In my last exercise, I wrote about how the ‘initial edit‘ can be used to deliberately control the volume and pace of the creative process. To avoid overloading your creative system, you decide to be choosy about which fish you keep, and throw the rest back.
This approach runs counter to the zeitgeist of the productivity blogosphere, which tends to celebrate the idea of ‘ubiquitous capture’. If your goal is to capture ideas everywhere, does it follow that you should capture everything?
For David Allen, creator of the Getting Things Done system (aka GTD), collecting everything (he calls it a “mind sweep”) is the first of five stages of mastering workflow. In his view, de-cluttering your head will free you of all the nagging thoughts that haven’t been scheduled or handled or delegated or archived, and give you a sense of clarity and focus that will help you…get things done!
The idea makes sense to me in theory, but in my own experiments with Allen’s methods, the results are mixed.
To be fair to David Allen and GTD fans, I know there is more to GTD than the collection phase. I’m not questioning whether capturing ideas is an important part of the creative process or a successful workflow. I am asking whether quantity or completeness of inputs is a determining factor in the quality of output. Bear with me…
To entirely empty your head takes time: you transcribe pages and pages of thoughts, research tips, diagrams, ‘action items’, etc. and maybe your mind is clearer for a moment or two.
But now you have a big, intimidating folder sitting on your desk or in your computer, one that you’ll dread opening because it is filled with hundreds of fledgling little ideas that will send you off into a thousand different directions.
You haven’t necessarily solved the problem of mental clutter, you’ve just transmuted it from one form to another, from mind to paper or computer. You might even be tempted to just throw away the whole folder!
The Weight of More Wood
Whether we are starting a new project, or stuck in the middle of one, why do we want to have lots of ideas?
Are we simply clearing our head, or are we generating more ideas because we’ve heard or read that maybe more ideas is the way to get started or get ‘unstuck’?
Ideas are to creativity as wood is to a maker of furniture. Yes, she needs good wood, in ample supply. But she knows that she can’t fix an unbalanced rocking chair by adding more wood to the warehouse.
Sometimes we have a natural surplus of ideas: a certain theme or project triggers a burst of mental activity. I’m not suggesting that be avoided.
Yet I’m skeptical of the “Twelve Ways to have A Thousand Ideas in Twenty Minutes” mindset — I exaggerate, but only slightly — that seems to apply Industrial Age models of productivity to 21st-century idea-making and the creative process.
Thinking of creativity as merely brainstorming and idea-generation is the Big Agribusiness view of creativity: we risk creating an over-abundance that feels like progress, but doesn’t actually solve the problems we set out to solve.
A Boatload of Ideas is Insufficient
A cargo ship filled with wheat can’t relieve a famine without a secure and functioning port, an effective distribution system on the ground, and enough clean water, cooking oil and labor to make it edible.
A famine is a systemic failure that can’t be solved by food, just as a wobbly rocker can’t be helped by piling on more wood.
Sometimes the “more” we need isn’t more raw materials: it’s more time, more attention, more structure, more patience and more craft.
When your creative work and output is disrupted or disappointing, and your supply of nascent ideas is adequate, what other parts of the overall system need refinements to make your ideas into something real?
Related: This article is part of a series on creative surplus.
