From the category archives:

Process and Workflow

That Initial Edit

by Matt Blair on April 2, 2009

in Exercises,Life Cycle of Ideas,Process and Workflow

It takes an instant to have a thought, a few seconds more to cast it into words or symbols, a few seconds after that to admire it or refute it or disregard it. My mind makes a quick set of clarifications, and then I have a decision: Is this idea a keeper?

I’m in the middle of washing dishes — suds to the elbows.

Rinse off the soap. Turn off the water. Dry my hands. (Ten seconds.)

I fumble for a pen and index card (a second or two) or find a clean page in a notebook (another three seconds) or go to the computer, wake it up, flip to the right window (add ten seconds), then page back through my memory to extract the idea, including all the refinements my subconscious has made while I was preoccupied with the mechanics of my “capture” technology.

I write it, save it, put it somewhere that matters, and that thought is saved — for a little while, anyway.

But what was the cost of all that? In time and energy? Forty seconds? Ninety seconds? Four minutes? Was it worth it?

Once I’ve scribbled an idea down, has this minor investment created an implied obligation towards this nascent idea: to transcribe it, put it in a system, review it, edit it, and connect it to everything else I’m thinking about at the moment?

Have I made a deposit in the bank of big ideas? Or have I incurred a debt that I’ll have to pay back? Can accumulating ideas leave us with more liabilities than assets?

Can you tell it is tax season by the financial metaphors?

Opportunity Cost

We often have our best ideas in the most inconvenient places or at the most inconvenient times.

Choosing which ones to capture is an editorial act — the initial edit. And this initial edit is the most essential, because each moment we spend on one idea is a moment that can’t be spent on other ideas or other projects, washing the dishes or listening to friends or living our lives.

Time and attention are the rarest ingredients of the creative process. Our use of them deserves the most thought, the most practice, the most consideration, and the most care.

We are finite. We can’t follow every idea to fruition. We have to let some thoughts go.

How do we decide which ones?

Questions

How do you decide which ideas to write down or capture and which to let go? Does your approach consciously and deliberately change, depending on what you are working on? Or is it more circumstantial?
Do you find yourself running out of new material to work on?
What tools do you use to capture emerging ideas? Do these fit well with your creative process? Are you able to keep up with ideas as you have them?
How many ideas or sprouts of ideas do you have laying around on index cards or in notebooks or emails? Do you have a backlog? Do you feel any pressure or obligation to do something with them?

Exercise

Spend a day or two recording absolutely nothing. When a new thought enters your mind, mull it over, play with it, and then try to remember it without relying on any external “capture” or reminder system.
Spend a day or two trying to capture everything.
On the continuum between those two extremes, what works for you? When do you feel like you are capturing enough, without flooding your system? Consciously experiment with the balance between trying to keep every idea, and letting some of them go.

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Gravel on the Ice

by Matt Blair on March 25, 2009

in Process and Workflow

My intention was to get up this morning and write.

In fact, I started writing, then went looking for a link related to the post I was working on, which led to a search through email, which brought up another email which had to be dealt with, which led to a lost password ‘situation’ and on it went.

At the desk for almost three hours, yet feeling like I’d just been bouncing around from nagging problem to nagging problem. All tasks that needed attention at some point, but none of which led to putting cohesive thoughts together in the last few hours.

“It’s going to be one of those days,” I thought as I stood up. “Or is it? None of this is insurmountable. None of it is impossible. It’s just annoying. A gaggle of petty, distracting, time-consuming annoyances. Life could certainly be worse.”

“It’s not as though I’d been buried in an avalanche,” I continued thinking to myself as I cracked an egg for a much-delayed breakfast. “It’s more like gravel on the ice.”

“Gravel on the ice?”

Where did that come from? What does that mean?

Traction and friction are two sides of the same phenomena.

In creative work, we hope to attain the first and avoid the second.

If an entire city is iced over (as Portland was recently) then gravel is essential for going anywhere. It’s messy, and the streets look terrible after everything has melted, yet it provides enough traction to walk around.

But that wasn’t the image I had when that phrase popped into my mind.

I was picturing myself on ice skates, trying to move elegantly across the ice. Instead of gliding gently over a smooth and finished surface, I imagined myself overly preoccupied with each movement, my eyes fixed a few feet in front of me, never able to look away for fear that with my next step, I would hit a pebble that would twist my ankle and send me spinning.

