Quiet Time: A Shared Value of Rest and Creativity

During the last year or more, we – as a global community – have experienced collective trauma. There have certainly been moments of explicit trauma in communities, online, and through a global health pandemic. This had the potential to stifle creativity, however, we have witnessed  moments of sparking tremendous creativity, radical grace, joy, and love. I want us to live in the creativity, grace, joy, and love.

We, at Creative Generation, guide our work with a set of principles. Over the last four months, our team has worked in these principles in numerous projects supporting young creatives and those who cultivate their creativity around the world - we have researched, produced, taught, written, thought, and more. As our field works to process, recover, and forward-think through the trauma we have all experienced, we have been working to support all of you.

It is now time for rest.

This week we will observe our first quiet week – a time for our entire team to rejuvenate, create, pause, and reflect. 

Popularized by Google during its initial IPO – the founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin made a promise to their employees via a letter to investors – 20% creative time would be spent exploring or working on projects that show no promise of paying immediate dividends but that might reveal big opportunities down the road. The idea has been replicated in companies around the world, often called fun or exciting names like “Genius Hour,” “Lab Fridays,” or “Awesome Time.”

From the start, Creative Generation, has supported 20%+ unprogrammed staff time for our team in order to think big, explore, and imagine potential futures. In our work, this may manifest as reading books related to our projects, mapping out exciting new concepts, creating artwork, connecting with people, and more. As time has gone on, we have found it harder and harder to do this as the world recuperates from the pandemic, timelines become more stringent, and deliverables come up in the queue. 

Thus, we have decided as a team to clear full weeks in our schedule on a quarterly basis to take advantage of this type of time for its numerous benefits. Here’s what we know about quiet and creative time:

So, during this week, you may notice a few changes from all of us here at Creative Generation: 

  1. You will likely get an auto-reply when you send us an email, we will get back to you soon!

  2. You won’t get the usual weekly newsletter or podcast this week – stay tuned for a return next week!

  3. Our social media will be a bit quieter.

I, myself, will be spending time with my family for the first time in 16+ months (and will be very grateful for scientific advances made in the last year to create a COVID-19 vaccination to allow for this!), working on complex project tasks, new research, and reflection from the beach in my childhood hometown in Maine. I know the rest of our team will also be resting in places which ground them, creating artwork, reading and/or writing, and more – I can’t wait to learn from each and every team member upon our return.

As a learning and capacity building organization, I hope that our thought process and resource-finding has helped you learn, too. Perhaps you or your organization will consider joining us for some quiet and creative time – if so, drop us a line at info@creative-generation.org; we would love to hear what you do!