Benjamin Davies’s Profile

5 Minute Creativity

TL;DR: When making a decision or working to solve a problem, spend 5 minutes (using a timer) just coming up with ideas. Managing your attention like this can supercharge your creativity.

A few days ago I was helping a friend flesh out an idea for an app that he is developing in his spare time. We came up with a new feature that we were both excited about, and we spent a few minutes going over how much more useful and fun the app was going to be with this new feature.

But in the spirit of philosopher Karl Popper, I asked my friend: "Is there anything wrong with this new feature idea?"

He spent about two seconds considering the question, before confidently answering "No!"

This took me by surprise. Somehow he had come to think that if a problem didn't jump out at him within the first two seconds of looking for problems, then for him the idea mustn't have any problems.*

I took some time later in the day to reflect on that moment. My first thought was about how irrational he was to have spent so little effort trying to poke holes in this new feature idea. After all, he was getting ready to spend hours of his valuable time bringing this new feature into reality. If he had just spent one minute thinking about what could be wrong with the new idea, and in that minute he discovered a fatal flaw in it, it might've saved him hundreds of minutes of wasted work over the next few weeks! Silly guy! Lucky he had me there to save him!

But then I thought about it some more, and realised that maybe I'm not actually that different to him. In many aspects of my daily life, I don't consciously give myself a meaningful amount of time to come up with new ideas or criticisms for the things I want to do. Many of my choices are kind of uncreative—I simply do the first thing that pops into my mind, in much the same way my friend decided there was nothing wrong with the new feature idea; because that was the first thing that popped into his mind.

I did some e-sleuthing around this thought and found On Creativity - The joys of 5 minute timers by Neel Nanda. It suggests literally using timers to make sure we spend meaningful time thinking about the things that matter. It might be worth reading if you identify at all with anything I have just said.

My favourite part of the article is this:

Set a 5 minute timer, and make a list of problems in your life - things that annoy you, things you want to work on, things that could be better. And then, go through that list, and cross off any you’re confident you’ve spent at least 5 minutes of focused time trying to solve. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have an embarrassingly long list left over. I’d be pretty curious about what happens if you try doing a 5 minute brainstorm for anything left.

I also found Nate Soares blogposts talking about using this approach (I believe the Neel Nanda article was at least partly inspired by Nate Soares):

In 'Obvious advice', Nate Soares writes:

When you're about to make a big decision, pause, and ask yourself what obvious things a reasonable person would do before making this sort of decision. Would they spend a full five minutes (by the clock) brainstorming alternative options before settling on a decision? Would they consult with friends and advisors? Would they do some particular type of research?

Then, actually do the obvious things.

In 'Be a new homunculus', Nate Soares writes:

Notice the guilt, listen to the message it bears, and actually write down the behavioral pattern that you wish to change. Then spend five minutes (a full five minutes, by the clock) brainstorming ways that you might change the pattern and start retraining your mind.

I think if I dedicated 5 minutes each week to thinking about all the things I could do that week, I would come up with a lot of stuff. Some of those ideas would suck, but some of them would probably be a lot more useful and interesting than whatever I would’ve done otherwise that week if I didn’t spend 5 minutes exclusively thinking about it. I might even start using 5 minute timers each morning to decide what I want to do that day. Time to explore.

Let me know what you think about all this. Going forward, I expect to be using timers for a lot more than just cooking!

*Needless to say, I suggested he spend a little longer thinking about it before he added the feature to his plans. In less than a couple minutes, he found three or four legit problems that would need to be addressed before the feature would merit inclusion in the project. Yay Popper!