4 ways to stay creative in the age of AI

I think of creativity as a bit like my friend Catherine’s chicken, Red*.

Red will lay an egg but only if the conditions are right. She needs nourishment, space to stroll, and a safe environment where she’s confident she won’t get eaten by a fox. If something’s wrong, she will either not lay an egg at all, or lay a disappointingly small one.

In the same way Catherine nurtures her chicken and enjoys a delicious omelette rather than a wizened dwarf-egg, we should all cosset our creativity if we want to get the best out of it. At a time when every week brings more headlines of AI’s relentless encroachment into what it means to be creative, fighting to protect this most human of traits feels both important and urgent. But how? Creativity is notoriously shifty: hard to define, harder to cultivate.

I’ve been a stereotypically creative person, for work and for fun, my whole life, but I still find it a struggle to beat the foxes of distraction and doubt. There are days when that pitch or page writes itself, and days when I stare out of the window hoping for inspiration and my brain feels like a dried-up walnut. Still, after over two decades of doing mostly creative things for a living, in journalism, writing and communications, I have noticed some tactics that work for me. Here they are:

1. Let yourself be bored

Probably my favourite bit of parenting advice is to back off and let your kids be bored, because that’s when the magic happens. We should apply the same logic to ourselves, and this means taking a deliberate decision to swim against the rip tide of the modern attention economy. It’s so tempting to cram every spare moment with some kind of content: an improving podcast, an instagram binge, a doom scroll, all at our fingertips, all of the time. Our phones are exquisitely engineered to eradicate boredom from our lives. But boredom is under-rated. Indeed, a psychological experiment found that “boring activities resulted in increased creativity,” adding to a wealth of anecdotes on the link between mind-wandering and inspiration. I remember a friend telling me how her father, an old-school mechanical engineer, refused to get a dishwasher because his best ideas always came when he was washing up. I recently spent a frustrating afternoon at my desk struggling to come up with a concept for an animation: the idea finally came to me while driving round a supermarket car park. I was in good company. The writer Agatha Christie hailed the benefits of tedium, declaring in a 1955 interview that “There’s nothing like boredom to make you write.” That’s why I now make a conscious effort to walk the dog in silence and fold laundry in monastic peace. Embrace boredom.

2. Take the pressure off

When I was part of the World Economic Forum’s digital team, before deciding on a headline for a blog we would write five alternatives and pick the best. I loved this exercise, because it took the pressure off. I didn’t agonise over each version, and often, the best ideas were bashed out last just to hit the quota. In a similar vein, painting is one of my hobbies, but I sometimes have such a fixed idea of what I want to achieve that it paralyses me and I don’t start because I don’t want to get it wrong. But painting with my young daughter - just for fun, knowing there will be a mess and not much time before she loses focus - pushes me to put something on paper and not care too much about the end result. When creativity goes well it feels spontaneous and joyful. It’s what comes naturally to kids, and what gets slowly crushed out of us as we get older. While this spirit can be hard to pull off at work, it’s worth trying to carve out a space for experimentation rather than hitting expectations.

3. Embrace constraints

Whole books can and have been written about what it takes to be creative. But sometimes, all it takes is a deadline (and coffee). Constraints are not always crushing. Of course, creativity has an enigmatic side: there is a reason the Greeks personified it as a set of Goddesses. But those of us with deadlines can’t afford to see if inspiration will descend mysteriously from above before 6pm. While lifting the pressure of expectations can be freeing, complete freedom is not the creative nirvana you might expect. From time pressure to format pressure (how do you tell a complex story in a 60-second video?) I find it helpful to remember that constraints can be positive for creativity, giving us less space to flounder. Again, research backs this up: a Harvard Business Review article analysing 145 empirical studies found that “individuals, teams, and organizations alike benefit from a healthy dose of constraints.” Outside of my day job, the only time I’ve finished a novel and got it published was when I had real time pressure: the ticking clock of an editor who was interested in my idea, and who might lose interest any moment. I’d also boxed myself into a limiting format: narrating my story in a first-person blog. Other, more ambitious, novels are half-written and languishing. Without the pressure of a publishing deal and the crutch of a narrative constraint I’ve not worked consistently enough for these stories to take hold of my brain. The right kind of pressure can kickstart creativity, not stifle it.

4. Focus, break, focus, break

There’s nothing worse than working on something creative, losing your focus, but toiling on anyway. You end up in a sort of ineffectual fug, not really creating, not really resting, just getting increasingly irritable, while eating too many snacks. This is no good. I find I can write in an efficient and focussed way for about an hour, and then I need a short break. In an ideal world, this is a screen break, not a non-break of checking notifications. There is a whole host of research on getting into a “flow” state - a feeling of total immersion in what you’re doing - which is great for creativity, productivity and also happiness. There is zero research to back up this particular statement but I reckon it’s true anyway: one hour of creative “flow” work is worth three hours of working on something while sporadically replying to emails and slack and whatsapping about your kid's dental appointment. You could argue that modern work culture is built to kill flow - the challenge is real, but that’s a whole other article. Within all the compromises of a multi-tasking job, I find it helps to be intentional about what is creative work, what is a break, and what is time to catch up on everything else.

To say that AI is the elephant in the room would be to add one animal analogy too many to this article. One of my biggest worries, as I explored in this interview with a neuroscientist, is that the ease of using AI will erode our ability to be creative in the same way that Google eroded our memories. But however much AI improves, and however we might plug it into our processes, creativity itself is precious. We should tend it carefully, both professionally and personally. I’d love to hear your tips for keeping the foxes at bay.

• Since I wrote this draft, Red got eaten by an actual fox. I’m trying not to see this as an omen. RIP, Red.