These weren’t boulders in my way. I could move around them. But having to pay such close attention meant that I could never gain any speed or momentum.

Just as we must choose our footwear and the type of movements we make based on surface conditions, we also need to choose our creative tools and gestures based on our own current conditions – energetic, emotional, and environmental.

When impeded by pebbles and grit, take off your skates and lace up your boots. And if you find your self slipping or sliding all over the place, you can either throw down some gravel to give yourself something to grip, or pull on your skates, embolden your gestures and see where the ice takes you.

This is based on a draft from this past winter that never made it onto the blog. I decided to revive and publish it before ice and snow seemed too distant in the minds of Northern hemisphere readers. For those of you in the South, consider it a preview.

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Tools We Can Rely On

by Matt Blair on March 9, 2009

in Process and Workflow

Many years ago, when audio editing software was primitive and hard drive space too scarce for regular backups, I hit the wrong key and saved a 30 second excerpt of an audio piece over a 40-minute original recording. I managed to recover the original, but it was a long, long night.

We each probably have our own stories of technology failing us, or of inadvertently scuttling a project with some minor action of our own. Usually, these flubs aren’t show-stoppers or permanent blocks, but a few petty annoyances combined can be enough to pull us out of flow. We forget the thrust of our thoughts, and might even wonder whether the project is worth our time, or if we shouldn’t turn our attention elsewhere for a little while.

Thin Ice

In creative work, the tool layer should support the idea layer: it needs to provide a solid, smooth and reliable platform for our idea work. Bad tools are like thin ice. They cause us to step tentatively, not boldly. Our eyes are looking down for signs of trouble rather than forward, or toward the sky.

And when the ice cracks, we fall through and lose momentum. Our attention turns to extracting ourselves and patching over the hole. Once we’ve done that, we may feel a momentary surge of satisfaction, then a sinking feeling that after so much time and energy, we’ve just gotten ourselves back to where we were, and not any closer to where we were headed.

Composer Tech

When a musician uses a computer to create new work, there are all sorts of distractions lurking within. The oboe sound isn’t quite write, so he searches for a more authentic one. The software keeps switching a g-natural to a g-sharp because it thinks he is trying to change keys. He wants one measure to have a long pause in the middle, and disappears into the documentation trying to figure out how to bend the machine to his will.

Sitting at a piano, the tools are simple, dependable and have been tested over centuries. There is a very low probability that the creative process will be disrupted by a failure of the piano, or the pencil, or the staff paper. This leaves the mind free to work at the creative layer, the idea-crafting layer, rather than the tool layer. You don’t expect a piano to sound like an oboe, so there’s less “distraction of perfection” — fiddling with the details while the project stalls.

Techno-Skepticism

I’m not a technophobe. Technology has transformed our ability to express and share our ideas in startling and empowering ways. If you want to hear how all the string quartet parts sound with the rest of the band, a piano alone won’t suffice.

But I am a techno-skeptic. Protecting ideas as they emerge — from all distractions — is critical to the creative process, and therefore it is important to be skeptical of anything we allow into that process.

Here are some of the tactics I use when choosing tools for my own creative projects:

Tool selection sessions. Set aside time in your schedule for assessing and evaluating new tools. Go into the experience without any expectation of producing a usable creative result, and then you’ll be pleasantly surprised if you do. The main goal is understand whether this tool would be more of a disruption or distraction than its worth, or whether adding it to your toolbox will enhance your creative expression.

Avoid the most sophisticated tools. Use tools that are just barely sophisticated enough for the task at hand. Think of filmmakers using story boards first instead of shooting a “rough draft” of the film. In my own creative work, I find that little is gained and much is lost by trying to be on the bleeding edge. I prefer the phrase bleeding edge to cutting edge, because it emphasizes the pain rather than the usefulness. When the complexity/dysfunction pain drops — or if you have built-up thick calluses! — then it is time to adopt the tool.

“Fix it in the mix.” Yes, it’s a cliché, and really bad advice if you are trying to capture a polished performance. But with so many good editing tools, it’s often just easier to enhance ideas after the first attempt: overdub the audio, insert a different clip, or work on a backup copy and revert to the original if you mess up. Use a simple tool to get enough of an approximation of an idea when it first pops into your mind, and then use more sophisticated tools to clean it up or recreate it later.

