Creatives Can Manage Time — Wrecking the Myth

After nearly two decades running a growing business, I’m now spending my weeks inside leadership teams. In that time, I’ve learned something that still surprises a lot of leaders.

Somewhere on your team is a creative.

You may not think of them that way. They aren’t always the designer or the copywriter. Sometimes they’re the operations leader who thinks in pictures. Sometimes they’re the salesperson who explains everything with stories. Sometimes they’re the HR leader who fills notebooks with doodles but asks the question that stops the room.

Creatives are everywhere. And when you’re trying to run a business, they can feel equal parts brilliant and frustrating.

The Reputation Creatives Can’t Shake

Creatives have been stuck with the same reputation forever:

• Hard to manage.
• Not great with deadlines.
• Allergic to calendars.
• At their best late at night, after everyone else has gone home.

A lot of leaders accept this as fact. I did, too, for a long time. I assumed creativity and structure were opposing forces. If you wanted ideas, you had to tolerate chaos.

Turns out, that assumption was wrong.

The Creative Who Changed My Mind

Years ago, I worked with a designer who completely broke the stereotype.

She was deeply creative and incredibly disciplined. Her calendar was locked down. Her mornings were protected. Her deep work time was non-negotiable. She planned her week with more intention than most executives I knew.

And she produced more high-quality ideas than anyone else on the team.

That’s when it clicked for me. The problem wasn’t creatives. The problem was how most organizations treat time.

Where Most Organizations Miss the Mark

In a lot of companies, creative work is expected to happen in the margins: between meetings or emails or during what are supposed to be breaks.  In other words, creativity is supposed to happen between interruptions.

Need a fresh idea? “Let’s squeeze it in.”

Need real thinking? “We’ll figure it out as we go.”

That’s like asking a sprinter to set a personal record while dodging shoppers in a grocery store aisle. The issue isn’t effort or talent; the environment is literally working against them.

When creatives look scattered, it’s usually because they’re never given uninterrupted time to actually think.

What Creatives Actually Ask For

Once I started paying attention, I began asking creatives a simple question: “What do you need in your schedule to do your best work?” The answers were remarkably consistent.

They wanted:

• Real blocks of uninterrupted time
• Fewer drive-by questions
• A predictable rhythm to the week
• Permission to protect focus without feeling guilty

One writer explained it perfectly. She said an interruption halfway through a creative block felt like pulling the power cord out of a video game right before the final level. The interruption wasn’t the issue, it was the reset.

What Happens When Leaders Get This Right

When leaders actually respect those needs, things change fast.

Creatives become more focused, not less. Deadlines improve. Communication improves. The work gets better and often faster.

Something else happens too. With space to think, creatives start spotting inefficiencies and friction that everyone else has learned to ignore. They don’t just produce, they improve the system.

That’s when I learned something important.

Creative work isn’t fragile. It’s not sloppy or anti-structure, it just runs on a different engine.

The Real Misunderstanding

This is where leaders often go sideways. They try to fix creatives by adding process:

• Another tool.
• Another workflow.
• Another layer of oversight.

But creatives don’t need more structure around them. They need structure around their time.

They’re not bad at managing time, but they are bad at pretending to work in ten-minute increments between interruptions. Creatives don’t lack discipline. Their discipline just needs a little more protection.

Give them protected blocks of time and everything changes. Focus sharpens. Flow kicks in. The work becomes immersive. And the output is consistently better than anything produced in a fragmented day.

A Simple Experiment That Changed Everything

One of my favorite examples came from a developer who insisted he wasn’t creative at all. He called himself “purely analytical.”

But his work told a different story. His solutions were clean, intuitive, and elegant.

The problem? He was exhausted.

I suggested a simple experiment: two uninterrupted hours every day, at the same time, with no exceptions unless the building was on fire.

Two weeks later, he was a different person. Productivity doubled. Stress dropped. He was sleeping better and enjoying work again.

That two-hour rule spread. First a few people tried it. Then the whole department. Morale improved. Deadlines stabilized. Quality went up.

And the “unmanageable creative” narrative quietly disappeared.

What Leaders Need to Understand

Creatives are not problems waiting to happen.

They operate on rhythms that respect how focus and ideas actually work.

In my experience, they don’t need:

• Micromanagement
• Hand-holding
• Another app

They need time. Real, protected, uninterrupted, focused time. Giving them that is a leadership decision.

When leaders get this right, creatives stop looking like exceptions. They stop looking messy. They become the people who consistently deliver the most valuable work on the team.

They don’t need to change who they are. They just need the time to use what they already have.