Routines can help you be more productive by automating certain decision-making processes. They take something you always do the same way and hand it off to your subconscious, similar to how you might hand off work to a machine or software. They allow your conscious mind to focus on more important decisions. Why would you want to break them?

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I’m glad you asked.

The last few weeks I talked about productivity and creativity through the lens of time and now routines. Last week I talked about the ways routines could give you a boost in productivity, by offloading less important tasks to your subconscious. This week I’ll talk about routines from the perspective of creativity.

I want to talk about why you want to break out of productive (and non-productive) routines just for the sake of shaking things up and forcing you to step outside your comfort zone.

The Medici Effect

In my post about time and creativity I mentioned that creativity needs to see things from different perspectives. I also mentioned how some ideas need to wait and be combined with other ideas before they become something.

This idea of mixing different ideas and different perspectives is central to the book The Medici Effect, by Frans Johansson. The book talks about how breakthrough ideas occur when the concepts from one discipline are applied to another.

Henry Ford is a good example. His idea to automate the manufacturing process of automobiles came from the meat packing industry which was already using an assembly line process.

Ford applied something that worked in one industry to another. He took an existing idea and applied it to something new and he made the manufacture of automobiles more efficient and consequently less expensive.

The more general idea comes from the Medici family in Renaissance Venice. Venice is a port city and during the Renaissance is was the port city where people from different cultures arrived and intermingled.

The Medicis were patrons of the arts and for a time Venice was the epicenter of art and culture and lots of different industries due to this mixing of different and independent ideas from different cultures and perspectives around the world.

Mixing new and disparate ideas is at the heart of creativity. You can’t do that by doing the same thing in the same way over and over again. That’s the old idea repeated. You need to take in new ideas from a wide variety of sources.

Be Open to the New and Different

Routines won’t help you be more creative aside from freeing up your conscious mind for other things. Routines help you be more productive, but they limit what you take in. They keep you in the same place. They aren’t going to make you more creative or fill you with creative ideas.

Aside: For the same reason I typically don’t sign into Google or Bing or whatever search engine and see personal search results. I think personal search leads to seeing the same sites over and over again. It can keep you from finding new things or rather leads you to continue to make the same choices and see the same sites again and again.