Choice Architecture
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I am proud to say I’ve never gone on an all-inclusive holiday. However, I know a funny video on YouTube titled Here come the Germans! The beach towel brigade. A pool door opens and some 50 people rush out of the lobby to reserve their pool chairs. Within 30 seconds all of the chairs are occupied by beach towels only for the grimmly vacationers to disappear to the breakfast buffet.
Despite being German, I fear the thought of spending my free time fighting over hotel chairs early in the morning. Most others don't. So, a fair amount of pop culture exploits this hilarious phenomenon. It's funny because it perfectly captures a very German trait: always be early and never trust chance to handle your most important matters.
While this scene serves great comedy movies, it also triggers an interesting thought. What if we're a little more German in how we approach the planning of the upcoming year? What if we reserve time for crucial activities early on?
Being innovative comes with a fair set of highly time-consuming activities. You must wander and tinker: read industry news, read reports, read books and blogs, do your research, digest new research (read a lot in general), gather information, talk to new people, talk to existing users, talk to colleagues and stakeholders, explore and discuss ideas, experiment with new concepts, play around with new tools, visit conferences, go to meetups, meet with other companies. There are many more activities.
To be creative, you need to be consistent on these. It really is about cultivating and sustaining a steady stream of inputs and impulses. You want to have plenty of references, moods, and insights. Otherwise, you'll miss the bits and pieces when trying to connect things. Without proper care, you’ll run out of inspiration.
All these activities are slow-paced and often you don’t know their value until much later. Neither creativity nor the ability to be innovative are linear processes. They emerge, ebb and flow, disappear, and rebound. Rarely, you can predict when a certain connection will come together to form a new idea or insight.
You can certainly provoke it but you can’t plan it. It’s on you to nourish that soil, and eventually, at some uncertain later point, it will show fertile. It’s like playing Bingo, except, you’re in charge of continuously gathering, shuffling, and matching your numbers material.
The issue with uncertain things is that they are uncertain. While the return of 30 minutes of browsing through research papers is hard to tell, the penalty for missing that deadline next Monday is pretty straightforward. In the heat of a busy week, it’s very easy to dismiss these high-effort and difficult-to-assess activities as lower priorities.
But there’s the trap! We are busy people and our schedules will fill up magically at any given time. What is urgent is seldom important. If we trust chance to handle the maintenance of our creative inputs or the timekeeping for our creative work, we'll find ourselves doing less than it probably takes to be innovative.
The Beach Towel Technique is a practical application of Stephen Covey's Urgent-Important framework (also known as the Eisenhower Matrix). We take Eisenhower’s guiding principle (“schedule important but not urgent tasks“) and equip it with best practices from the domain of choice architecture (e.g. booking a slot well in advance even if we don’t know the exact task).
By using this technique you’re avoiding the trap of reacting to every immediate demand, instead dedicating time and resources to long-term goals and values. This is the instruction:
The digital note will serve you as a journal throughout the year. It’s a place where you list the things you think are necessary to get into creative mode and track how your planning worked out in reality.
It’s best to set up short sessions of 30 minutes each quarter to review this note. Under Patterns, jot down your observations on what worked and what didn’t. Especially, reflect and write down why it did or didn’t. If you spot patterns, make sure to record them for your next attempt with the Beach Towel Technique.
Here’s my digital note as a reference. Last year it helped me spot a silly but effective theme in my creative practice. It’s better for me to have my creative sessions early in the afternoon on days when there’s no evening program. I’m bad at timeboxing and more often than not I tend to lose myself in a flow. Whenever I’m interrupted by some follow-up activity I get borderline grumpy. If that happens too often, I used to ditch my creative activities as a whole. In the past, this has regularly led to weeks of no creative work at all. Reviewing my digital note helped me spot this recurring pattern and schedule accordingly. Most of my creative sessions only take place on days when I’m dead certain that I can get carried away in whatever I’m doing without anything stopping me along the way.
Over time you’ll develop your very own best practices when it comes to blocking out time for your creative activities. Here’s a list of practices that work well for me:
For sure, a smart cookie already spotted the flaw in this technique. One easy thing is to create Outlook events, a more challenging one is to actually pull through and do these things. Once it gets busy, colleagues will insist on more meeting time, deadlines will brush aside any good intention you had and your personal weariness will lure you into the idea of being too tired to go a little extra mile.
There are methods and hacks you can use to help you defend these time slots and stay consistent. I'll dedicate more thoughts to that in other notes. However, you'll never need those hacks if you don't free up some time to nourish your creativity in the first place. So naturally, we need to train this muscle first.
The Beach Towel Technique works for two reasons. First, it minimizes the coordination effort. Second, it sets creative work as default.
Planning is difficult and boring. Some people like it, but most don’t. So, instead of planning your creative activities monthly or even once a week, the Beach Towel Technique aims to minimize the times you need to find space in your calendar to make creativity happen.
With practice and experience, you can reduce it to once a year. In fact, we know that the less effort it takes to start something, the higher the likelihood for it to actually happen. Not needing to constantly squeeze something in or reschedule other things is a big plus.
Think of your schedule as a board for Nine Men’s Morris at the start of a game. Whoever places the first man influences how all other men are positioned. You want your most important creative activities to be scheduled first. All follow-up events throughout the year will either adjust or you’ll get the chance to review priorities coming from a rather strong defense than a weak offensive.
Even if a conflicting event takes priority, you’ll have to actively compare and conclude whether it’s worth sacrificing your creativity. Saying “Friday’s busy, how about Tuesday instead?” is a lot easier than “I need to cancel Friday, anything free on Tuesday?”.
Small but impactful. After a time, these advantages will ease the transition to new habits and reduce the number of times where you’ll sacrifice creativity work to break through a bottleneck in crunch time.
My research on choice architecture made me shift my perspective on my yearly planning activities each January. Now, I see these very first days of a new year when I dedicate a day or two to calendar and automation adjustments not just as yet another organizational activity but as an intentional approach to hack my everyday work towards more creativity and ultimately the ability to be innovative when life asks.
The beauty of the Beach Towel Technique is that my instruction can be extended by countless little hacks and tools.
For example, I use an Outlook reply feature that helps me reschedule a conflicting meeting to another time by auto-suggesting better alternatives to the person who sent me the proposed time. One out of two arrangements will pan out without any intervention. This is huge as it halves the number of times I am getting into these prioritization conflicts in the first place.
I’ll share these in the future. For now, take an hour or two, grab your beach towels, and don’t forget the buffet right after. Happy New Year!
