为何忙碌并不意味着富有创造力

译者 渝东山人

How Being Busy Means Not Being Creative

by ALI LUKE on JANUARY 25, 2010 · 42 COMMENTS

Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Ali Hale from Aliventures.

为何忙碌并不意味着富有创造力

编者按：这是一篇由来自Aliventures的文章，作者Ali Hale

Here’s a word: productive.

有个词语称作：富有成效

Here’s another word: busy.

另一个词语叫做：忙碌

All too often, we act as though those two words mean the same thing. But they don’t: being productive doesn’t equal being busy. And the correlation between productive and busy is weak at best: being busier doesn’t necessarily make you more productive.

我们时常将这两个词表现的仿佛是同一回事。但事实上并不是：富有成效并不当然的忙碌。并且两者之间的相关性是微弱的：做一个忙碌的人并不必然的使你更具成效。

Here’s a third word: creative.

第三个词语叫做：创造

Add that one into the mix, and things turn sour. I’ll spare you the Venn diagram, but busy and creative don’t tend to overlap.

将它混合进来，事情就变得不尽人意了。我将与你分享维恩图解（一种逻辑图解），但是忙碌与创造似乎很难存在交集。

You’ve probably experienced this first hand. You have a creative thing which you do, a process where you make something unique and put something of yourself, your individuality, into it. When you’re busy, that creativity stalls. When your mind is on the dozen other things you need to get done, you’re locked out from that creative zone.

你也许亲身经历过这样的情况。你有一个极佳的创意，一种使某件事独一无二并融入你个人的特色的方法。可是当你忙碌时，这个创意便搁浅了。你的心思在一打打你要去做的事情中停留，创造园地将你拒之门外。

Busyness is antithetical to creativity. If you’ve ever tried to force creativity, you’ll know this. Chances are, you can push onwards, cramming your creative work into thin slices of time, but it’s like driving with the handbrake on: it’s not doing you, or your work, any good.

忙碌是与创造性背道而驰的。即便你任然尝试尽力去促进创造，你将了解到。也许你可以将你的创造性工作塞进一段段的时间来推动它向前，但是这就好比踩着刹车驾驶一样：对你以及你的工作没有一点好处。

Busyness is Shallow

忙碌必然泛泛

When you’re busy, your attention is constantly on the moment. You obsess over this half-hour, this email, this task on the to-do list, and your focus isn’t on enjoying each task and giving it the value it needs – but on getting through it so that you can get on with the next thing.

当你忙碌时，你的注意力立即会持续。半个小时里，你为邮件、待办事项列表中的任务所缠绕。并且你的注意力仅仅在于做完这一件事以便你可以继续做下一件事，而没有享受每个任务给予每个任务应有的价值。

You end up focusing on what needs to be done today – rather than on what you want to achieve this year. Busyness can be seductive: it offers a caffeine-like buzz of scrambled thoughts; it can be a way to show off to the people around you; it may even reassure you that you’re a good and productive person.

你关注与那些你应该今天完成，而不是在一年你你要实现那些目标。忙碌其实是具有诱惑力的：它提供一种咖啡因——就像搅乱思绪的嗡嗡声；是一种向周围人炫耀的方式，甚至能确保你是一个良好而有成效的人。

Being busy means adopting tunnel vision, constantly focusing ahead, with no time to deviate, to wander, to glance at the richness and the possibilities all around you.

变得忙碌意味着采取管状视野，持续的关注前方，没有时间偏离、徘徊，对你周围丰富而无限可能的世界撇上一眼。

When you’re busy, you miss out on getting any real depth. Maybe you end up cutting out time you’d spend in meditation, prayer or reading. You find yourself putting off creating until another day. That novel stays in the bottom drawer. That painting gathers dust in your studio.

