How Efficiency Can Boost Your Creativity & Save Money

We creatives lament the perceived lack of time on projects to think things out fully, to let ideas marinate & creative juices to seep out of our minds, through our hands and onto our monitors... that homogenization of human & machine. We might be doing it to ourselves.

What if I told you we could "steal" from other segments of the project timeline for the front loading of creative exploration? What if I told you our end result could be elevated to new heights via stronger creative without the project taking a minute longer?

Well, I'm telling you that we can and it will.

After 20+ years working as a creative professional, I've encountered a great deal of variety in work systems and project organization. Every team has a multitude of factors working for or against it and while the personnel dynamic plays a massive role, one common thread remains. It's a dirty word that we simply need to get over and come to embrace... and that's process. Process is pixie dust for saving time and energy. Process is accountability (for your team and for yourself). Process is structure that allows our creativity to soar. It affords us a substantial block of time to consider, to push limits and land the plane... back on the on-brand runway. Of course, there are ineffective processes. We need to champion efficiency in process for creativity to get its due.

we need to champion efficiency in process for creativity to get its due

Process needs to be bought into. We're going to have to sell it to our teams, supervisors and/or company leadership before we can implement (or reimplement). The challenge, as we all know, is that people are generally resistant to change - the "we've always done it this way" response will rear its ridiculous head while a chorus of begrudging moans reverberate the halls of our office. Ehhh, that may be a bit overdramatic. Still, our push to drive something new will take some finessing.

One way we can do this is by associating "real dollars" to the segments of our timeline. We don't need to know what everyone makes to create an effective cost analysis in this manner. We'll assume a generalized unit as one hour of an employee's time. We add up the total units for each segment and simply reallocate more units for our creative team in the beginning... the natural outcome will yield less time spent fixing or redoing work. A two hour meeting with 10 people discussing the avoidable dead end equates to 20 units... what could our designers do with half of that to really dial in a strategy?

We must sell the front load creative conjuring reframed as a road map - a path to get to our desired destination that avoids unnecessary traffic, accidents, PTO, incidents, developers AWOL and a slew of other obstacles we know all too well. It's not efficient to rehash streets we've already driven, to miss an exit or to stop for a tire change when we knew the road was rife with potholes - that begets a culture of finger-pointing and frustration. When less time and energy is spent with multiple departments reactively problem solving something that could have been proactively avoided, everyone wins.

it's not efficient to rehash streets we've already driven, to miss an exit or stop for a tire change...

Besides the aforementioned resource preservation, more time set aside for us creatives will develop a proper incubator to birth next level work (relative to our team, of course). Extra time invested in these preliminary stages will place value on ourselves and the work we are meant to make. Assigning worth to people will illicit a strong desire to succeed and confidence to try harder... smarter.

Efficiency in process, when weighted in favor of creative thinking, ideation and strategy, will pay dividends in every sense of the word... we creatives, will do our job better, other team member's time is less unjustly spent and ultimately, our company saves resources while producing quality work that can drive better sales.

That's the pain point we're alleviating for them and for ourselves... so, let's start spreading that pixie dust.

If you've got more to add or a manager that needs to hear this, comment and share away. I'd love to hear from you. #leadership #training