When you run your own business, the pressure to get the most out of your working hours and to come up with brilliant ideas on the spot is immense. But study of the brain and the way people work shows that 10-hour days in the office are not necessarily the right way to achieve productivity and creativity.
To get your day off to the right start, write your to-do list first thing in the morning, not the night before, says Amy Brann, author of Make Your Brain Work. "Prioritisation is a brain-energy-intensive process, so you need to do that at a time where you can think clearly," she says.
She says that the old advice about taking breaks to improve efficiency is true. "Your prefrontal cortex, the area of your brain involved in cognitive work (planning, decision making, thinking) gets tired easily," says Brann. "The best breaks are things that get your heart pumping, stimulate your appreciation for life or make you laugh." So going for a run, playing a game or having a joke with colleagues is not skiving off, but the best way to be the most productive. And switching from writing a report to checking your emails doesn't count. "It needs to be from a cognitive task to something else," says Brann.
It can be easier to work efficiently when you run your own business. Jonny Weston says the motivation that led to him setting up his design studio, itcouldbelikethis, is usually enough to get him through his working day. "If you do something you like, you'll learn, work and rest better than if you don't," he says.
Faye Andrews, who co-founded the sports communications specialists, The Emilia Group, says it's easier to be efficient when you run your own business because you can work to your own natural rhythm. "I'm not a morning person. My optimum day, if I'm just working straight through with no meetings, is 11am to 7pm," she says.
Sometimes small business owners not only need to be productive, but creative, to come up with a killer new idea. Rod Judkins, a painter and teacher at Central Saint Martin's art college, advises businesses on creative thinking and has written a book, Change Your Mind, which argues that creativity is not something you are, but something you believe you are. "Creativity is a skill that everyone can learn, and everyone can benefit from," he explains.
Judkins says that fear of failure is a huge obstacle to creativity. "People are so worried about notching up a failure that they become too frozen to do anything," he says. "In the work environment, there is often pressure to be seen as sensible and logical. This stops people suggesting anything that might be seen as crazy." Judkins sites Hubert Cecil Booth's idea of sucking dust up in a vacuum cleaner rather than blowing it away as a concept that was laughed at first but has become the norm.
Doing daily tasks the opposite way, or in the opposite order, encourages creativity in the workplace, Judkins suggests. He ran a creativity workshop with a Dubai soap opera who had run out of ideas and suggested that the team – camera people, script writers, actors – swapped roles to stimulate new ways of working. "At first they were angry and resistant, but they eventually opened up and had a go," he says. "Fear of failure vanished because the weight of expectation had been lifted. New, original ideas poured out."
Many small business owners report being struck by inspiration just as they are falling asleep. Justin Hillier, who runs a translation business called Justification emails himself when he thinks up the perfect turn of phrase just before drifting off. Andrews keeps a notebook by her bed. Weston says he gets his best ideas when he's feeling child-like. "The ease and playfulness with which children think can generate lots of new ideas," he says. "Most people find that their best ideas come at times when they aren't 'working'," agrees Brann. "Rarely do people share stories of brainwaves when they are sat in front of their computer. One of the best strategies for coming up with a great creative idea is to stop trying."
But once you have an idea, it's important to develop it straight away. "You get a shot of energy and excitement from an idea," says Judkins. "If you put work aside for a while and come back to it, you lose that excitement and start to question what you do, doubt sets in and the energy level drops." So, when the lightbulb appears there's no more excuses for taking breaks – it's time to get to work.
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