Whittling your entire life down to process makes you almost robotic and strips you of creativity, spontaneity, and just....that je ne sais quoi of life. It's just too boring.
As always, it's a balance and depends on context. Gymtime? Make it a process. Hanging out with friends? Yeah...don't schedule that in your calendar. Just go hang out with them.
That being said, I agree that planning too far in advance is a bad idea, mostly because like the weather, there is an element of chaos in people's lives that makes the best possible action at any given moment hard to predict farther than a few days out.
You have a problem to solve. You first spend time understanding the problem. This process continues until you understand the problem.
You then start to turn potential solutions over in your head. Lots of research and thought required - this includes inspiration. You must feed your brain. You continue this process indefinitely until...
Epiphany. A special kind of inspiration. You come across something unrelated and your mind connects it to the problem. Ideas in the shower are a typical example. The epiphany gives you a rush - out of nowhere you have the solution.
Creativity is a process where inspiration is a key part. They don't have to be exclusive.
I just mean I think it's difficult to argue that anything we humans do can be viewed as anything else but problem solving.
So in the case of the kid there might be millions of direct reasons (e.g., boredom > want to solve that), but I think it would still be possible to map any of them to some form of problem > effect or cause > effect relationship. Nothing happens without a reason (without religious connotation).
Which is not to say that you can't just suddenly have a moment of sudden inspiration, just that they are far more rare than the creativity you work for.
Bad writers wait until they have an idea to start writing. Good writers know the ideas don't happen until after they've started writing.
What I meant to express is that chopping up your week into a pre-defined routine that you do every week for years under the guise of discipline is the wrong way to approach it.
I think we're mis-communicating because neither of us defined what "process" means to us. Perhaps we really agree with each other.
Recognizing that, then the problem is just one of how and when you put in that time to go in deep on ideas, when nobody is asking you to. For a lot of folks including myself, routine helps: "I will spend two hours each day on the hard thing I don't know how to solve and have no actionables on," and usually within those two hours something happens to develop your thought process.
For younger folks, deliberate engagement in "designed creativity" is something that isn't just not taught, but actively discouraged by the lack of external feedback, role models or conversations. So it's much harder than just picking up a skill by copying and subsequently making some surface changes to the copy.
this is easy to do when you're younger but after 30 becomes difficult.