February 2008

Two elemental fears sabotage my creative process time and again.

The first fear is that my creative expressions won’t be received well by others. It would take many blog entries (and hours of therapy) to unravel that fear. That’s not what this blog entry is about…I’m afraid no one would want to read about that anyway. Maybe I’ll talk about that someday. If everyone is really nice. And asks nicely. And promises to not be mean. And tells me that they like me even if they don’t.

The second fear is that I am going to run out of creativity. To put words to that sounds silly, but I find that impulse often lurks just beneath my consciousness. Creativity, however, is without limits. It doesn’t deplete like a self-contained reservoir that will run dry.

Creativity begets creativity. Each idea I explore generates two or three more. The idea for this blog wandered aimlessly in my head for several months. I wondered if I could sustain it. The simple action of writing that first post generated a flow of thoughts for future posts. My primal instinct was to pile them in a corner, thinking that I should hoard them for the future. If I only shared one every few days, I thought, I wouldn’t run out of ideas.

Fortunately, it doesn’t work that way. As I write, I find that each new post releases more captive ideas. Now if you’ll excuse me, Ijust got another one.

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David Allen’s Getting Things Done techniques have been very helpful for me. The one that has most benefited my workflow has been the concept of organizing tasks by context. For example, every task is categorized based on the context where it can be completed, ie, @home, @errands, @mac, etc.

A few months ago, I created a new context: @tinkering. The idea behind @tinkering is that it is a place for those tasks that don’t require much in the way of concentration. Some examples from my current @tinkering context include an email reminder to a friend about a book they borrowed, a wordpress plug-in I want to try out, and adding a recommended reading page to this blog. When I need something less intensive to do, or if I have my laptop handy while watching a movie, I can work through the @tinkering context.

I originally set it up as a sub context of @mac, because these were all tasks that required my computer. However, I’ve recently made @tinkering into it’s own context. OmniFocus shows tasks from a subcontext within the parent context as well. I decided I didn’t want to have these tinkerings cluttering up my @mac context, which is full of to-dos that require more thought or effort than a typical tink.

If you want to try out the @tinkering context, let me help you get started. Go ahead and add “subscribe to the Creativityist RSS feed” as your first task. See how easy that was?!

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More words from Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird:

You are going to have to give and give and give and give, or there’s no reason for you to be writing. You have to give from the deepest part of yourself, and you are going to have to go on giving, and the giving is going to have to be its own reward. There is no cosmic importance to your getting something published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

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This is part 3 of 5 in a series on capturing everything. Other entries:

Once you start to really get serious about capturing every thought of value (and some that aren’t), you’ll quickly realize there are two types of thoughts you want to remember. On the one hand, there are the tasks that we’ve already talked about. These are items that you need to remember to do, usually, but not always, within a certain timeframe.

On the other hand, there are ideas. They are usually incomplete thoughts — maybe a concept you want to develop for a new project, or a notion that will fit in well with something that you are already working on. These are ideas you want to live with, to sit with, to revisit over and over and develop more substance around them. To add them to a task list isn’t helpful, because they usually aren’t something that you can or want to just complete and check off. On a task list, they only serve to distract you when you are really trying to get a few things done.

I think it is critical to have an idea catalog — a digital moleskine. I know that many like to fill notebook after notebook with ideas and then shelve them to revisit later. There is something glamorous about notebooks full of ideas, but I prefer to capture them on my computer. It helps me easily organize thoughts or track them down later. For Windows users, I’d recommend OneNote. When I switched over full-time to a Mac a few years ago, this was the only program I worried about not being able to replace. On my MacBook, I’ve settled into Yojimbo and I love it. The rest of this entry will be Yojimbo-centric, but I hope anyone might be able to find motivation, at the very least, from it.

Just like when capturing tasks, I want to be able to quickly and reliably capture ideas with minimal distraction from what I might be working on at the time. Though it is easy enough to create a new note in Yojimbo itself, there are two main ways I capture ideas with Yojimbo.

Similar to OmniFocus, I can quickly capture a thought and add it to Yojimbo with Quicksilver. There is a convenient little Yojimbo plugin that is available in Quicksilver. I just type -space to activate the Quicksilver window, type a period followed by the thought I want to capture, tab over and hit ‘Y’ for Add to Yojimbo, and then hit enter. The thought is tucked away for later, and I’m back to whatever I’m working on in seconds.

The main shortcoming of this first capture routine is that Yojimbo just inserts whatever I type into both the title and the content of the new note it creates. If there is a little more I want to capture, Yojimbo has features to help me easily capture a thought from whatever I am working on. I can type F8 no matter what I am doing, and a quick-entry windows opens up. (This keystroke can be set to whatever you like in the preferences.) A window pops up where I can type a title and then the content of a note. If there is something in the clipboard, it is automatically included as the content of the note which is also really handy.

Yojimbo also includes a little dock that sits on side of the screen. Anything can just be dragged to that tab, and it is added to Yojimbo. However, I like to keep my desktop clean, so even that inconspicuous little dock is a little too conspicuous for me. Between the two techniques I describe above, I don’t really have much use for the dock.

Of course, all of this just gets the ideas into Yojimbo, which can quickly fill up with notes. I use it for capturing ideas, research notes, book notes, software licenses and even my daily pages. In a future post, I’ll share how I organize all of that within Yojimbo so that I can review what thoughts are in process and tuck away others that I don’t want to see all the time.

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In Orthodoxy, the ever quotable GK Chesterton writes:

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.

Those words have meandered back into my head while reflecting on yesterday’s quote from Anne Lamott. Chesterton suggests that it is the exercise of expression that helps heal the pained poet. I’m not sure if research would back up good old Gilbert’s assertion, but I find merit in them. (I’m also not sure if I should consider myself on a first name basis with Mr. Chesterton.)

Creative works that draw us to that place we don’t want to go don’t just happen. They come from the tattered soul of an artist that is reaching in to find what is there. Not all creative expression is born out of, or deals with, the pains and hurts of life. Yet I find that when an artist takes me someplace, it is only because they have been willing to go there too.

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Some of the notable blog entries that I have recently starred in Google reader:

• How to Use Reading to Become a Better Writer (Write to Done) - “There are two ways to become a better writer, in general: write a lot, and read a lot.”
• The Quicksilver-for-Windows Showdown (Lifehacker) - Quicksilver gets its fair share of love around here. It looks like Windows users have some options too.
• Book Review: One Year to an Organized Life (Unclutterer) - A book that looks to be worth considering if you are wanting to create a less distracting home.
• The Significance of Daydreams (Mindhacks) - This one was sent to me by my friend and fellow creativityist. Thanks Samuel!

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From Anne Lamott’s fantastic book on writing (and life), Bird by Bird:

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words–not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

When I am marked by a film, a book, a painting, or any artistic piece, there is a quality to it that captures what Anne Lamott explains here. The best creative expressions are those that usher us into places that we don’t want to go, or places we yearn to go, but don’t seem to know how.

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