The Art of Pausing: A Key to Creative Flow

No. 165 | By Christine Carron

Imagine for a moment that you had to read a three-hundred page book that had no punctuation, no capitalization, no line breaks, no chapter breaks, no chapter headers, and no page numbers. Just page after page after page of unbroken text. One long beast of a run-on sentence. 

How easy would it be to get through that book? 

Even if it were a book that you would love under different circumstances, the way the book was structured would:

• make it extremely (and unnecessarily) challenging to get through, 
• tank your enjoyment of the process of reading it, and
• short-circuit your motivation to get it done. 

In brief, it would make reading the book one massive, unpleasant slog of an endeavor.

Here’s the pickle: Many of us manage our creative work like a massive run-on sentence. 

Set Up Your Work to Flow

At the core, punctuation and all those other indicators—like capitalization and page layout—create what I call “strategic pauses” in the way we flow through the “work” of reading the book. It makes it easier to get through. I’m guessing that this association of punctuation and the power of strategic pauses makes intuitive and logical sense to you. Yet, many of us have a hard time applying those same principles to the way we approach getting our creative work done.  

Some pushing part of us hounds us to do “just a little more.” It wants us to believe that breaks, even short ones, are bad. Dangerous, even. “You’ll get even more behind if you rest,” it tells us. It is a cycle that never lets up. 

We can’t take a day off lest we break a streak. A streak that is making us feel (finally) like a legit creative, because don’t all creatives create every single day? And, heaven help us, if we dare take an extended break, a.k.a. a vacation. At that point, we could find our Inner Critic gleefully joining up with our Inner Pusher, both reminding us that such blasphemy (an entire vacation?!?!) clearly means we are lazy or don’t have what it takes. 

All these wild (and very forceful) imaginings of our Inner Pushers are not fun. They are also not supported by research. Quite to the contrary, in fact.

Strategic Pauses Boost Flow

Here is how Scientific American writer Ferris Jabr summarizes some of the relevant research on strategic pauses in his article, Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime: “Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity, and is essential to . . . achieve our highest levels of performance. . . .”

Another way to think about these strategic pauses is to consider them to be “work punctuation.” My invitation to you this week is to stop seeing pauses as failures of productivity. Instead, reframe them (and claim them!) as an integral aspect of your creative productivity practice. 

Perhaps a short comma’esque pause will be just the ticket to boost your flow. Other times a slightly longer semicolon’ish pause will rejuvenate your motivation. And sometimes a full stop pause of a metaphorical period will be the exact strategy that renews and sustains your determination to get a creative project over the finish line. 

A Pauseful Approach

What do pauses look like when we move from metaphor to reality? Making a plan is a type of pause that can speed up your flow through a targeted set of work. Reflecting on how a week of work went is a pause that will help you assess how you might improve your flow going forward. Taking a walk outside between writing sessions, or painting sessions, or between any type of work sessions is a pause that is near guaranteed to refresh your brain and your engagement. 

Like punctuation in a book, adding strategic pauses to the way you manage your creative work will help you stay in charge of your forward momentum, boost your motivation, and make it easier for you to get your creative work done—which all makes the whole creative adventure a lot more fun.

Happy day, happy creating, happy jamming. You’ve got this!