January 2008

I cherish the simplicity of a clean workspace on my computer. My wallpaper is a simple black. Almost.

One of the simple joys of parenthood has been the rediscovery of the Dr. Seuss books I read as a kid, plus a few I wasn’t familiar with. Everytime we read Dr. Seuss I come away with a smile on my face and a stirring in my soul. If I have a creative superhero, he is it, and that is why this quote from him stretches boldly across the bottom of my screen:

Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.

Creativity comes when you find your voice and let it be heard without worrying how it will be received. There is little doubt this advice worked for Dr. Seuss, and so I try to live this way too.

If you don’t mind.

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Leo Laporte and a few others are writing a collaborative story via twitter called 140Novel. They are taking turns adding to the story within the 140 character limit that Twitter imposes on them.

Who knows if it will be a good story? I am more interested in watching how creativity can be stirred within a collaborative process. It removes anxiety when you know that you are only responsible for what you are going to write at this moment, and someone else will pick it up from there.

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Andy Ihnatko reviews Scrivener in his weekly technology column today: Scrivener is in the write place. I’m already on the record stating that Scrivener is an app I wish I was cool enough to use. Andy Ihnatko’s column stirs my interest and notches me one more step toward coolness.

One thing I can say about Scrivener…it has a great model for a trial. The trial period is 30 days of use, but they do not seem to be consecutive days. In other words, the trial does not end 30 days after you first open the program. Rather, each day you use it counts as one day of the trial. So, if you go three days without opening the program, those three days don’t count as part of your trial. This is a model for a trial that very reasonable, and one that more shareware providers should consider.

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This is part 1 of 5 in a series on capturing everything. Other entries:

I have always had a good memory — some friends even call me Rain Man, though I’ve forgotten who they are. This elephantine memory isn’t necessarily a strength, because I’ve come to understand that the best use of my brain is not to tuck things away.

The most helpful idea that I have adapted from David Allen’s Getting Things Done is the discipline to capture everything. From a creative perspective, the goal is to free your mind from remembering details so it can create and interact with ideas.

This will be the first of a series of three or four entries describing my ever-evolving process of capture. It is misconception that ‘getting organized’ is only for anal types who would rather line their children up alphabetically than hug them. On the contrary, a good system of making sure details are taken care of can free up space in our souls to focus more on the things that bring us life.

The first challenge to capturing everything is to make sure you have reliable and trustworthy systems in place to collect and store what is flowing out of your noggin. I will call my collection tools buckets — these are what I use to make sure everything is caught and stored. On my Mac, I have two main software buckets, because there are two different categories of information that need to be captured:

Capturing tasks - The way I see it, tasks are temporary. They can be checked off, completed, and best of all, forgotten. Tasks are typically, but not always, life-draining and serve to distract from more life-giving experiences such as developing relationships or finding ways to express ourselves. Sometimes you just need to focus on getting this stuff done, and when you do, the more prepared you are, the less time these tasks will suck away. There are many tools available to manage your tasks, but as I’ve mentioned before, I use OmniFocus for capturing and organizing my tasks. For those familiar with GTD, OmniFocus is excellent for organizing your tasks into projects and contexts. For those who don’t have a Mac, or the cash for OmniFocus, don’t panic. There are many options, but I would recommend you try out Remember the Milk — a free(!), web-based task manager that seems to have new features everytime I look at it.

Capturing thoughts - Unlike tasks, thoughts usually have value beyond a certain timeframe. They might be an idea you want to think about more, research for a story you want to write, or a quote you want to make sure you never forget, er, lose. There are roughly 10,487 programs for the Mac designed for something like this, but for me, the choice is Yojimbo. In spite of the name and the dock icon, this is a clean and easy program to store and retrieve whatever thoughts, images or notes I need safely tucked away. In my Windows days, I found that OneNote was great for this. I haven’t found an online option that offers the needed flexibility, although you might be able to do something similar with BackPack or Google Docs.

Both of these programs win out for me because they can both collect and organize information very easily…but I get ahead of myself. We’ll visit those processes in future entries in this series.

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I find that ideas are best flowing when I am in a regular routine of doing daily pages. Daily pages might not be the right name in my case — perhaps weekly pages, or even fortnightly pages, would be more suitable. I’ll go ahead and stick with daily as a reminder that they are worth doing that often. Daily pages are a regular discipline just to generate output to get your mind moving.

