Sometimes when you are in a creative endeavor and you need to get an idea or further the process it makes sense to allow for creative dwell time. How so you ask? Well creative dwell time can be as short as 20 seconds or a much as a three days or perhaps just sleeping on it. If you talk with many authors they will tell you that it is best for them to think of a subject to write about and then write down a few points and then think on it for a couple of days. As a writer I have often done this, although now I will not allow myself more than 20 seconds of creativity dwell time.
Now then, if in the next few days if I get another idea about the subject, I will perhaps write another article or add a chapter to the previous work. Creativity dwell time can be dangerous especially when writers, authors or designers truly believe they need it. Because then it becomes a ritual and it causes them to not use their time wisely. In other words they convince themselves that they must waste time in the name of creativity dwell time to do their work. This simply is not so.
Consider if you will the combat martial artists in the movies and how they might pick up a chair and use it as a fighting tool by using the legs to block various forward advances of their opponent. You can see that they must think on their feet extremely rapidly on how best to use the legs of the chair.
All this happens in a split second, perhaps even less than a tenth of a second. Obviously that is not very much creative dwell time is it? I hope you understand my point in that you cannot use creativity dwell time as an excuse for not doing your work or projects. I hope you will indeed consider all this in 2006.