

amounts of creative insight, that this will take  me a day, a week, an hour; where's its deadline? When do I need to do it?"' ... pushed off; so, into the future. The other thing you might do with these is use them in that back burner model as the parallel filler activity; so, the thing to do whilst you're waiting for the big idea, basically. The thing you have to be a little bit careful with these, using that is

if they're *complicated but are taking mental energy*, then they get in the way of the creative thought. However, that by very definition pushes them up into the bigger emotional or creative energy tasks. So, if they're low creative energy, if they're things you can just get on with but are quite complex, then you might do them as your back burner activity whilst you're doing the things that you  have to sort of perhaps wait for that moment when it's 'Ah – yeah! That's right! Get on with it.' Okay, let's look at the top left of this thing now. So, things which are

*low complexity but require a substantial amount of creativity*. So, these are little puzzles – you know. It might be as simple as 'What name should I give for this menu item?' – you know; it's that kind of thing, or... but they're things that – you know – you do have to think about, do require a bit of processing; so, they're eating up your creative thinking, but they're relatively small. These are often little fun tasks, actually, because  you know you're going to get them done;

you know they're not such a huge thing that you think,  'Oh my goodness! Will I ever think of that many (inaud.)?' – you know. You know you're going to do it; you might have some strategies for helping you doing it. There is a category of things up here, though, that are *not fun*. And... You know – you'll have different ones,  but I'm rubbish at like sending – certain emails. Some emails are fine, but there are ones where I'm just worried about how to *phrase it*;

so, it's not so much creative energy as *emotional energy*. And what I will do is I can spend a day not doing that task. So, for those things, these things which are more problematic, again you either want to try and clear the decks of them, so I'm going to push it down to the bottom. Or, even though it's quite small, put it off, schedule it so that it's not  forgotten – you know it's not forgotten, and it may, but hopefully by scheduling it into the future, it makes it less of a weight on your mind. Okay, now the *gap* – the yawning void here on this diagram is the things that

*require creativity but are also complex*. There, I said we're not talking about complex in the Einstein general relativity sense, but in the new idea of how you're going to organize this new application in some way that's going to be different from your competitors and yet it's going to be easy to use; it's going to be immediately attractive when they first see it, and it's going to continue to enthrall them for weeks and years to come – you know.

So, this is non-trivial stuff. You know – this is the Nirvana up here; this is it, right? But it's hard – these are the *hard things*. What good planning should do is help you to break that down into things that either actually require *no creativity at all*, or are these *lower grade things*, these things that require those creative insights but are more fragmented.