Time & Time-table ‌‌‌‌| Creativity, Introspection, Productivity

‌‌Every day in the morning, I sit with myself, waiting for my muse to say something in my ear. Some days it wants me to be reflective (introspective), other days it lets me be creative & sometimes it demands me to be productive. So, every day is a new day in itself & doesn't feel the same as the previous day. Know why? Our mood is a product of our fleeting feelings, thoughts, emotions, actions, and energy levels. The good news is if we are in control & tune with ourselves, we may live each of our days painting our world in different shades.

However, in this productivity-fixated world, we hope to spend our time, the finite currency, in the most judicious way. The eventual consequence of this is feeling monotony and dullness. It further results in a lack of interest and motivation for our work over a course of time. Arguably, it is caused due to repetition and linearity of daily tasks and jobs. As we gain command over them, it stops posing challenges to our brains, thus, feeling mechanical & boring.

On a different note, tell me something: would you go to the same shopping mall and buy the same dress every time? I guess not! Here let's consider three different scenarios to understand what happens as we choose to spend our day differently.

‌‌

‌‌

JUST CHECKING IT OUT | Taking a reflective ride

-Sometimes you'd like to go out and check out the new arrival stock. You’d take a walk in the store, go to every section that draws your attention and see for yourself what it’s in there. On both conceptual and experiential levels, this is how sitting down on an introspection would feel.

You tune into yourself & become aware of your internal state of mind. Sometimes, you might come across unresolved emotions and unprocessed feelings like past hurt or frozen grief. Other times, they may be unheard thoughts and unregistered intentions like starting a business or fitness regime. ‌‌‌‌However, it is to hear yourself out without identifying yourself with any of those feelings, emotions, thoughts, or intentions. You merely get in touch with your thoughts, feelings, and emotions in the inaccessible corners of your mind.

It is similar to a normal way of inspecting stuff in the shopping store. You’re simply out on a window shopping to check out the stock in the shopping store. You might happen to like a dress so much that you plan to buy it. But only later when you think you can stretch your budget enough to afford it. ‌‌‌‌

Parallelly, you’d take an action to fulfill a long-held wish or put in the effort to resolve an important issue when you think you’re in a conducive emotional and mental state. As of right now, you might be tied up with ongoing projects or other commitments in life that remain your priority. At the same time, you become aware of the long-pending call, which you need to take up when the time is ripe. We can say, for now, it’s on your wishlist i.e. on your surface memory, and it will remain there as a shopping article that you ought to purchase in the future.

‌‌

EXPLORING TO BUY THE BEST | Going on a creative journey

‌‌

-Similarly, sometimes you wouldn't buy a dress and the matching heels & complementing accessories- all from just one shop. You'd not mind moving through different shops for a more diffused and assorted look. Naturally, it will require you to remain patient & put in more hours for the shopping hunt. You have no idea which street you’re going to take today to finally land in the shop where you find the stuff of your liking. But you’re enjoying yourself and heading up with curiosity, awe, and wonder as you’re walking on the street and passing across the shops. Eventually, you find yourself drawn towards one shop, so you walk into it & spend some time searching for what you have been looking for. ‌‌‌‌

Likewise, feeling creative on a day is to shift into and access altered states of mind (read shops) like gloominess, happiness, or contentment to bring out on paper or canvas that's within you and wants to express itself. There's no plan in your mind, there's no roadmap to follow, or no pattern to stick to. You simply allow yourself to be and go with the flow to express your ideas vividly in some form of art.

‌‌

GOING OUT TO MAKE THE PURCHASE | Traveling a productive path

‌‌

-Now there are times when you're clear in your head. You know that you want that specific/exact dress you had seen your friend wearing at a get-together. You like its color, its texture, its style and you know it’ll look good on you.

Because you want it so much, you couldn't stop yourself from asking your friend where she bought that wonderful piece! You can’t wait to see it in your cupboard that you have figured out everything beforehand. Be it the price or the shop, you have all the necessary details with you to make that purchase. ‌‌‌‌

Colloquially, to do some task productively, you must have a set of cut-out instructions at hand to execute it smoothly. Such that you derive maximum output in less time and subsequently with less effort. So when you run that specific task, you’re focused, attentive, clear & sorted in your head to extract the desired output.

