Try this Creative Productivity Experiment

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you know we’ve tried and suggested a range of cracking creative productivity techniques. From using your dreams to fuel inspiration, to the power of taking walks, to the importance of keeping a routine, we’re pretty into trying new creative experiments if it means more time making art and less time procrasti-baking.

If you have an hour that you’re going to clock at your desk, try with me this creative productivity experiment and see if it works for you. The Draugiem Group is a company which owns a bunch of tech startups and they recently conducted a study using a time tracker app DeskTime. Their experiment aimed to discover what made their most productive employees function at such high levels. They found that in the usual eight hour work day, their most productive staff members were working for 52 minutes straight before taking a 17-minute break.

So here’s what you should try, set a timer and work straight for 52 minutes on a goal-orientated task, and then take a break for 17 minutes. Make sure your break is screen-free and that you get up and step away from your desk. Maybe even take a walk outside.

It seems that working for 52 minutes with a 17 minute break allows for a long enough period of time to enter a flow-state and accomplish a large chunk of work, while still staying fresh and reinvigorating your brain with regular breaks. Perhaps the key to working faster isn’t to stay chained to your desk for hours on end, but to work smarter by strategizing on exactly what, and for how long, you will work on.

If you want to read more about the findings you can read the simplified results that were published on The Muse.

If you give this a try, let us know in the comments below.