Neil deGrasse Tyson, "You cannot be productive and creative at the same time."
I’m not buying it. The idea that having more time makes one more creative might be accepted by some, but not me. It seems to me that the longer the ideas get mulled over, the more the real creative stuff gets wiped out in favor of what Jeff described with the Supt who wants it all dumbed down so it’ll be easy to care for. I haven’t met that guy yet; I find most Supts very open to creative ideas.
Tyson’s quote may mean you have to be careful about reaching an unhealthy balance between creativity and production, but I also think one has to be careful about thinking every creative idea must somehow be explainable. Which is why being productive by getting the creative ideas built quickly before everyone reviews them is often the best way to build something different.
Don,
My experience is that time can help, but only if you use it to put away the project in a drawer somewhere and come back to it later. Time off often gives us a fresh perspective over toiling all night to come up with the perfect combo of holes, or what have you. Most of the time when you are trying to crank out new ideas in a quick row, you are really going back to nearly the same idea you drew up the last time, or maybe earlier in the evening. Then someone pulls it out and you see you haven't budged an inch in your thinking.
When you do start working on a plan after a delay, you often wonder why you got stuck on one particular facet, and find that if you ignore that, or change it, the whole design comes together.
Of course, as to working better when on a deadline, many old sayings come to mind, including, "if you want something done, give it to someone who is busy" and "Necessity is the Mother of invention."
This is my experience as well. When I go back to the map a month later, it's like my brain has been working on it while I've been asleep. You already understand where the dead-ends are, and you have let go of trying to make something work that won't.
"Necessity is the mother of invention" has sometimes led to the best feature of a course, but for others, it can lead to the worst. Some guys are just not as creative, or not as good under pressure.
From that standpoint, the greatest advantage I've had is the chance to work with big sites that are only about golf. If I am stuck trying to build a good green in a certain spot, and I can't make it work, I usually have elbow room to move that green and the next tee to somewhere better!
Can't do that if you are hemmed in by housing, although I smile remembering the conversations I overheard at Long Cove forty summers ago:
"I want to build a tee back here."
"That's a house lot, Pete."
"I'll buy the lot."
"We've already got you down for twelve of them." 
This post got me wondering. One of the early things they teach you in landscape architecture school is about the design process, a modification of the scientific process, where you analyze, propose various options that solve those problems as well as possible, pick one (or combine elements of the best two, etc.) and refine that in more detail.
The question is, did they come up with that in an era when there weren't enough creative designers to fill all the slots and needed to teach non design type personalities a way to come up with something, or was it to put a few checks and balances on those truly creative designers who might rely too much on intuition, and quickly decide on something without really thinking through the practical and engineering side? From memory, they always told us it was to curb the "master designer" mentality, but of course, you couldn't look at a room full of freshman paying your school thousands of dollars to study LA, and tell them honestly that they really weren't cut out for the profession they had chosen.
