There is no such thing as “multitasking.”

Ever notice what some middle-schoolers do while they try to focus on their homework? They're scrolling through Instagram, they have the TV on “in the background,” there's music playing on their laptop, and all the while their phones are vibrating with hugely important texts from BFFs.

If you challenge them on this less-than-ideal learning environment, they'll likely protest, “But kids are different today because we can multitask!” If multitasking means simultaneously doing several things poorly, then yes, they're different.

To describe this popular and ineffective mindset, author Linda Stone coined the term continuous partial attention, in which we skim the surface of multiple incoming data streams, pick out a few random details that appear to be important, and move on. Although such an approach may give the illusion of productivity, in reality you're slowing down your progress. You're casting a wider net but catching less.

Here's the thing. Attention is binary. It's on or it's off. You're either paying attention to something or you're not. Which is to say, what didn't work back in middle school won't work today.

When you sit down to concept, turn everything off—all the way off. Turn off everything except your brain.

Quit wasting time on email, Instagram, wandering around, and coming in late.

In 2019, Adobe did a survey with 1,000 of their employees asking how much time they spend on email during the workday. “Respondents reported spending an average of … 143 minutes checking their personal email.”¹

That's two hours and 20 minutes, friends. More than a quarter of the day.

Before you scoff at this figure, I want you to do an exercise I ask my students to do in class. Go to the “systems” page on your phone and look up battery usage. If it's like my phone, it'll show you how much time you've spent on each of your apps. Look at the numbers you see there. How much time did you spend on Instagram over the last week? Ninety percent of my students are shocked or embarrassed by the number. And, of course, that's when I tell them, “From now on you don't get to tell me you ‘didn't have enough time' to work on your campaigns.”

Here's the thing, people. Every creative assignment you'll ever receive will have a deadline. You'll have only a certain amount of time to come up with something great. Yet I'll wager if any of us could watch a film of ourselves during a typical day at the office, we'd turn beet red seeing how much time we waste screwing around with our phones, taking coffee breaks, texting, Instagramming, and yuckin' it up out in the hallways.

We are so eager to be distracted that, left uninterrupted, we will interrupt ourselves. We do this because of what's called “resistance to writing.”* It's a sort of self-imposed creative block we use whenever a promising creative opportunity comes along. We'll do anything to not do this cool project we actually want to do.

So, we sit down to work with the best of intentions, but we'll leave the TV on and maybe keep our computer propped open like a sort of trapdoor through which we can escape when the ideas aren't coming and we begin to feel that anxiety. Interestingly, the second we feel anxiety (“… ohmyGodohmyGod …”) we hear “the Ping.” The Ping is what creative theorist Todd Henry calls the tiny signal that reminds us we must immediately check our email and Instagram. (“Hey! I'm pretty sure something out there suddenly became more important than my job.”)

And so off we go through the trapdoor, trading in our capacity for sustained mental effort, all for the rich comic experience of gr8 lol texts, an exchange well described in Todd Henry's Twitter axiom: “You cannot pursue greatness and comfort at the same time.”

For today, all you need to do is acknowledge this defense mechanism exists and when you sit down to work, commit to the work completely. Turn off your phone, turn off your computer and its email, turn off the TV, turn off the music, find a pen and paper, put your feet up, and give it your whole mind. And when the anxiety comes, don't run from it, or deny it exists. Acknowledge it and remember, the only way out is through.

“Squirrel!”

—The dogs in Pixar's movie UP

Control your monkey brain.

After you turn off your smartphone and find a quiet place to work, you're ready to sit down and face the final enemy of distraction: your own monkey brain.

This term is popular with practitioners of meditation and refers to the tendency of the mind to swing from branch to branch, topic to topic, jumping around, screeching, chattering nonsense, and carrying on endlessly.

If you've ever tried to meditate, you know how hard it is to get the monkey to shut up. Your thoughts leap around ceaselessly, into the future, back to a distant memory, to what's for dinner, to the thing you saw that one time, to the mark on the wall, to the lyrics of …

The good news is practicing any form of meditation or mindfulness will improve your capacity for sustained focus. No less a creative icon than Steve Jobs attested how it improved his creativity. Biographer Walter Isaacson quoted Jobs:

If you just sit and observe, you will see how restless your mind is. If you try to calm it, it only makes it worse. But over time it does calm, and when it does, there's room to hear more subtle things—that's when your intuition starts to blossom, and you start to see things more clearly and be in the present more. Your mind just slows down, and you see a tremendous expanse in the moment. You see so much more than you could see before.²

Ignore the little voice saying, “I'm just a hack on crack from Hackensack.”

