Build Better Workplaces with Creative Routines

This is another guest article written by two of our partners: Francesco Chevallard (digital transformation & change) and Haris Mexas (ICF-certified coach). They previously wrote two articles together: Emotional Intelligence in Leadership and Group Decision-Making which we both highly recommend you to read. In this new article, they explore how to build better workplaces with creative routines.

Ever felt stuck in your day-to-day job? Going to meetings, repeating the same tasks over and over again, with no clear direction? If that has happened to you, you probably started hearing a voice in the back of your mind telling you that you are missing something. That despite your efforts, you’re not quite reaching the outcomes you know you’re capable of achieving.

This can easily happen when you slip into a routine without being aware of it. 

Routines are important: if you want to work effectively and reduce stress and chaos in your job, you’ll benefit from a solid routine that helps you organize your activities and focus your attention. 

That said, as helpful as established routines are, they shouldn’t completely dominate your work life. You also need breathing space to think creatively, to step back, and to assess whether you’re still moving in the right direction.

In this article, we will continue our exploration on how to improve your work habits and discuss how to balance routine and creativity. Let’s build better workplaces with creative routines.

The science of routine

Imagine starting your workday without a plan: your inbox is overflowing, meetings pop up unexpectedly, and you’re constantly switching between tasks. By lunchtime, you feel overwhelmed, scattered, and unsure of what you’ve actually accomplished. Now, contrast this with a day that begins with a simple routine: you review your priorities, tackle your most important tasks first, and schedule regular breaks. By the end of the day, you not only get more done but also feel calmer and more in control.

A routine is a process for automating repetitive tasks. Understanding routine through different lenses demonstrates why structured habits are essential for optimal performance. In this section, we’ll explore the psychological, neurobiological, and behavioral aspects that both favor and challenge routines, helping you understand how to relate to routines in a way that supports your well-being and effectiveness at work.

Psychological lens

Structure offers cognitive relief.

Starting the day without a plan, facing a flood of emails, unexpected meetings, and constant task-switching, can quickly lead to mental overload. From a psychological standpoint, this lack of structure places a heavy burden on our executive functions, which are responsible for managing attention, planning, and prioritizing. Without a routine to guide decision-making, the brain is forced to stay in a reactive mode, continually assessing what to do next. This constant stream of micro-decisions contributes to mental fatigue and a growing sense of being overwhelmed.

Routines, in contrast, offer a form of mental scaffolding. By creating a consistent pattern for starting the day, reviewing priorities, or organizing tasks, routines reduce uncertainty and the stress that comes with it. This psychological sense of predictability helps us feel more grounded and in control, especially in environments that are fast-paced or full of competing demands. While the benefits of routines on brain function and behavior will be explored in more depth in what follows, it’s important to recognize their role in providing cognitive clarity and emotional stability, two essential elements for maintaining focus and well-being at work.

Neurobiological lens

The brain-based blueprint for better routines

At the neurobiological level, routines are deeply rooted in the brain’s effort to conserve energy and optimize performance. Much of this work happens in the basal ganglia, a brain structure responsible for automating repetitive actions. Once a behavior becomes routine, it’s “offloaded” to this system, allowing the brain to execute it with minimal conscious effort [ventral to dorsal shift]. This frees up the prefrontal cortex which is highly involved in complex thinking and decision-making, for more demanding tasks.

“It’s a brilliant efficiency mechanism, but there’s a catch: once a habit is formed,
the brain resists change, even when the behavior is no longer helpful.“

Our tendency to return to familiar routines is largely driven by dopamine-mediated reinforcement. When a behavior leads to a satisfying outcome (like ticking off a to-do item or finishing a task), dopamine is released. This neurotransmitter acts like a spotlight, it highlights the neural pathway that was just activated and makes it more likely to fire again in the future. It does this by enhancing a process called long-term potentiation (LTP). LTP is when synapses (the connections between neurons) become stronger through repeated activation. Dopamine increases the efficiency and strength of these connections, especially when there is a reward involved.

