DIGITAL DISTRACTION

The Importance of Reverie 

The artistic process involves many approaches to assist creativity, among them is reverie. Daily distraction-free time is helpful to let the mind be undirected and spontaneous, ruminative, tangential, or to follow curiosity or some muse. Light attention on a task like walking, cycling or driving (without a podcast on) can also be important for the brain and mental health, but it's remarkable how little time most of us have in the current era to do nothing but allow the river of reverie to flow, which is important for general emotional processing and creativity. 

Maximizing and Decision Fatigue

Many creative types lean toward being maximizers as opposed to satisficers (see Malcolm Gladwell, Blink). Maximizers want to have the most possibility to be able to choose the best option, but this comes at the price of mental energy for decisions. Decision fatigue is a common result. Some decisions are mission critical for our goals and some are not. Routinization as proposed in this clip helps minimize decision fatigue. Streamlining decisions which are repeated but not meaningful allows us to use routinization which frees up bandwidth and time for reverie. Some artists can get stuck in a type of thinking which seeks maximum choice for maximum expression for parts of their life not related to their work or personal satisfaction. Maximizing can become a habitual thing that is applied everywhere without realizing it. A creative value, but perhaps misplaced when it comes at the price of accumulated loss of bandwidth and eventual overwhelm which can contribute to stalling on projects or abandoning long term goals.