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Twenty Ways

by Matt Blair on May 5, 2009

Since I first read Steve Pavlina’s article “20 Ways to Improve” a couple years ago, I’ve made a habit of doing this exercise a few times a month as a way to continually re-assess what I should be working on and thinking about in my life, or in relation to my current projects.

Here is Steve’s intro:

“A simple yet powerful idea I learned from Earl Nightingale is to grab a blank piece of paper (or a blank computer screen) and brainstorm a list of 20 ways to improve. You can write down anything — ways to increase your income, improve your health, better your relationships, etc. The focus is on generating ideas to make your life better.”

Re-reading his article recently, I realized that I have interpreted the approach and intent a little differently to suit my own ways of thinking and working.

Subtle Tweaks

In his article, Steve says the exercise may take 30-60 minutes, but I rarely spend more than 10 minutes on it. I think Steve and I are generating different kinds of ideas, at different levels of detail. I try to come up with them as quickly as I can. Each one is a single sentence or maybe even just a phrase, and I try to write without thinking or pondering or editing too much. For me, the exercise is a way to get out of a contemplative or analytic mindset, and tap into my intuition.

I start by putting twenty dashes on the paper or in the editor on my computer, so I can quickly see how many I have left to go without counting.

The first dozen or so ideas usually come easy. I always seem to run out of steam at about sixteen. That is the moment to keep going! Often the most interesting and unexpected ideas appear after the easy ones, when I’m fidgeting and squirming and trying to convince myself that sixteen is good enough.

In Steve’s framing, the scope is life in general, but this exercise applies just as well to specific projects or areas of life. If it seems daunting to think about twenty ways to improve your whole life, start with a specific topic or project, or a challenge you are facing.

Review

I keep all my lists in a single folder, so that I can go back and compare my newest lists to those I wrote a month or a year ago. What keeps coming up?

I regularly review these lists to look for patterns, and summarize what I find: What items or themes keep coming up again and again? Are these areas where I need to focus? Or, more importantly, are there things on the list that I have been nagging myself about for months that, with time, I can see just aren’t that important after all?

For example, I had one item that kept surfacing in different forms for over a year, related to a new system of organizing notes and drafts for writing projects. Looking back on it now, I was actually fairly functional without trying such a system, and was hesitant to start work on the new system because of the time it would take and the disruption it would entail.

The consistent self-hectoring wasn’t providing any benefit to me. By writing it down and externalizing, I was able to see just how much it was bothering me, move it to the “someday I’ll work on this” list, and get on with my work with one less worry on my mind.

One final review tip: Don’t look at previous lists until after you have finished the current one. I’ve found that if I review first, I’m inclined to think that something that was on a previous list should be on this list. If I haven’t done it yet, how can I leave it off? The goal of the list is to find out what you think you need to do today, in the current moment.

Beyond Improvements

When I was in elementary school, our report cards had three kinds of grades:

S: Satisfactory
U: Unsatisfactory
NI: Needs Improvement

Steve’s exercise is focused on the NI or the U categories: the parts of your life (or project, etc.) that aren’t quite working and need attention. This bias can make completing the exercise regularly feel sort of like continually getting a report card with all NI’s on it: You aren’t doing well, and you better pick it up, or you’re going to fail!

Running yourself down is not the point of the exercise, so I think it makes sense to offset the list of improvements with a list of twenty things you have already improved or that are going well. Spend time coming up with an equal number of items in the “Satisfactory” or “Much Better” categories, and make note of your accomplishments as well as what you could improve.

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Blooms, Dead Zones and Your Ecosystem of Ideas

by Matt Blair on April 22, 2009

in Creativity as Agriculture,Life Cycle of Ideas,Process and Workflow

We are conditioned to think of abundance as a good thing, but there are instances when abundance is toxic. We need water to live. Yet if we have only water, and no air, we drown.

Blooms around the Mississippi Delta

Eutrophication provides a more nuanced example: Eutrophic comes from the Greek for ‘good food’. We need food as well as water, and if we are lucky, we have access to good food.

But good food isn’t always so good if there is too much of it. In a eutrophic lake, for example, nutrients are so abundant that algae bloom out of control. Water quality declines, and so does oxygen content. Many larger plants and animals in the lake die.

Abundance at the bottom of the food chain overwhelms the resources needed by the more complex and evolved species above, and the result is a so-called ‘dead zone’.

What’s the primary cause of these lethal blooms? Runoff from farms, filled with chemical fertilizers, which enters creeks and rivers, and changes the nutrient balance of nearby bodies of water — lakes, seas and oceans.

NASA map of plankton blooms along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico

Plankton blooms, northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico (NASA)

Could the same scenario play out in our creative process?

Ideas, of course, are a key ingredient of creative output, but can an over-abundance of ideas cause ‘creative dead zones’ that don’t support more refined idea-making and complex expressions of thought?

A Pipe or a Web?

Words like ‘blocked’ and ‘unblocking’ imply that creativity is a linear process: that on the way from A to B, there is something in the middle of the road which must be surmounted or blown up or routed around. Or maybe it’s like a pipe, with a blockage in one section: clear the blockage, or replace that section of pipe, and ideas will flow again.

In my experience, creativity is a web of interconnected relationships and processes, with different ideas at different stages of development — an ecosystem of ideas. It’s multi-dimensional, and striking a balance between all the disparate parts is essential for the whole system to flourish.

In such a model, brainstorming represents a proliferation in one phase of the life cycle of ideas, which may have a positive or negative influence on the health of the entire ecosystem. There is no single measure of how many ideas are ‘too many’ or ‘too few’ without looking at the context.

I’m not advocating a lack of ideas, just suggesting that dumping the equivalent of chemical fertilizers into our brains can cause an ‘idea bloom’ that throws the entire system into dysfunction and decline.

Your creative ecosystem can break down in many ways. What if the predators — the critics and the naysayers — are over-abundant, and devour simpler forms of life before they can reproduce and evolve? I’ll discuss that in a future post.

Re-balancing Your Ecosystem

If your own creative process resembles a dead zone, what’s the solution?

Dead zones are not permanent, according to an article in Scientific American:

“Only a few dead zones have ever recovered, such as the Black Sea, which rebounded quickly in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union and a massive reduction in fertilizer runoff from fields in Russia and Ukraine.”

And surely it’s easier to heal our own ecosystem of ideas than rehabilitate an entire sea!

In the case of the Black Sea, the recovery of the ecosystem was an unintended side effect of political and economic disruption — not exactly the kind of external triggers we hope for, or can afford to wait for when our creative process is unbalanced. Instead, by being sensitive to the imbalances, we can intentionally make adjustments, before the situation is critical.

If idea fertilizers are creating a surplus that threatens to have a negative impact, a return to organic processes — a focus on hand-crafted and carefully cultivated ideas — is one possible way to restore the balance.

If there is a surplus in one part of your creative process that is negatively affecting the whole, what changes could you make so that your ecosystem of ideas will thrive again?

This post is the third in a loose and evolving series on creative surplus. Last week, I introduced the potential ‘problems’ of having too many ideas and also pondered the process of choosing our work when there are so many worthy projects and ideas to explore. I’ll add links to subsequent posts in the series here as I publish them. UPDATE: I’ve added a new post on inefficiency and culture.

Related: The full list of articles in the creative surplus series is available here.

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Too Many Ideas?

by Matt Blair on April 13, 2009

in Life Cycle of Ideas,Process and Workflow

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.

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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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