Over time, the routine itself can trigger the reward response, creating a loop that’s hard to break. This explains why starting a new habit feels like a mental uphill climb, while slipping into old patterns is almost effortless. Understanding these mechanisms helps us not only build smarter routines but also reshape unproductive ones by deliberately pairing new behaviors with meaningful rewards.

For example, if you want your team to adopt a new CRM system, don’t just mandate the tool, instead build a dopamine loop around it. What you need to do here is break the old routine in favor of a new one. To achieve this, set up micro-rewards for usage, celebrate visible wins in team meetings, and pair the habit with an emotional hook like showing how it helps them close deals faster or reduces stress before reporting deadlines. The more you can turn the behavior into a rewarding routine, the more likely it is to stick.

Behavioral lens

Designing environments that shape habits

Behavioral science tells us that much of what we do isn’t the result of conscious intention, but of habit loops shaped by our environment. In other words, we behave the way we do not because we decide to each time, but because we’ve been cued to. Routines thrive when…

• the cues are clear
• the behavior is easy
• the reward is immediate.

That’s why a coffee machine near your desk turns “making a coffee” into a mid-morning ritual, even if you’re not particularly tired.

Smart routines don’t only rely on willpower or motivation; they’re crafted through choice architecture or the deliberate design of environments to encourage specific behaviors. Want your team to do focused work before noon? Make meetings off-limits before 11 a.m., encourage use of noise-cancelling headphones, or create visible “deep work” zones. These environmental nudges support positive routines by making the desired behavior the path of least resistance.

But routines, once formed, don’t naturally adapt. Behavioral science emphasizes habit disruption as a critical lever for change. This doesn’t mean scrapping routines entirely but strategically introducing variation. For example, rotating team roles in retrospectives can prevent fixed groupthink patterns, while occasionally holding strategy meetings offsite can jolt creativity and reflection. The key is to recognize when a helpful habit has turned into a rigid routine that no longer serves its purpose and to intervene early by tweaking the cues, rewards, or setting.

How to manage and improve creativity

We would like to emphasize that creativity requires time and mental space: to be creative you can’t be constantly swamped in operational tasks nor stuck in meetings the whole time. 

Of course, sometimes you have no choice. Urgent tasks must be completed and meetings may be forced on you by your bosses and colleagues, without your saying. Francesco experienced this when working as a consultant a few years ago. For three consecutive months, he had 6-8 hours of meetings a day and had to spend the evening to do his actual work. If somebody had asked him to find time for creativity back then, he would have laughed in their face! 

Luckily, that’s not always the case. Assuming that you have at least some degree of control over your time at work, let’s have a look at what you can do to improve the way you make use of it. 

1. Managing meetings: When you are the one sending an invitation, make sure that you include only the necessary people and that you come well prepared, with a clear agenda of what you want to discuss. This is good practice regardless, and will help you reduce the time you spend in the meeting itself and your colleagues will be thankful!
2. Optimizing your agenda: Be mindful of agenda overload. Keep some space open to look at your work from a distance, research specific topics, brainstorm new ideas, and so on. Having the time to consistently reassess your priorities and accommodate ad-hoc tasks is crucial. This principle is seen in Agile/Lean methodologies (capacity planning at ~70-80%), as well as throughout productivity literature such as Greg McKeown’s Essentialism or Cal Newport’s Deep Work. How much time you want to spend exploring is very personal and situational. Some people may want to set aside a few hours every day, some may be content with half an hour per week. The important part is to commit to it so that you don’t get stuck in a mindless routine. Tip: block that time in your calendar, so that your colleagues cannot schedule anything else during that time.

Once you’ve carved out that time and mental space, the next question is: how do you actually use it to spark creativity? There’s no single right way, but there are a few powerful techniques and habits that can help you break out of routine thinking and open up new perspectives. Let’s explore some of them.

A very obvious one is to chat with somebody, with no set agenda in mind. It can be a colleague, a friend, a partner, a mentor or whoever else. Try not to focus on solving a specific problem that you are facing, instead keep an open mind and bounce back ideas and topics. Something will definitely come out of this and may help you make better decisions in your day-to-day work. 

