Give yourself time
Mark advises that design in the corporate world is deadline centric. Every time he begins working on a set one of the first questions is "When is it due?". With time being so much important we are often caught on an impetus to never waste any minute and this means to be working at all times. For most people creativity requires time and rushing things creates a scenario which disfavours one's creativity. Mark says this applies to him, without telling that this is a rule for everyone because it may not be the case for other people. He does believe there exists brute creativity, where one forces themselves to see connections. However, creativity that comes naturally, without pressure, offers better solutions for many problems.
He tells us that the fact that we have deadlines and pressure doesn't mean that we can't take our time to let the natural creativity flow at its own pace. The trick is to plan ahead and find windows in our schedules where we can let our creativity flow at its own pace. The mistake that people make is to believe that things are just going to happen, ideas are just going to show themselves, because they have a limited amount of time. Our minds and emotions don't like that. They require their own time. To never schedule and plan ahead is the worst way to waste time.
I can relate very much to Mark. When I was in college, enrolled in a applied sciences program, I felt how important it is for us to manage time. We have to make use of our time and be assertive. We often have multiple subjects to study per semester and there isn't a recipe that works for everyone. What I can guarantee is that unless you adopt a routine with strict time tables, you are probably going to fail. You have to look at yourself and program yourself to do things at certain times of the day. To do so you have to include in your schedule how many hours you are going to sleep, how many hours you are going to spend reading, how many hours you are going to spend writing that report, etc. Sacrifices have to be made and if you have to sacrifice going out with friends, going to the gym, etc. Do them. You have to set priorities for each activity. Changes are possible such as going out with friends fewer times per month or going to a gym which is closer to you. It's very much personal to weight each activity, but you have to do it. There are people who just can't do it and this may be related to certain areas of the brain not functioning very well. The extreme failure to set a schedule and/or failure to follow one can be diagnosed.
I once had a professor of Calculus who would say that she required to sleep to solve mathematical problems. It may sound contradictory but it's about peace of mind. When we are under pressure and trying hard to solve that Calculus or physics problem that we can't solve, chances are that we won't solve it with more pressure. Put that problem down and stop trying to solve it. More often than not, the solution crosses our minds when we are not actively trying to solve it. We may be taking a bath, listening to a music, walking on a park or just be doing nothing but looking at the sky. Andrew Willes, who solved the centuries old Femart's Last Theorem used to walk in the woods and these are moments that our minds are making connections subconsciously. Pressure working against creativity is more or less the same argument about pressure making us fail in exams. When under pressure our minds lose focus, either because we hyperfocus on something or because we are trying to focus on too many things at once. Those are moments when we forget what we have already learned and look at a problem and panic because we don't remember how to solve it.
If you just can't cope with too many subjects in one semester, cut some out. Take your time to learn fewer at once, but better. This is a mistake that very often happens in college. People enrol in too many subjects because they think they can do it, they think they can prove something, they think they need to finish the degree's program earlier or they just ignore how hard the sum of all of them is going to be. I know this from personal experience, when you rush things and don't plan ahead, you are much more likely to take more time to finish whatever you need to do. If you have the choice to exclude some and you can't cope with too many classes, do it. I think that one way to look at time is to ask "What's the best that I can do with this allotted time?" instead of "Can I have more time to do this?".
There is a book dedicated to procrastination called "Solving the procrastination puzzle". Most of the time we procrastinate, the reason lies in fear. It's the fear that makes us delay whenever we can. We have to recognize it and learn from it. Unfortunately I can't tell you how. Time is curious because having more time is not always the answer. Suppose I have one year to design one magic card. I can state it right away that most of that year's time is not going to be spent creating the card. Having too much time to do something is counter-effective. Mark often talks how restrictions breed creativity and this is true for being time constrained. I believe there is a threshold where too much constrain is bad, but I think it that we can do better predictions based on how fast we can do something. We can rely on short schedules, ranging from one day to a week, to analyse how fast we do something to make better predictions.
To conclude, I think that Mark is right about us requiring time to think and time to feel. To give an extreme example: if we are sad or devastated because we lost something important such as our home, friend, pet. It does take time for our minds to process it and forcing us to process it faster doesn't work. We can't just block the emotion, because that doesn't work either. We really have to take the time to process it. When Mark tells us to give ourselves time, he's not talking about magically expanding time. What he's telling is that if we can find a window of time, we can relax and take our time during that period.
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