Every once in a while, your monkey mind will pause briefly to inform you that you suck.

We all have this voice in our heads. Even the superstars in this business secretly believe they're hacks at least twice a day. The difference is they get better at ignoring this voice. In their book Pick Me, Vonk and Kestin give advice on making this evil little voice shut up.

You have to learn to mute the voice. Or just use it to spur you on to do better. The painful truth is all the awards in the world don't take away the tyranny of the blank page. The only thing that does is making a mark on it. Somehow, just getting those first few thoughts out is helpful, even if they genuinely do suck. The act of moving the pen across the paper is the antidote to the belief you can't do it.³

Remember you don't have to outrun the bear.

Another little voice that's sure to turn up sooner or later is the one that goes, “This better be a really big idea.”

“It's hard to think of any idea, let alone a big one,” writes ad veteran Josh Weltman in Seducing Strangers. “And the bigger the idea the client wants, the emptier my head gets.” To avoid freezing up, Weltman came up with his own definition of a big idea.

A big idea is one that can beat or kill a smaller idea. It's like that joke about outrunning the bear. I don't have to outrun the bear, I have to outrun only you. I think my definition is freeing because I no longer have to come up with a big idea. I just need to find one that's bigger than the other guy's idea.⁴

Make friends with sucking.

To get the creative engine to turn over, I sometimes began concepting sessions by challenging my art director to see who could serve a really crappy idea first. I was always happy to oblige and whatever POS idea popped into my head next, I'd send over the net. It was usually terrible and we'd both groan, “Boy, that totally sucked.”

Then she'd return the serve. And maybe it sucked, too, or maybe it sucked less. And back and forth we'd go and after a while we were coming up with things that didn't suck.

Remember Anne Lamott's advice: “The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really crappy first drafts.”

Somebody else once said, “All art is a series of recoveries from the first line drawn.” I don't know who said it, but it's brilliant. Because creativity is an iterative process. We start by drawing a line on paper, we decide it sucks, we bend it in another direction, add a bit here, take off some there, and pretty soon it starts to look like something.

Identify your most productive working hours and use them for nothing but idea generation.

I'm a morning person. By three in the afternoon, my brain is meatloaf and even a TV campaign featuring a grocer named Whipple doesn't seem like such a bad idea. So, when I get to the office in the morning, I go right to work. No screwin' around.

But you might be sharper in the afternoon. That's okay, too. Just make sure you strike while your iron is hot. Once you feel you brain getting crispy around the edges, give those down hours to the busywork of advertising, or what I call “phone calls and arguments.”

Cluster similar activities.

There's a wonderful book by Scott Belsky on time and energy management titled Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind. I recommend it.

One of his many smart suggestions is to cluster the various duties you tackle each day. Don't let your day's calendar be a patchwork quilt of 10 minutes answering emails, 30 minutes concepting, 10 minutes here, 10 there. Each one of these activities uses a different part of your brain, and it will help you creatively if you cluster the similar duties.

Belsky writes, “Finding intelligent adjacencies within your workday and clustering [similar] duties allows you to stay engaged and to focus more deeply for longer periods of time.” For me, my biggest clusters are meetings, emails and phone calls, and concepting time. I found when I roped off my creative time into big three-hour chunks (and aligned them with my most alert times of day), my focus was better and so was my work.

“You'll get better ideas,” Belsky wrote, “because you can dive deeper with an oxygen tank than you can if you have to surface for air every few minutes.”

Temper your Irish with German.

Okay, here's the deal. Advertising is a business. The whole chaos-is-cool, whiskey-and-cigarettes, showing-up-late-for-work thing? That's fine for artists and rock stars, but advertising is only half art. It's also half business. The thing is, both halves are on the deadline.

So don't be sloppy. Don't be late. Meet your deadlines. Don't put off doing the radio because the mobile is more fun.

This also applies to expense reports and time sheets. Learn how to do them and do them impeccably. Be a grown-up. Sure, they're boring. But, like watching any episode of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” if you just sit down and apply yourself, the whole unpleasant thing will be over in an hour.

“Be orderly in your normal life so you can be violent and original in your work.”

I don't know much about novelist Gustave Flaubert, except he said that great line and it seems to fit in right about here.

Many creative people find a dash of ritual in their lives provides just the structure they need to let go creatively. I happen to prefer an extremely clean and empty room in which to concept. That may sound weird, but I've heard of stranger things.

