It's generally well understood that quality creative work is achieved after a lot of targeted practice. Once you spend a considerable amount of time mastering the techniques of a craft, you attain the true freedom of expression. Even the most naturally gifted people never downplay the value and quantity of practice needed before you really unlock your creative potential. Thus, creativity finds its place in productivity. But it's a very dangerous prerequisite.
Any sort of creative work is a massive undertaking with an indeterminate goal, so we can take solace in producing things rather than creating. In chasing quantity, in counting hours spent and artefacts produced, we lose sight of what really matters. When the journey becomes the destination, the trip is not worth taking at all.
Because it's so hard to achieve consistency in creative output, productivity can often seem to supplant creativity. And so being productive starts to lead to tedium, mediocrity, and having a dubious finesse in making worthless things. How do you avoid this? With ideas.
An idea, which usually starts as a tiny speck of imagination, can elevate productivity into the realms of creativity. To nurture an idea, to make it grow and have enough power to fuel and give meaning to your work, means to continuously explore and improve outside of the realm of production.
So if productivity is to sit and write down a story, creativity is the poetry in between the lines.