Caveat Creator

Problematic tools can also present us with beautiful dilemmas — boxes we are forced to work within.

A MultiMoog Synthesizer

About fifteen years ago, I found a filthy old MultiMoog synthesizer in a music store, and bought it for about 20% of the going rate at the time because it was “broken” and the owner didn’t want it.

What did “broken” mean? There was something wrong with the envelope circuitry, so the sound started when I turned it on, and didn’t stop until I turned it off. Everything else about it, including the keyboard (I could change the pitch) and the volume knob (I could fade in and out) still worked, and it could create rich tones and intricate patterns. It wasn’t something you could use for a prog-rock cover band, but as a complex drone machine — a kind of 20th-century hurdy gurdy — it was full of possibilities.

Sometimes, reliable dysfunction can be just the right thing.

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The Importance and Limits of Words

by Matt Blair on March 6, 2009

in Inspirations,Life Cycle of Ideas,Process and Workflow

Am I too word-oriented in my exploration of creativity? Why do I place such an emphasis on writing, poetry, and language in general?

No matter what we each choose as the preferred medium of our creative expression, we all use language. We all live by language.

Language is the nexus through which most (but not all) thought passes as it transits from mind to mind. It is the standard intermediate form, and preserves the greatest store of human experience.

Words are probably the most accessible medium that artists and creative thinkers share, and experimenting with words is the most effective way to learn patterns and behaviors and tactics that can then be applied to work in other media. If I was writing about creativity using only terms and processes specific to electronic music, it would be more difficult to translate those ideas directly to sculpture or photography.

This bias is not mine alone: Our computers have keyboards — word capture devices — not paint brushes, uncarved marble, or drumsticks. To work with ideas, and exchange ideas, inevitably and unavoidably, means to work with words. A greater facility with human language can enhance our work in nearly every domain of human endeavor.

Languages and written words are the jars into which we pour our ideas and perceptions, to store them away, or take them to the market, or mix them with other ideas to share at a table with friends.

Poets and philosophers and linguists and inter-cultural explorers of all kinds discover or invent more intricate containers, or repurpose old ones, or assemble them in exquisite and every-changing arrays, all in hopes of capturing everything between earth and sky and beyond — the totality of human existence.

And that’s the ultimate problem: not all of life will fit in such figurative jars. Much of it doesn’t.

Yes, I love words, but I am equally enthusiastic about what I refer to as the “non-verbal” — the encounters for which words are insufficient. I don’t simply mean those moments when the words we know as individuals, or our own abilities to articulate, are lacking. I’m talking about experiences for which our shared human language — all human language in aggregate — is inadequate.

There is no jar big enough to capture the precipitation of even one thunderstorm. We can catch a little of it. We can drink from it, be rehydrated by it, be cleansed by it. But no matter how well-crafted or expansive the jar, its contents are no substitute for running through the thunder and the rain, the irrepressible storm of life.

As we walk home soaking wet, language and words and poetry are the drops of water we wring from our clothing.

As we seek the uncontainable, the ineffable, and the transcendent, we use words to find our way, and to see where we’ve been.

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Color Your Thinking

by Matt Blair on February 6, 2009

in Places and Contexts,Process and Workflow

NPR’s Morning Edition reported this morning on new research about how color affects the way we work:

Scientists at the University of British Columbia studied more than 600 people as they performed various tasks, usually on a computer. Sometimes the screen’s background color was red, sometimes it was blue.

The experiments showed that with the red background, people did as much as 31 percent better at tasks like proofreading or solving anagrams, which require attention to detail. But for creative tasks, like designing a child’s toy, a blue background improved performance.

According to Ravi Mehta, the author of the study, red induces “avoidance motivation” that causes people to be detail-oriented and wary of mistakes, while blue creates an “approach motivation” in which people are more open and relaxed. Maybe that’s why Bono wears those tinted shades?

When I heard the story, I was intrigued because it reflects not only my own color preferences in life (blue, and a little green, rather than warm colors) but also my creative disposition. I seem to always have a steady flow of new ideas and connections running through my head, but my biggest challenge is what I call “editor’s block” — selecting the right pieces, fixing all the details in place and solving all the little puzzles required to achieve a final form. I can get myself into a detail-oriented or risk-avoidance frame of mind, but it always feels a little uncomfortable. To put it in terms of this study, I think blue, not red.

