Creativity Shouldn’t Come After Work. It Can Come Before It.

Most creative activities for adults happen in the evening. It makes sense. During the day, people work, children are at school, parents are busy, and eventually there is some free time left for drawing, creative thinking lectures, music, ceramics, or other creative activities. But I would like to look at it differently.

What if creativity doesn’t have to be something we save for the end of the day?

What if it could be not a reward after work, but a way of preparing ourselves for it?

Today, more and more people work remotely, have flexible schedules, run their own projects, or simply organise their time independently. There are parents, homemakers, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and people between projects. For them, a creative practice in the morning or during the day doesn’t have to be just entertainment. It can become a way of changing the state of mind in which they enter the rest of their day. I am drawn to the idea that a goal should not necessarily be measured by the number of hours we spend working on it, but by what actually happens as a result.

You can spend two hours on a creative activity and leave without feeling any different. Or you can spend twenty minutes on one exercise that unexpectedly changes the way you look at a problem. That is why I am more interested not in: “Today we are going to spend two hours being creative.” But in: “Today, we have one task.”

Creativity Doesn’t Have to Mean Drawing

When we talk about creativity, we often imagine an artist, paint, a canvas, music, or dance. But creativity is much broader than that.

You can ask someone to look at an ordinary object and come up with ten different ways to use it. You can ask them to describe a familiar place as if they were seeing it for the first time, on another planet. You can give them several unrelated words and ask them to turn them into a story. You can work with colour, shape, associations, attention, absurdity, memory, or observation. You don’t even necessarily have to create something in the traditional sense. Because the goal of such a practice does not have to be a beautiful object at the end.

The goal can simply be to help a person see more possibilities.

What Happens Afterwards?

Every one of us has knowledge in our own field. An entrepreneur knows their business. An architect knows architecture. A marketer knows their market. Someone who has worked in the same profession for years knows an enormous number of details. But sometimes the problem is not a lack of knowledge.

The problem is that we keep looking at the same problem in the same way. We know familiar ways of solving things because we are used to thinking within the same set of connections. A creative practice can temporarily move us outside that familiar route. It creates space for associations, unexpected combinations, and new questions. And then something interesting can happen.

The new solution may appear later. Not necessarily while we are drawing. Perhaps someone did a completely absurd exercise in the morning and then, several hours later, during a work meeting, suddenly saw a solution to a problem they had been stuck with for weeks. The creative practice did not give them a ready-made answer. It helped them change the way they were looking for the answer.

A New Branch of Possibilities

I like to think of creativity as creating a new branch of possibilities. A person already has professional knowledge, experience, skills, and logic. None of that disappears. But something else is added:

observation, play, association, curiosity, the ability to allow absurdity, and the ability to look at something familiar as if it were unfamiliar.

New combinations can emerge from that. And new combinations create new possibilities.

They can help someone develop a product, change a business process, find a solution to a difficult problem, see a different way of communicating, or simply move out of an anxious state.

Not every exercise will lead to a brilliant idea. And not every morning needs to be productive. But regularly returning to the ability to see more than one possibility may gradually change the way a person interacts with reality itself.

Why Morning or Daytime?

I don’t think there is a universal rule saying that everyone should be creative in the morning. Every person has their own rhythm. But the idea itself feels important to me. We tend to give the first part of the day to what we consider serious: work, study, meetings, emails, numbers, plans. And creativity is often left for whatever energy remains. For the evening. For the weekend. For “when I have time.”

As a result, something that could potentially change the way we think becomes the last item on the schedule.

I would like to reverse that order.

Open the space for possibilities first. Then enter the day.

It doesn’t have to take hours. Sometimes a small practice is enough. Creativity as a State, Not a Result. Perhaps we need to change the way we think about creativity itself. Instead of always asking: “What did you create?”

Sometimes it is more important to ask: “How do you see now?”

You may not have made a drawing. But you noticed something you had never noticed before.

You may not have come up with a business idea. But you asked yourself a different question for the first time.

You may not have solved the problem. But you stopped believing that there was only one possible way out.

This is why creative practice can be valuable not only for people who consider themselves creative. Perhaps especially for those who have been saying: “I’m just not a creative person.” Because creativity, in this context, is not a profession or a talent. It is the ability to shift perspective.

A Different Kind of Workday

I imagine creative practice as a small space between a person and their habitual way of living. In the morning, someone arrives with their work, anxiety, tasks, plans, and limitations. For a while, they are invited to look differently. To play. To observe. To create something meaningless. To ask a strange question. To allow the impossible. And then they return to their ordinary life. But perhaps slightly differently. Not because they were given new knowledge. But because they were reminded: every familiar reality can be seen in more than one way.

And perhaps that is why creativity doesn’t always have to wait until evening.

Maybe we need a little creativity before the day even begins.