Creative Time - part 1

If you are one of the many people who work at a tedious job for a company that treats you like machinery, there is at least one thing you can do, short of getting a better job, which will improve your chances of staying sane. This one thing is to introduce "creative time" into your life.

Creative time will help you endure almost any job or unhealthy life situation. It is so therapeutic that it has even helped inmates survive imprisonment! The secret of its success:

Creative time works miracles when it is time that you have full control of some self-directed creative activity.

It doesn't have to be very long, but it does have to be time that you have to yourself. It rehabilitates you spiritually because it unleashes your creativity and gives you time to create an effect on something according to your own desires.

Your ability to create is a spiritual quality and this often gets blunted in work situations where the company wants you to follow scripted routines instead of applying common sense and logic.

Those of you who work in customer service departments are often forced to follow truly insane patterns of behavior, because management has decreed that call-handling statistics are more important than customer satisfaction. This is the type of job that penalizes you for caring about customers and working for real results.

The longer you work at such a degrading job, the sicker you will become. Perhaps there is no short-term alternative to working in this hell-hole, but there is a gradient you can follow that will help you survive until you can locate a job that will provide both income and sanity.

"Creative time" is so important to me personally, that I am amazed that I didn't mention it in my unconventional guide to surviving corporate employment. It is more than kicking back and watching the tube, so I will go into more detail in the next few posts.

A tip of the hat to one of my favorite office blogs, BigPictureSmallOffice for this post that mentions "creative time".

Comments

[Jane Chin]

Ah yes, I remember these very well. We called them "Individual initiatives" or "development objectives." These projects usually come from the employee seeing an unmet need that her skills can fulfill and volunteering to do extra work with no additional pay. The various individual initiatives I've engaged in kept me engaged at work. I can only think of one period in one company where I was so disgusted with management and lack of ethical consideration that I literally stopped "appearing on the radar." I wanted to be invisible and I wanted the managers to stop micromanaging me.

[David St Lawrence]

Jane,

I have taken on "individual initiatives" at companies where interesting tasks were few and far between, but they are a pale imitation of "Creative Time" which is self-directed and for your own benefit.

I think I need to get on with the rest of this series... :)