A tangent, indulged: My parents gave me a new teapot for Christmas, though with some hesitation, because the only one left when they bought it was red.

The results of this research are a reminder of the complex role our physical environment plays in our mental posture:

The study explains why previous research has produced conflicting results about how red and blue affect thinking, Mehta says. Either color can provide an advantage, he says, but only if it’s matched to the right kind of task.

And that’s the broader point: Pick a physical environment that is conducive to the mental approach that you need at a given moment. If you aren’t in the right mindset, alter the environment.

I notice significant differences from simple changes like walking while I’m proofreading, or writing at the kitchen table in front of the window when I’m first brainstorming, then sitting at a desk facing the wall while editing. If I get stuck on deciding the best sequence for two ideas or whether to indulge a tangent, I might stand in front of the computer. I just did, in fact, without even thinking about it. Physical movement seems to allow more mental latitude.

Like any scientific study, I’m sure that future research will add nuance to or maybe even contradict this understanding of how color affects our work. But you don’t have to study how 600 people work under different conditions, or worry about some general theory. Make adjustments in color and position and lighting and temperature in your own environment. Take cues from research like this, and study yourself.

Well, I better leave it there. That red teapot is whistling at me.

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Distinct Roles

by Matt Blair on February 1, 2009

in Process and Workflow,Quotes

You cannot write books with a critical head. You cannot produce good prose if you are the skeptic, scouring every line for the false note, the exaggeration, the argument that doesn’t persuade.
…
The [editorial] hat and sneer came in handy later — once I’d written the first draft. It was then I needed to slap myself around, give the manuscript a hard time, and I was glad to have been a former editor. But I had learned something I’d never known: No amount of study, or work in the field, could prepare me for facing the page alone.

Marie Arana, in her introduction to
“The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think And Work”

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It’s Easier to Build Bridges in an Archipelago

by Matt Blair on January 29, 2009

in Life Cycle of Ideas,Process and Workflow

Steven Johnson has a piece on Boing Boing about his writing process, and how he uses DevonThink to avoid the intimidation of an empty screen:

Instead of confronting a terrifying blank page, I’m looking at a document filled with quotes: from letters, from primary sources, from scholarly papers, sometimes even my own notes. It’s a great technique for warding off the siren song of procrastination. Before I hit on this approach, I used to lose weeks stalling before each new chapter, because it was just a big empty sea of nothingness. Now each chapter starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes, which makes it seem far less daunting. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.

I went to hear him speak at Powell’s a few weeks ago, and he shared another aspect of his writing process: how to approach a final draft with fresh eyes. By the time you have finished a book, he explained, you have read your own material so many times that the color has drained out, and it is difficult to tell what is working and what isn’t.

To minimize the re-reading, he writes each chapter straight through, and makes a note at the end of each day about where to start the next day. He tries to only read each chapter once, until the final edit phase. This yields a messier first draft, he admitted, but also a better perspective for the task of tidying up.

And it is quite a contrast to Joan Didion’s approach:

When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm.

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Brevity

by Matt Blair on January 18, 2009

in Exercises,Process and Workflow

I’ve been thinking a lot about brevity lately.

Some of the best things in life are small. DNA, for example. Small is generative.

Our sound bite and text message culture can create the impression that small is insignificant, that short is shallow. When an experience lacks context or detail, our brains build an environment around that experience and fill in the holes. At the risk of overstating things: when details are lacking, audience members can become co-creators by exploring the implied depths.

Last year, Smith Magazine published a book of six-word memoirs titled “Not Quite What I Was Planning”. The original inspiration was Hemingway’s (possibly apocryphal) six-word short story:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

You don’t need a thousand words to evoke a compelling image.

They have since expanded the idea, with a new collection on “Love & Heartbreak” (promotional video) and recently ran a contest to come up with a six-word inaugural address for Barack Obama. (The contest is over. My submission would have been: “Thank you. Now, we rebuild together.”)

I can read and re-read some of these concise memoirs, and they strike me differently each time, depending on my mood, or a conversation with a friend a week ago, or something I saw yesterday.

Some describe a life-defining moment:

Just in: boyfriend’s gay. Merry Christmas.

– Seshie Harget

Or life in a series of abbreviations:

ABCs
MTV
SATs
THC
IRA
NPR.

