Elongating time: why creativity needs procrastination and inefficiency

In this blog, I’ve already talked about the need for marination and procrastination. But I want to talk a bit about the common denominator: time.

For creativity to thrive, we need to elongate time. The biggest misconceptions and myths about creativity have to do with time: those (infamous) aha! moments, sudden insights or light bulb moments.

Creative thinking needs time. It needs time because it needs to be messy, inefficient, tangential. Creative thinking is about making connections that weren’t there before.

Listen to the cues we get within language about messiness: ‘think outside of the box,’ ‘run with an idea,’ ‘break the rules,’ ‘don’t fence me in’.

I think it was Ansel Adams who once said it’s not that he was a better photographer than anyone else, but that he was willing to put in the time to take and develop 10,000 photos of the same thing. He had the patience to wade through 9,999 messy photos.

Here’s where it gets muddled for our society. You know how one might describe elongated time? Inefficient. A literal waste of time. Boring.

Who gets bored these days? People boast all the time that they never get bored. Every minute is filled with excitement, productivity, information, even creative projects. If I had 30 minutes to either stare at the wall and daydream to the point of boredom or pick up my smartphone and connect with every single person and piece of information created in human history, hell, my phone is looking pretty good next to that wall.

But creativity requires elongated time. We’ve talked about squiggles on this blog before: those messy, sticky threads of thought that might lead nowhere.

But here’s the thing: they’re pretty sticky. Have enough of them, and one is bound to drag through the right pile of mud and pick up the exact right connection it needed to move forward. Not enough time, not enough threads. Too much time, the threads start to knot and snarl.

So the next time someone catches you staring off into space or taking 10,000 photos when one would do, tell them you’re not bored, procrastinating or inefficient. Tell them you’re elongating time.