CREATIVE DAYS VS. PRODUCTIVE DAYS...

This week has been extremely productive... and that got me to thinking about the difference between creativity and productivity, especially in our insanely achievement driven society. This week was all about facing tasks which needed to be done, even though part of me wanted to stay in “vacation mode”. The more I tackled, the better I started to feel as a bag of clutter went out the door on garbage night, laundry from the trip got done and everything got put away. Yesterday and today are devoted to spreading out every receipt I’ve filed away by category all year long , totaling them and putting them into large, brown manilla envelopes to hand over to my accountant for corporate taxes. Hey... at least I’m not a shoe box full of paper kind of girl. My mom always filed things away and could find things when she needed them. I have a very deeply buried inner Virgo (supposedly the tidiest of the zodiac) and clutter still tried to win the battle, but I like knowing where things are. I have come to one important conclusion in the past year... it would be much easier to find things and keep track of them if I had less STUFF!

Productivity is all about accomplishing tasks... and when the tasks seem too overwhelming, it is often tempting to avoid them, but that really doesn’t help in the long run. So I have had my itunes blasting on my eMac while I try to carpet the floor with odd bits of paper and sort them out again. My files were easy enough to sort through, keeping the current year bits in there and putting the others into the assigned envelopes, but dealing with THE BOX was harder.

Do you have one of those “throw it there now and deal with it later” holders? Mine is a photocopy paper box on the floor of my office that has been there since we redid the place last year. Instead of reams of paper, it holds all the fiddly little bits of paper, receipts, notes, statements and stuff that I “meant to get to”. Often stuff piles up on the kitchen table or counter upstairs. When it gets to be too unbearable, I sort it out, toss out the junk, sort it further into Dragon Dreams stuff and family stuff, then the business stuff comes down to the office. In theory, it should get sorted right there into what it needs... but this past year as I wrestled with fear and procrastination, it often just got chucked into THE BOX. The warped logic behind having it all in one place was that if I lost something, I had one place to rummage through instead of several.

So now I am tackling THE BOX, just in case there are receipts that could be important to this year’s corporate tax return. I am absolutely hating every minute of it, except for the sense of accomplishment and freedom it is giving me as stuff goes where it belongs... or into the trash.

Creativity isn’t about how much you get done and sometimes recharging your creative batteries is all about taking time to be... but creative types also need to remember that accomplishing important tasks is part of treating this as a career, a calling and a business... instead of just a hobby.