I hate being interrupted when I’m in the midst of writing a… sorry… hang on… Okay, I’m back. Now, what was I saying? Whatever, I forget.

If you Twitter or have other message checking tendencies and especially if you work from home, you’ll know what this is like.

For some tasks like entering my tax receipts, I can happily multitask, but for writing I find it terrible when I’m interrupted and get very grouchy towards whoever interrupts me.

This talk from John Cleese at the World Creativity Forum explains two simple rules for creativity: protected space and time. Don’t let yourself be interrupted in either sphere. It’s pretty simple.

There is more about the nature of creativity and people involved in making things. I noticed Lauren picked up on the same sentence that I did:

“Most people who have absolutely no idea what they are doing, have absolutely no idea they don’t know what they are doing.”

It explains many things, says Cleese, including Hollywood, social media ‘experts’ and bad service experiences.

Now it’s time to turn off Twitter and Mail.app and get to work.

(Via Lauren at redjotter)