In The Art and Science of Creativity, George Kneller wrote,

Schiller [the German poet] filled his desk with rotten apples; Proust worked in a cork-lined room… . While [Kant was] writing The Critique of Pure Reason, he would concentrate on a tower visible from his window. When some trees grew up to hide the tower, [he had] authorities cut down the trees so that he could continue his work.⁵

Whatever works, dude.

Don't drink or do drugs.

You may think drinking, smoking pot, or doing coke makes you more creative. I used to think so. But I was fooling myself.

I bought into the myth of the “tortured creative person,” struggling against uncaring clients and blind product managers. With a bottle next to his typewriter and his wastebasket filling ever higher with rejected brilliance, this poor, misunderstood soul constantly looks for the next fantastic idea that will surely rocket him into happiness.

In a business where we all try to avoid clichés, a lot of people buy into this cliché-as-lifestyle. I did and I can assure you it is illusion, as is all that crap about how writers need to “work from pain.” Oh puh-lease, it's a coupon ad for Jell-O.

Keep your eye on the ball, not on the players.

Don't get into office politics. Not all offices have them. If yours does, remember your priority—coming up with ideas. Keep your eye on the project on your desk.

First of all, being stuck is a good sign.

Being stuck means you're likely to hit a breakthrough soon. You've passed through the Valley of Low-Hanging Fruit and now you're suffering in the Barren Wastelands. Well, the good news is you're about to enter the outlying area of big, new ideas. Truly unexplored territory. Remember: being stuck is not unusual. It's an expected part of the creative process.

So don't be creeped out by those long silences during creative sessions with your partner. You can spend whole days trying very hard and still come up with nothing. I've found it's only after you've suffered these excruciating hours of meatloaf brain that the shiny and beautiful finally presents itself. The trick is to stay with it. Suffer through it.

“Start from where you are.”

Huge projects can be intimidating. But the thing is, you want huge projects because those are the ones where you can hit the home runs and advance your career. So, here's what you do, and I got this gem from a speech by one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott.

Anne Lamott is the author of one of my favorite books on writing—Bird by Bird. The title itself is one of the first lessons Anne gives us, in which she recalls having to write a long report about birds for school. She was daunted by the size of the project and finally in frustration asked her dad, “How am I ever going to write this?!?” And her father answered, “Bird by bird, Anne. Bird by bird.”

And so it goes with all creative projects, be they writing, art, or film. Creative projects are daunting. In fact, the more we care about a project, the scarier it is, the larger it begins to loom over the measly 24 available hours in our day. Setting out, we begin to see all the wonderful angles we might explore, all those interesting byroads, and the creative mind, it runs down the road ahead of us, sees all the other wonderful roads forking away, oh wow, they go in all directions, they multiply, they go fractal, kaleidoscopic and … we freeze. We tighten up and pull back.

This is when resistance to writing usually kicks in. Happens to me all the time. In fact, the way I procrastinate is to “do research.” Gathering material and backstory is, in fact, an essential part of the problem-solving process, but I often used it as a crutch or, rather, a hidey-hole. (“I can't possibly begin to write this! Don't you see how MUCH there is I don't know?”)

Recognizing when we're resisting work is the first step. So, we take a deep adult breath and tell ourselves, “It's time to start, dear.”

Start … okay. Fine, start … but how? With this big-ass project? It's still here, spilled all over my computer's desktop, its file folders obliterating the once serene screen-saver picture of the lake, a lake I'm never going to be able to actually visit because of this damn project! Fine! I'll start! But where?

And again, Ms. Lamott comes to our rescue with another piece of calm and loving advice. “Start from where you are.”

When you think about it, how can we start anywhere else? We have to start from here. And yet many of us want to somehow maaaaybe just think our way down the road a piece, not far, you know, just to maybe start mapping out the journey, do some more research, sorta get a grip on this whole thing, you know, the 30,000-foot view of all the roads and, … and … SCREW IT! LET'S SOLVE THE WHOLE STINKIN' THING RIGHT NOW! And again, our mental wagon train grinds to a halt before we can ever start west

“Start from where you are,” says Ms. Lamott.

This is the piece of advice I have most loved. I used it to write this very book. Writing a whole book seems daunting, right? (Well, it was for me.) But right before I first began writing, I'd been thinking a lot about how important simplicity is to creating great advertising. I couldn't wait to write that chapter. The problem was, according to my 30,000-foot road map, such a chapter belongs more in the middle part of this unwritten book, right? I can't start there. Can I?

And I did. I started exactly there, on what is now Chapter 6. I started there because “The Virtues of Simplicity” was the part I was most excited about writing; I could worry about the opening chapters later. I could worry later about what the next chapter might be. By simply picking up this one subject that interested me, I was able to sit down, start writing, and remain bent over my keyboard for the longest time.