Clearly, in this case, you have the directions to go to the exact shop without stopping here and there and exploring other options. ‌‌‌‌For the first few times, you’ll be excited before that purchase and feel satisfied after completing it. Now as you repeat the purchase each time, your excitement levels begin to drop down and that feeling of satisfaction seems to fade away.

Neuroscientifically, when you repeat a task several times, you build new neural pathways and connect neural circuits. It involves the firing of a lot of neurons, what you call brainstorming in the English language. Until you establish and stabilize that neural pathway, it seems interesting & engaging because of a lot of churning happening on a neural level. ‌‌‌‌

Contrarily, once you have it figured out, you're just a few steps away from replicating the set of instructions for the desired result. Subsequently, it goes into auto-mode marked by a significant drop in your brain activity levels. When this happens, you find your job dull, even mentally and emotionally draining sometimes due to lack of fulfillment. It doesn't excite you anymore and you feel bored to death after making the same purchase, in the same way, many times in a row!

Thus, every morning you dread walking down the same street to the same shop to buy the same dress!! There’s no thrill, no fun, no anticipation, and no new possibility on the chart. You get to live the same old experience on repeat!

‌‌

REAL LIFE VERSUS IDEAL PLOT

‌‌

Now, it goes without saying that in real-life scenarios, not everyone is privileged to ignore their work commitments to aid their reflective rides or nurture their creative juices. Our nature of jobs is such that: it values core competencies & high expertise, pay for year-long experiences, and overinflate productivity. We gotta lead high-performance teams to run big corporate houses to improve customer experiences in the face of cutthroat competition. Amidst all this, so many of us cannot conceive of work as more than a means to meet our expenses, clear off debts, and pay our bills. ‌‌‌‌At least, we can do better by innovating the nature of the job at the office. For instance:

• Think of the ways where you can be creatively productive to do more with less (cost cutting/budgeting).

• Think of the times when you can be productively reflective to cut through the process (problem-solving).

For good or bad reasons, everything seems to boil down to profit & productivity in this seemingly fast-paced corporate world today!

‌‌

The heart of the matter is: We have become so fixated on productivity these days that we neglect to nurture our creative aspirations & reflective retreats. As a result, we feel bogged down by having to go to the same shop to buy the same dress every time we go out shopping. We repeat the routine tasks so much that we feel mentally and emotionally regressed, a mental state that we know if as burnout.

We rob ourselves of an opportunity to live/feel/appreciate/explore a range of experiences in a long day. So when we complain of boredom with our daily job or mundane affairs, it's an obvious and pretty natural outcome of repetition and regression. As we miss out on creative novelty, mental vitality, and physical vigor that play a huge role to nourish our emotional, mental, and physical well-being.

‌‌

BALANCING CREATIVITY, INTROSPECTION, AND PRODUCTIVITY ‌‌‌‌

So the crux is it's so very important for us to set some time aside to nurture our creative expressions & go on reflective rides beyond the daily desktop hustle. So that we allow ourselves to let loose, go with the feel, and go with the flow without having to drive ourselves on a rigorously traveled route. As much as you feel compelled to prioritize taking this rigorous route, make time for yourself in the day to go out on a pathless path.

Yes, there is no set of directions to discover it, start exploring it for yourself. ‌‌‌‌For heads up, it’s not gonna be as predictable as the street that you walk down to buy that dress from that shop. You might find yourself lost in it but you never know you find yourself in it. Certainly, it's gonna be more creatively colorful than you imagine & reflectively reverberating than you wish for. Last but not least, don’t fool yourself into thinking that your professional self is skilled enough to figure out this pathless path using some smart hacks or shortcuts. That's not gonna help you. For it, you first have a tune in to yourself & to hear out your muse!

P.S.: Tune into yourself with the divine powers of yoga & meditation. Book your slot now at https://calendly.com/bbbites

"Start your yoga journey today and tap your vast potential tomorrow."

‌