This post is part 1 of a 3 part series with me rambling about how I cleaned up my life and found more time and more energy to get on with my personal projects outside of work. Without burning out.
Next: Part 2, Productivity
Finally: Part 3, Creativity

That's pronounced “iv-a-tees”, not “eye-va-tees”, and today is all about reuniting the siblings who were separated at birth: Product Ivity and Creat Ivity. On with the show.

While doing mindless or repetitive tasks on the computer, I'll often opt for putting a DVD on as background. When I'm actually at home, I'll rarely watch anything without having my laptop sitting in front of me working on some problem or another. To me, doing both at the same time feels more productive than doing just one at a time, even if I can't give either task my full attention.

So there I was, just getting ready to do … something. The DVD started, and pop - the idea I was about to work on evaporated. Where do ideas go when you put on DVDs? I have no idea, but the idea returned after I stopped the disk.

The problem was I wasn't trying to be productive, I was really trying to be creative, which got me thinking about the differences between the two. This is what I came up with, and what each mean to me:

Productivity is doing the necessary evil tasks (paying bills, talking to insurance agencies, doing the washing up, the laundry, tidying the living room, processing emails, making phonecalls) as efficiently as you can, in order to have more time for Creativity.

Creativity is the process of creating something new. The classical examples are art, music and literature, but anything that you don't already know how to do could be creative the first time you do it. Once you know the process, it stops being Creativity and becomes Productivity.

Some observations from those definitions:

1. They feed into one another quite naturally, and at the fringes, overlap, but fundamentally they're different.
2. The task they define is ambiguous, so what's creativity for one person could very well just be productivity for another (maths is a good example of this).

Being productive on it's own leaves big gaps in your life where you're not sure what to do with the extra time previously filled with tedious minutiae, while being only creative can cause problems with the laundry, or worse: a complete stall from all the guilt of not doing the things that you 'have' to; the necessary evils.

Others have written a lot more on this topic, but indulge me, and allow me to add one final observation:

I feel it's important to use productivity skills to enhance your creativity. The actual creation part isn't worth a lot unless you give it some attention and develop the ideas into something. In order to do that, you may have to go through a few necessary hoops. The ability to skip through the setup phase as fast as possible in order to actually get started on what sparked you off in the first place cannot be overstated enough - and that is productivity.

At the risk of sounding like a bad TV advert: if you've not discovered “productivity” yet (and all the associated fads, gadgets, aids, courses guides and other “productivity porn”) then it's worth looking in to, if only so you've got more time for creativity in your life - both at home, and at work.

Yes, friends, I'm talking to you.

(You know who you are, 'cause you're feeling guilty about now!)