I was introduced to daily pages through The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron. (She calls them morning pages…I’m not sure how or why I switched to calling them daily pages, but I’m not changing now!) In this book, she calls them “the primary tool of creative recovery” and describes them this way:

What are morning pages? Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh, god, another morning. I have NOTHING to say. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah…” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions.

Sometimes my daily pages are just as boring as she describes above. On the other hand, I am often surprised at how deep they sometimes get as they help me clear my thinking about something. And, I can definitely say that when I am in a season of doing them more consistently, more creativity flows out of my cleared head.

Please don’t think that daily pages are just a tool for those who write. It doesn’t matter what your medium of creativity is, daily pages can be a valuable tool in your creative flow.

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“You’re such an amateur!”

Even if jokingly, these words are often spoken to let us know that our efforts aren’t top notch. It’s too bad, really, because there is something beautiful about the genuine strivings of an amateur.

Not too long ago, someone pointed out to me that the word amateur shares the same Latin root as the word love. Quite literally, an amateur is someone who does something purely out of love for the act itself.

It is love, and not finances, that must drive creativity. It is something we have to get out, a voice that has to be heard, a song that has to be sung, or an image that has to be seen. If your creative outlets help pay the bills, great! If not, remember that an income, or the dream of one, is not what makes your voice worth hearing.

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“We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”
- Madeleine L’Engle

HT: Joshua Longbrake

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On Monday, I posted about the hardware I use in my workflow. Today, we’ll tackle software. One of the best things about being a Mac user is the vibrant community of independent software developers. There are affordable programs that have been coded to help with just about any task or project you can think of, and most of them look great.

The list below isn’t a comprehensive list of what I use. But this is the software I use daily to find space to be creative. For the most part, these are my GTD tools.

OmniFocus - The pool of GTD apps for Mac is getting deeper: iGTD, Actiontastic, TaskPaper, and newcomer Things. I’ve at least played with most of them, and OmniFocus is king. There is a great user community going on the OmniGroup forums and the fact that I can quickly add tasks from just about anywhere is critical to me.

Yojimbo - A good workflow has to have a reliable way to capture and store ideas and content for future reference. There are many programs available to do this on the Mac, but Yojimbo is my choice. Again, a great user community and integration with other programs make it a program that automatically loads anytime I boot up.

Quicksilver - I’m not going to begin to explain Quicksilver here, but it is much more than the program launcher that many use it as. With Quicksilver, I can add a task to OmniFocus or an idea to Yojimbo in three seconds without having to switch away from what I am doing. It is an essential tool to capture everything.

Pages - When Apple released iWork 08, I downloaded the demo to try it out. I had a paper do during my trial period, so I wrote it in Pages. I was hooked. It was much faster than Word, and prettier to look at. I know that Office 08 for Mac has just been released, but I haven’t used it yet. I’d love to hear comments from those who have.

Ecto - I was a skeptic about using a blog editor for quite some time. I always thought that the Wordpress dashboard worked fine. However, now I’ve been using Ecto for a few months and won’t go back. The biggest advantages: having multiple blogs available to post to, and the ability to have a number of different entries in process that I can quickly add a thought to whether I am online or not.

I wish I was cool enough to use…
Scrivener - Scrivener has a lot of fanboys, and I can see why. Everything about Scrivener makes me want to use it. For starters, it is made by a company called Literature and Latte. How can I not like that? Scrivener is similar in concept to StoryMill, but it is designed for more than just writing fiction. Two things are hanging me up: 1) I prefer Pages, because I like to see the layout of something as I go, and 2) I can’t justify the price (although it is reasonable) when I can create a similar experience using Yojimbo and Pages.

I have intentionally not gone into much detail with any of these, but look for posts detailing how I use each to come in the future.

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At the core of creativity is finding the space to bring ideas to life. Creative expression doesn’t happen for me unless I give it the space to take shape.

I’ve already mentioned it, but I use GTD methods to help my creative process. Not only do they help me diligently capture ideas as they come to me, but they also help me free my mind of details to focus on forming and expressing those ideas.

More and more, I am learning that a good physical space is just as important as a cleared mental space. When my desk or office is cluttered, it is not only distracting, but it also is like slow emotional leak that drains motivation. I recently read Peter Walsh’s It’s All Too Much. The book is mostly common sense and a few new ideas, but it provided the motivation I needed to clear away the clutter for a fresh workspace. On the same note, I get a regular reminder to battle clutter from the daily posts at Unclutterer.

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