So, if you're trying to stare down a huge project and you don't know where to start, reach into the pile and grab the piece that interests you the most. That's the one piece you're likely to get a quick start on because it interests you. Start there. Here's the cool part. As soon as you get an idea on that first piece, doors will start to open on either side of what you've done, revealing other possibilities you couldn't see until you put this first idea on paper.

Creative theorist Steven Johnston calls this phenomenon “creative adjacencies.” You can't see the other doors until you go through the first one.

“Inspiration usually comes during work rather than before it.”

–Novelist Madeleine L'Engle

If you're stuck, relax.

In a Psychology Today essay titled “How to Have More Insights,” neurologist Dr. David Rock wrote about the deleterious effect anxiety has on creativity:

When we have a creative project, we tend to get anxious, and the uncertainty of not being able to find a logical solution creates anxiety in itself. The brain is primed to experience at least a mild threat from most forms of uncertainty. Learning to be okay with uncertainty is part of the process of having more insights, because the more anxious you are the less likely you are to notice any subtle insights.⁶

The answer then is to be mindful of when your anxiety starts, to acknowledge it, and to breathe through it. We can't be both creative and tense. The two events are never in the same room together. Stay loose.

But remember, you do in fact need a certain amount of pressure to be creative. Creativity rarely happens when things are perfectly under control. To make the kettle boil, a little fire is necessary. A deadline a month and a half away isn't always a good thing. I find if I have too much time to complete a project, I'll put off working on it until a couple of weeks before it's due just so I can dial up the pressure a little bit

The trick is to control the pressure, not let it control you. Relax.

Leave the office and work somewhere else.

Go somewhere boring. In an interview, best-selling author Jonathan Franzen said he does his writing in a boring one-room office using a computer that doesn't connect to the internet. The walls around him were white brick and the one window looked out onto a perfectly banal New York City alleyway.

Boring is good. There is nothing there to distract you and you're forced to grind it out. Even if you're not in the mood. “Lots of people are creative when they feel like it,” says Seth Godin. “But you're a professional when you can do it even when you don't feel like it. And that emotional waiver is why this is work and not a hobby.”

Change something. Anything.

There's an old saying by a guy named Charles Thompson. “Never solve a problem from its original perspective.”

Let's say you're stuck on coming up with a cool social media campaign. Okay, then why not slide over to a different medium and solve the same problem as if it were a television commercial? Later, when you go back to work on the social, you might see things differently.

Or, let's say you've been assigned a big commercial with real budget, and you're stuck. Well, try pretending you have next-to-no budget. How would you concept a commercial you shoot on an iPhone?

The main rule here is that if you've come to a standstill, change something.

Blow up everything. Start over.

There are times when you might find inspiration by combing through your notebook, looking back on ideas you've come up with so far. But if continued perusals convince you that none are working, say screw it and call in an air strike.

Blow it all up. All those old half-assed ideas may be serving only to muddy the waters. Or maybe you're subconsciously holding on to some approach you want to work but likely never will. Just blow it all up, go get a nice new pad of paper, and start over.

“If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn’t expecting it.”

—H. G. Wells

Stay off the stinkin' computer.

“Until you have a great idea, the computer is just a Lite-Brite® for crap.” So said Brian Buirge and Jason Bacher, and brilliantly.

It is a common rookie error to rush to the computer when you feel stuck. (“I'm not getting any ideas, so lemme just see what this idea looks like comped up.”) But this is another example of an escape door we go through to avoid the hard work of concepting. Don't give in to the anxiety. Breathe through it.

Let all your early thinking happen with a pencil and paper. In fact, you may find handwriting brings an altogether different part of your brain into play. David Fowler thinks so: “Try it… . It’s just different. The connection between your hand and the page via a tiny strand of ink imparts something that's somehow closer to your heart.”⁷

What does the ad want to say?

Here's one silly trick I've used from time to time to circumvent my chattering monkey mind and access the deeper, more creative part of my brain.

With pen poised over the notebook in my lap, I close my eyes and ask, “What does the ad want to say?” Not me, not the writer, not Mr. Advertising Expert, but the ad. What does the ad want to say?

I know it's weird, so don't tell anybody I do this, okay? But when it works, the answer seems to rise out of the dark like the little triangular message inside that Magic 8 Ball.

Go to the store where they sell the stuff.