Another way is to practice free writing: take a pen and a paper (or your laptop, if you live in 2025!) and write a list of ideas, without specific order or predefined structure. Your thoughts will get more structured and clearer thanks to the effort of pinning them down; and your mind will look for links and connections allowing you to see more clearly if what you are doing on the job is right or if a change of direction is needed.

If you don’t have many ideas, worry not: there are many brainstorming techniques that can help you:

• Mind mapping: write a main idea in the center of a sheet (for example, “increase sales”), then add all around what comes to your mind connected to the main idea (for example, “expand our market”, “launch new products”) and continue writing down thoughts connected to the previous ones. You can also ask yourself questions to clarify and challenge your own writing, and refine more and more your map. In the end, you should have a few high-level ideas that can become plans to improve your work.
• Word association: this technique is similar to the previous one, but doesn’t require creating a proper graphical map. You start by writing down a word that describes what challenge or problem you want to tackle. Then you write a list of words that are related to the first one. You continue by creating connections between the words, and trying to come up with new meanings and concepts. Finally, you look at the end result and see what can be used. 
• SCAMPER, a method developed by creative theorist Alex Faickney Osborn and refined by educator Bob Eberle: the starting point of this technique is quite different and involves taking an existing idea/product and then think of what you could substitute (S), combine (C), adapt (A), modify (M), put to another use (P), eliminate (E), or reverse (R).
  An example could be the invention of smartphones, which combined (C) several functionalities (phone calling, listening to music, internet browsing) in one device; or the veggie burgers, where meat burgers have been substituted (S) with plant-based patties. 
• Six thinking hats: this technique was invented by physician Edward de Bono and is based on the concept that the brain thinks in different ways and taking a different approach can help bring to surface judgments, ideas and thoughts that may be lingering. The idea is to (metaphorically or literally) wear different hats during the brainstorming phase, so as to solicit feedback from different parts of the brain. The 6 hats are:
  • Blue: used for looking at the big picture and managing the whole process.
  • White: to collect facts and information and provide careful analysis.
  • Red: considers feelings and emotions and should be used to deliver snap, gut judgments.
  • Black: should focus on the negative side of an idea with criticism and risks. 
  • Yellow: for the positive side, benefits, value added, and so on.
  • Green: used to let imagination go wild and generate new ideas. 

All these techniques can be used by yourself or with colleagues and friends to develop new ideas and escape narrow thinking and routine. 

Final tip: look at other fields to get inspiration. Some of the best innovations in the world came from somebody copying and adapting, or drawing from, something they observed in another field, sometimes totally unrelated. Just think of Dyson’s breakthrough vacuum cleaner, which was inspired by the separation technology used in sawmills and applied the same principle to remove dust in what was then a revolutionary product. Or Solea Laser Dentistry, which adapted the power of carbon dioxide lasers, which were originally used to cut metal, to make dental procedures faster and less painful.

Conclusion

The modern business world is increasingly complex, moving at a very rapid pace that makes it hard to balance the need to stay up to date with the need of completing more menial, everyday tasks. 

Most of us lead busy lives: it is easy to feel overwhelmed by a myriad of small activities and end up suffocating our creative instincts. This has clear neurobiological and psychological roots, so it is all too natural that it can happen to us.

Luckily, once we are aware of this, we can come up with solutions. As paradoxical as it may sound, adding to your week a routine around creativity works and can make you find that very important balance. 

We hope you found this article by Francesco Chevallard and Haris Mexas on building better workplaces with creative routines useful and that you learned more about why behavioral science is so powerful for managing organizational change. If you’re looking for a partner to help you achieve business outcomes with behavioral science, let’s schedule a call. Want to learn more about the application of behavioral insights in management, HR, growth and innovation? Read our blog or view our YouTube channel.

About Neurofied

Neurofied is a behavioral science company specialized in training, consulting, and change management. We help organizations drive evidence-based and human-centric change with insights and interventions from behavioral psychology and neuroscience. Consider us your behavioral business partner who helps you build behavioral change capabilities internally.

Since 2018, we have trained thousands of professionals and worked with 100+ management, HR, growth, and innovation teams of organizations such as Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, Deloitte, Novo Nordisk, ABN AMRO, and the Dutch government. We also frequently speak at universities and conferences. For questions or thoughts, please contact us here.