– Jancee Dunn

What an extraordinary outline of a life in twenty letters! Of course, such density is only possible with an awareness of the cultural context of those abbreviations.

Others summarize a disposition:

Wildly crooked,
unlikely to be straightened.

– lê thi diem thúy

And some are ambiguous enough they could describe a moment or a disposition or a lifetime:

No thank you, I’m just looking.

– Kariann Burleson

Twittering

I’ve also started to twitter recently. (No, don’t worry — that’s not a medical condition. If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, here’s a primer.)

Yes, banal tweets vastly outnumber the epigrammatic, as in other spheres of communication and life. But if you think texting and tweeting are limited to tween preening, I’d point you to actor/writer/director Stephen Fry or New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as counter-examples, among many others.

Figuring out how to say what you want within the 140-character limit becomes a kind of editorial game. As you type, the editing window indicates how many characters you have left. The trade-offs are as clear as they are for a poet writing in a traditional form: “If I get rid of that adjective, I can add an interjection. Or maybe a link? I’ll trim that excessive adverb, and be able to properly punctuate. Could that sentence make sense without a subject?”

After a while, you just start thinking smaller, unconsciously shifting to a more terse frame of mind.

Concise. Terse. Laconic. Pithy. Whichever appeals. That’s the trick for this month.

Questions

Are you generally attracted to small art or big art? Short songs or multi-hour operas?

What is the smallest or shortest art work that you have really enjoyed? The biggest in size or longest in time?

Some words are worth more than others. Much more. Think of some of the key turning points in your own life: did it take a thousand or ten thousand words for you to realize that your life had changed in a profound way? Or a single breath’s worth?

Exercise

1.

Take something you’ve been working on: it could be art or an email or a piece of music or a memo on some boring topic. (It might be easier to do this non-destructively, with something you can easily duplicate.)

What is essential? Is there anything that can be trimmed? What aspects must remain for it to retain its meaning?

Cut it in half. I don’t mean physically, although that may be an option. I mean remove half of the material, however you define material. If it’s a song, it could mean making it half as long, or taking out half of the instrumental parts. If it’s a sonnet, try to cut it down to a quatrain and a tercet.

How small could this work become before it changes unrecognizably? Is it changing into something else interesting and alive? Or is it losing its vigor? Can you cut it in half again?

2.

After completing the exercise above, set your intermediate drafts and final result aside for a few days or a few weeks.*

Then review the details of your decisions with fresh eyes (or ears) and ask yourself: “Did I lose anything vital or essential in my reductions? Did less turn out to actually be less, not more?”

If you look at your final version as though it is a rough draft, would you be inclined to expand it? Or would you maintain its size and scope and refine what is there already?

* You may have noticed by now that letting ideas age is one of my favorite techniques. It is not the ideas that are altered by time. It’s our perspective on our ideas. Setting a project aside is frequently the best way to ‘work’ on it — as long as the schedule allows for it. I let this piece sit for about ten days and then applied this exercise to an earlier draft of itself. At one point, it had swelled to more than two thousand words! By the time I hit the ‘Publish’ button, it was less than half of that.

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Making Use of Excuses

by Matt Blair on November 12, 2008

in Exercises,Process and Workflow

Excuses have a bad reputation. They are often interpreted as contrived half-lies meant to allow the excuse-maker to shirk responsibility or weasel out of obligations and expectations. Sometimes this is true.

Excuses can also be valid signals of dysfunction or genuine difficulty, indicating that you don’t yet have the right tools or time or skills or knowledge to proceed. With this interpretation, they can be essential catalysts to our creative work and growth.

For example, I’ve had a note on my to-do list for a few weeks now reminding me to assemble a set of photographs for another article I’m working on, but I haven’t done it yet. Why? Whenever I noticed it on the list, I’d develop a vague sense of unease: that the task was overwhelming, or might take longer than I had time for at the moment, or that maybe it wasn’t that important anyway. I would start to tidy up my desk instead, or go make tea and then decide that I should roast some squash for dinner, or that maybe the time would be better spent re-organizing a bookshelf or two.

What are these excuses telling me? If my intention is to organize a set of photos, why is my brain leading me towards other activities? Why did I spend the last few hours cleaning up my desk and typing up notes from unrelated projects when I had set out to organize those photos? What are the real reasons for my reluctance?