There is demographic data typed neatly on paper. And then there's the stark reality of a customer standing in front of a store shelf looking at your brand and then at Brand X. I'm not saying you should start bothering strangers with questions. I just find it inspiring to soak in the vibes of the real marketplace. Go there and simply watch. Think. I guarantee you'll come back with some ideas.

Author Jack London's advice: “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

Go to a bookstore and study books on your subject.

Say you're working for a company that makes outboard engines. Go to a bookstore and page through books on lakes, oceans, submarines, vacation spots, fish, pistons, hydraulics, whatever. Just let your brain soak up those molecular building blocks of future concepts.

You might get the ideas flowing right there in the store. And even if you don't, what's to risk, except maybe getting the hairy eyeball from the clerk who thinks you ought to be buying something. (“Hey, whaddaya think this is? A li-berry?”)

Ask your creative director for help.

That's what they're there for. There is no dishonor in throwing up your hands and saying, “Help me or I shall perish.”

Your creative director may be able to see things you can't. She hasn't had her nose two inches away from the problem for the past two weeks like you have. She knows the client, knows the market, and can give you more than an educated guess on what's jamming up your creative process. Sometimes all it takes is a little nudge, two inches to the left, to get you back on track. You hack on crack from Hackensack. Oops, there's the evil voice again. Begone, self-loathing, I banish thee.

Get more product information.

You may not know enough about the problem yet, or you may not have enough information on the market. So, ask your account folks or planners to go deeper into their files and bring you new stuff. It's likely they edited their pile of information and gleaned what they thought most important. Get more of the original material if you can.

It helps to work on several projects at once.

You may find ideas come faster if you move between projects every hour or so. For most of my working career, I had about eight or nine open jobs on my desk at any one time. It'll likely be the same for you. But this is a good thing. Designer Milton Glaser said on Twitter, “Working on one thing at a time is like facing a rhinoceros; working on 10 things at a time is like playing badminton.”

Don't burn up energy trying to force something to work.

Even when you do manage to force a decent idea onto paper, after hours of wrestling with it, it usually bears the earmarks of a fight. You can count the dents where you pounded on the poor thing to force it into the shape you wanted. There's none of the spontaneous elegance of an idea born in a moment of illumination. Blow it all up and start over.

Be patient.

Tell yourself it will come. Don't keep swinging at the ball when your arms hurt. Maybe today's not the day. Walk away. Go see a movie. Do something distracting and don't think about the project at all. The problem will be there when you come back tomorrow. But maybe the block won't.

Learn to enjoy the process, not just the finished work.

I used to hate the long process of coming up with an idea. I simply wanted the work to be done, the idea to be there on my desk. But thinking this way made my job way harder than it had to be.

The fact is, most of your time in this business will be spent in some cluttered, just-slightly-too-warm room, thinking—not admiring your finished work. And nowadays with work that appears online, there's rarely an “I'm-finished-now” moment anyway. You'll likely never be done. Customers will keep responding to your idea, new stuff will come to light, cool ideas will walk in the door, and everything will keep changing.

So, remember to let the fun be in the chase. Even if you have an award-winning career, only 0.00000002 percent of it will be spent walking up to the podium to accept an award at the One Show. All the rest of the time you will likely spend in a small room somewhere, under fluorescent lights, trying to decide whether crisp or flaky is the right word to use.

Remember, you aren't saving lives.

This isn't heart surgery, folks. No one's gonna die. And as much as a client may hate to hear it, in this business failure is a possibility. In fact, if your ideas don't fall on their face every once in a while, well, you're not tryin' very hard.

The story has it that Dan Wieden once told one of his top creative directors that a promotion wasn't likely “until you've made at least three monumental mistakes.” Clearly, Wieden believes creative people don't develop unless they're willing to fail and fail and fail again. It's a credo so ingrained in the agency they created a huge work of art for the hallway (Figure 15.2). Made entirely of more than 100,000 pushpins, it's a daily reminder you aren't pushing it hard enough if every one of your ideas turns out just hunky-dory.

When you get stressed and the walls are closing in and you're going nuts trying to crack a problem and you find yourself getting depressed, try to remember you're just doing an ad. That is all. An ad. A stupid piece of paper. (It's not even a whole piece of paper you're working on. It's just half of a piece of paper in a magazine, and somebody else is buying the other side.) Or it's a stupid landing page. Or a stupid radio spot. Remember, advertising is powerful, and even a “pretty okay” idea can increase sales. I know, I know. Don't tell my clients I said this. But we're talking about times when it feels like your mental health is at stake. Don't kill the goose trying to get a golden egg on demand.

Bertrand Russell said: “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief one's work is terribly important.”