creativity and work.

i picked up some issues of Harvard Business Review the other day at the library's magazine exchange.

I'm reading an article entitled "Creativity under the Gun." It is discussing a study done on creativity at work and time pressure. The authors identify four basic states that are combos of time pressure and likelihood of creative thinking:

• Expedition - low time pressure, high creativity
• Autopilot - low time pressure, low cretivity
• on a mission - high time pressure, high creativity
• on a treadmill - high time pressure, low creativity.

They quote from diaries that workers kept during the study as examples of each of these states.

I could identify with all of them, but I think that mostly I experience two of these states at work: expedition and treadmill. Often when I start a new project at work, there is not a lot of time pressure at first, and i can sit around and mull over the best solution to the problem, and play with some different approches. This process basically continues until I get the new feature basically working. Then it turns into the treadmill sometimes - all of a sudden my boss needs to demo the new feature, but it hasn't been fully tested (or isn't finished being coded).

THere are many days when I feel like I am just busy fighting fires - fixing one pressing bug after another, hacking code to make it work quickly.

Then there are all the days when I've solved the problem, but haven't filled in all of the details of the code, or the days I need to test the code. I'm not sure what those are - they are just not as fun as the other days, for sure.