If you spend every bus, tube, tram or train journey with your head in your phone, you’re throwing away one of the best opportunities you have to improve your creative skills.
Ironically, many of you reading this post will be reading it on your phone. Hopefully, you’ll look up and around you when you finish.
Sitting on the train into London yesterday, I was reminded of a thought that has been niggling at me for years. Whatever happened to quality thinking time?
Everyone on my train – and I do mean everyone, even those travelling together – had their heads in their phones for the entire journey.
Addictive digital stimulus
I’m not the most sociable person in the morning myself so I understand why people don’t always want to converse with their travelling companions. I too welcome the morning silence.
But why does that quiet time have to be spent on our devices?
Why do so many of us feel the need to fill every waking moment with digital stimulus? Gazing out of a window and letting our thoughts drift can bring so many powerful rewards.
The bed, the bus and the bathtub
Giving our minds space to wander often sparks our best ideas. In fact, Jeremy Utley from Stanford University says in his talk on creativity that the history of innovation is the bed, the bus and the bathtub.
He believes that it’s always those moments when we’re not thinking about work that the best ideas come to us.
I certainly find that my light bulb moments come when I least expect them.
That’s why I used to leave a notepad and pen by my bed. Nowadays, I just ask Siri to set a reminder. Yeah, okay, that is using technology, but I go straight back to wayward thoughts, or sleep, afterwards.
The never ending fascination of people watching
Another advantage of not spending every public journey locked in our phones is the chance to watch everyone else.
How do they sit or stand? What are they wearing? Where have they come from and where are they going?
I like to imagine who my fellow passengers are and what’s happening in their lives. What stories could they tell? Or be interested in?
The more we know about ‘audiences’ the better we can relate to them in our communications.
As most of the content we read has been chosen for us by algorithms, it’s good to get out into the real world and see how actual human beings behave.
Sneaky peaks
The other advantage of not spending all our time with our heads in our phones is the chance to see what everyone else is looking at.
I love having a sneaky peak at what the person next to me is watching, listening to or reading.
Granted it’s not as easy as looking at a compartment full of people reading the latest James Patterson bestseller or seeing which reality TV celeb is on all the front pages. But a sideways glance can tell me if anyone is looking at those LinkedIn posts we painstakingly produce for ourselves and our clients.
Giving our mind space
How ever you choose to use your downtime is up to you. Scrolling through some hilarious Tik Tok videos or watching the latest episode of ‘The Last of Us’ could give you the break from work we all need to recharge our creative batteries.
But there’s also a lot to be said for a few moments of silence. It doesn’t need to be full blown meditation or mindfulness. Just sitting back and taking in our surroundings as we speed from one destination to the next can be enough to spark our next original and compelling project, campaign or event.
Do get it in touch if you’d like to talk to me about improving your organisation’s creative thinking.
Photo by Rasheed Kemy on Unsplash