当你忙碌时，你失去了获得任何真正深度理解的机会。也许最后你不得不减少你花在冥想、祈祷或者阅读上的时间。你发现创造被你放到一个个的“改天”。那篇未完成小说任然在抽屉底下发着，那些构思的画作也在尘封在工作室。

Busyness Stops You Dreaming

忙碌使你的梦想停滞

My creative material is words, and a good portion of those are spent on fiction. I’m taking a part-time MA in creative writing, learning from some great and generous authors. One theme which comes up often is the need to dream. Creativity activity is fundamentally different from much of what we do when we’re busy. Whether you work with words or paint, pixels or code, your creativity comes from somewhere beneath the surface chatter of conscious thoughts.

我的创作素材是文字，他们中好的那部分被用在小说的创作上。业余时间我进行创造性写作，向一些伟大而豪迈的作家学习。经常出现的主题就是做梦。创造性活动与平常我们忙碌是所做的事情具有本质上的区别。无论你是处理文字或图画，像素或者代码，你的创造力往往不经意间来自那些表面喋喋不休的自觉地随想。

During your life, you’ll have had ideas come to you at the most unexpected times, often when your mind isn’t on anything in particular. Whatever does it for you – country walks, long baths, meditation, exploration, daydreaming – there’s a fair chance that, when you’re busy, those gaps of time get crushed out of your life.

生活当中，常常会有想法在意想不到的时间出现在你的脑海，尤其是在你的脑海没有装着任何事情的时候。不管你做什么——乡间漫步、久久的泡个澡、冥想、探险、做个白日梦——当你忙碌时，很有可能的这些琐碎的时间间隙会给粉碎你的生活。

When you go into a creative session, it takes a while to get into flow. If my mind is too clogged with what’s already happened in the day, or if I know I’ve got other things to finish before bed, it’s very hard to enter that creative zone.

当你进入一个创造性的会议，需要一定的时间融入。如果你的思维为今天已经发生了什么所阻塞，或者想着我知道我要在上床之前完成另一件事的话，就很难进入创造的空间了。

Productivity Isn’t About Outputs

效力与产量无关

When we get in a tangle and try to match up creativity with productiveness with busyness, it’s often because we’ve been taught to align productivity with outputs – particularly measurable outputs: words written, hours worked, widgets cranked.

当我们陷入混乱并努力使创造、生产力与忙碌相匹配，往往由于我们被告知效力与产量是同盟——特别是可计量的产量：字数、耗时、弯曲的部件。

But being productive isn’t about being able to point to items ticked off on a to-do list. It’s possible, indeed, easy, to be very busy and active without producing anything worthwhile. You could train yourself to type faster and write two thousand words an hour, but they’ll never be great literature; chances are, they’ll never even be publishable.

但是变得富有效力并不仅仅是能够将项目勾画在待办事项列表中。极有可能，的确是，很容易的变得很忙但是没有生产出任何有意义的东西。你可能将自己训练能快速的在一个小时里写出2000字，但是它们绝不会是很好的文学作品，有可能，它们永远也不会被发表。

Creating a single stunning painting, or a single haunting piece of music, is far more “productive” than trying to make ten mediocre ones.

创作出一幅惊人的画作或是一曲动人的音乐，要比制作是个平庸的作品有卓有成效的多。

Being truly productive often means eschewing busyness. That may mean making sacrifices (financial or otherwise) for the sake of having the necessary space to create. It may mean being deliberately, even brazenly, counter-culture by insisting that more is not better, and by finding your own meaning rather than letting society dictate your life to you.

真正的富有成效往往以为着要避开忙碌。那可能意味着为了拥有足够的空间创作而牺牲（财力或者其他）。同时可能是故意的，甚至是明目张胆的反对传统，坚持多必然不够好，同时找寻自我的意义而不是让社会支配他们的生活。

What would you rather leave when you’re gone – an empty inbox, or a masterpiece that touches the lives of people you’ll never meet?

当你逝去你能留下什么——空空如也的信箱，抑或是你不曾想过的，触及人类生活的杰作？