Working backward through my internal dialogue, I start to understand several sources of my discomfort:

I’m not sure which of two possible articles I’d like to pair with these photos. My lack of clarity on the writing side makes me unsure which photos I should select. There are hundreds of photos related to this project, so without clarity, it becomes an overwhelming task.
Because of that fuzziness, I’m also not sure which set of keywords to use to classify the photos, or where to file them. Should I create a new set of keywords altogether, or just use what I already have? (This is related to the naming problem I wrote about earlier.)
Will these images be used in a gallery, which means I could select ten or so photos that together represent the idea, or do I need a single representative image?

Underneath the excuses, I discovered a series of questions that I hadn’t answered because I wasn’t consciously aware of them. Once I paid direct attention to the excuses, and tracked them to their origin, I was able to make the decisions I needed to make to clarify the project, and start sorting the photos.

Exercise

Identify a project you have been wanting to work on for a while, but have avoided for some undetermined reason.
Keep a piece of paper or a notebook in your work area for that project.
Every time you think about working on it — but don’t — write down the reason or excuse. The first one that pops into your mind. Try not to punish yourself over it or go on a guilt trip. You are gathering information, not pressing charges.
After a week or so, or however long it takes to start finding that your latest excuse is already on the list, set aside some time to think about each excuse on your list in detail. What is the source? Do not slip into trying to work on your project: this is work about your project.
For each excuse, look for underlying problems. Line by line, go through everything that is possibly getting in your way. You may not be able to resolve each one, but you can probably think of some workarounds.
After doing this, set a schedule for working on the project, and try to adopt the attitude: “No excuses. I’m going to work on this.”

No matter how well you analyze and develop workarounds for your excuses, new sources of friction will appear. It’s a continuous process. Repeat as necessary.

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What’s it called?

by Matt Blair on October 29, 2008

in Life Cycle of Ideas,Process and Workflow

I’ve been thinking about the Michael Ondaatje quote I posted recently, and why it’s so valuable to avoid framing our ideas before we know what they are, or what they will become.

A canvas can just be an untitled canvas. A tune in your head can be sung again. A photograph is automatically given some sequence of identifying numbers as your digital camera tucks it away on a memory card. And an idea can be quickly scribbled on a napkin or an index card.

But when using a computer to capture a critical point in an unframed argument, a section of dialogue between two unnamed characters in a before-first-draft play, or a fragment of poetry, we are often forced into answering the question “What is this?” before we are really ready to do so.

Deciding what to name something, and consequently where to put it, can quickly become an idea-threatening distraction. While struggling to hold a still-forming thought in our heads, we are confronted with an array of questions: “Is this part of something I’m already working on? Should it be? Am I missing a connection to something else? Is it even relevant to anything I’m doing? Maybe I should just write it down? But what should I title it? What folder does it fit under? Should I create a new file for this? Maybe even a new folder? Could this become an entire project, all on its own?”

Such questions are necessary at some point, but these are questions ‘about’ the idea, and the ‘about’ part of idea work comes later, not when ideas are first poking out above the surface. You wouldn’t expect a two-day old or even a two-year old child to know what university she would like to attend, and whether she plans to major in theoretical or applied physics! Why do we expect to know the future of our still-forming ideas?

So if you are sitting at the keyboard, and you feel a new idea coming on, what do you do?

My Approach

I keep a text editor (such as TextMate or Notepad or Word) open on my computer all the time, always a click away, with a file that is already named and saved for the current month.

I call my main file “idealog” and add the year and month to the title. When brainstorming on specific topics or projects, I sometimes use separate files I call “buckets” as though I’m sorting apples or fish. Other possible names include:

seeds
sprouts
idea journal
inbox
nursery

Pick a word or metaphor that works for you.

When something pops into my mind, and I don’t know where to put it, I flip over to the text editor, type the new idea at the top, and save it. I usually add a date, too.

A few weeks later, when I’m in a more editorial mood, I go through this collection of nascent thoughts and decide what to do with each of them. If I’m working on a deadline, I might review these notes more frequently, but I always find that letting ideas sit for a while gives me a more nuanced perspective on how and where they fit in.

The key point is to to avoid the urge to categorize when ideas first appear in your head. Ideas need the space to become without constraints, which means they need a place to emerge, even if they don’t yet have a name.

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