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I just re-found this video from the 2009 Brisbane Riverfire fireworks back in September. I uploaded it ages ago to YouTube but forgot to link to it! It was taken whilst driving along the Riverside Expressway from the Captain Cook Bridge in Brisbane – we hit the Bridge right on 19:00 when the fireworks started – best vantage point ever!

Filed under: general by Chris

I recently read an article by Clive Thompson from Wired Magazine entitled Why Idling Mind Is Mother of Invention (thanks @janerawson). The super-brief summary of the article is that, contrary to popular belief, daydreaming and procrastination (hereby labeled ‘mental drift’) are actually crucial to solving complex problems and hence, productive.

As somebody who works in a fairly technical and creative industry, I whole-heartedly agree with the sentiment.

You dream, I dream, everybody daydreams

To go in to a little more detail, Clive talks about how brain scientists have shown that the areas of the brain responsible for long-term memory processing and problem-solving kick into overdrive when our brains wander into mental drift land. This suggest that our brains are doing more then looking for a distraction from a boring task: it seems they may be utilising this time to store/access memories and solve nagging problems. This doesn’t seem too far-fetched. Most people can relate to the idea of having (at least partially) solved some nagging issue whilst off in la-la-land. Think the famous ‘Eureka’ moment of Archimedes in his bathtub (Granted, we tend not to run down the street nude after every great idea, but the parallel exists none-the-less).

So, the take-away message from this is that daydreaming – good. Forcing high-levels on concentration on a particular, probably boring, task – bad. The second thing the article suggests is that you should actively timetable your day to allow a little daydreaming time. Most people suggest that going for a long, many hours walk might be the best solution. However, as Clive correctly points out, this is not possible in most work environment. Instead, he suggests the fairground that is the social web might be the solution. He postulates that killing time on YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and web-games might be the electronic othologue to going for a walk along a path, through a wood, with nothing but your thoughts.

I vehemently disagree.

The problem with resources such as YouTube and the like is that they require moderately high levels of attention and concentration. I can honestly say that I have never gone ‘Archimedial’ whilst catching up with people on Facebook or watching Sesame Street reruns on YouTube. These things are too much like watching TV or playing video games – activities considered to be creativity-killers. I personally believe you need to have a degree of sensory deprivation and introspection to be truly creative.

So, anyway, what does all of this have to do with notepads?

Well, if you are in a creative work environment that doesn’t completely suck, you should have a certain degree of control over your movements throughout the day and a boss that doesn’t sit behind your chair whipping you in to action every minute of the working day. A 3 hour walk may be out of the question, but there are some things you can do.

• STEP 1. Walk away from your computer!
• STEP 2. Grab your trusty notepad, and a pen

I find that the computer is a big creativity killer for me. It is a device that supplies a saturation of sensory input (especially with today’s media-rich web environment) and encourages interaction, that in turn discourages introspection.

What I tend to do is grab my notepad, find somewhere fairly close to work but away from distraction (ideally a nice area with plenty of lighting). I work on a large campus so I will tend to head to a cafe or something similar – you might have a nice lunchroom, or even find a tree to sit under – whatever works for you. Then you can just sit down and do nothing – thinking about whatever pops into your head and mulling over the problems. If you are writing an article, think about the logical structure of the article and note dot-points for what you want to talk about (I structured this very article in my notepad this morning over breakfast). Draw flow diagrams for algorithms. Sketch your perfect partner. Hell, draw dragons if you want to.

The important thing is to have a notepad handy to write down your ideas. Why? Because ideas you have during a daydream can be just like the particulars of a real dream – once you are out of that mindset they can very quickly fade into oblivion.

My two most creative timeframes? Breakfast and work travel. I always lay out a great spread for breakfast and have my notepad with me. I also have my notepad (or at least my diary) with me when travelling on the train – public transport with an iPod plugged into your head can be heaven, introspectively speaking.

This is all well and good, but why should I always have my notepad with me?

Social idea explosionism

One of the great perks in my work is that I am surrounded by a bunch of very bright people who love what they do, know a lot about what they do, and come from a variety of disciplines. Some of them even wear shoes. Having meetings with energetic people that have similar passions and interests to your own often leads to a state that I call idea explosionism.

Ever been discussing a problem or idea with a friend or work colleague and entered that positive feedback loop where, bouncing off each others ideas, you come up with an outcome that is bigger and better then your original solution or idea? You might have even spawned a number of sub-ideas relating in some fashion to the original. This is idea explosionism. Think of it as brainstorming at a higher level of existence. Another analogy is that you are creating a multi-threaded consciousness, with each member of the conversation contributing an independent thread of thought and creativity.

The problem with idea explosionism is that it is exciting. You will often get so caught up in it all that any thought of taking notes is virtually thrown out the window. However, take notes you must. Some of the best ideas that I have ever come up with has been over coffee or lunch with a bunch of like-minded people – and in most cases I’ve only remembered the ones I’ve written down.

Administrivia: clear out that creative space!

Things are required to perform most actions. However, too many things can hinder action, or stop it all together. Consider this. To play a game of basketball (action) you need both a ball (thing) and some players (thing). However if you imagine that you cover an entire basketball court with balls and try to put 100 players on the court, a game of basketball will be extremely difficult at best, impossible at worst. I believe our brains are no different. From the perspective of the brain; facts, ideas, tasks and schedules are all things: like our players and balls they take up space. The former take space in your creative space or mental workshop, the latter on the basketball court. Creating solutions to problems and creating new ideas is an action, similar to playing a game of basketball. You need some ideas and facts to create, but too many can get in the way.

In short, the more things (facts, balls) cluttering our space (brain, court), the harder it is to perform actions (create, play ball).

This is where a notepad can help. To continue our basketball analogy, if we found there were too many balls and players on the court, we would put all the spare balls into a storage closet and put the excess players on the bench – clearing our space and allowing a game of basketball to be played. We can do the same with our minds. Let the notepad be your storage closet. Let your diary be your bench.

This idea of dumping all the tasks and ’spare ideas’ on to paper to clear the mind is not a new one. It is called, rather appropriately, mind dumping. The premise is that, by dumping all the things you need to do from your brain onto paper, that you no longer need to use your brain-power to keep a mental todo list running in your mind. The scheduling responsibility is left to your list or diary, leaving your mind free to do stuff we now know is important, such as daydreaming.

I’ve written at length on a mind dumping technique I created called mind clustering on Cognicology. Mind clustering is a categorical mind dumping technique. I’ve even created a simple instructional video on the mind-clustering technique that you can also find on Cognicology. The inspiration for mind clustering came from an earlier mind mapping article by Yaro Starak.

Take home message

So the take home message? Always have a notepad with you, always. Daydreams, idea explosionism and the need to dump ideas can happen anytime, anywhere: so grab a comfy couch and be prepared!

Filed under: general by Chris

‘All you need is love’

Bugger that, Beatles. That line (as well as bowl-cuts, safari suits and mustard-coloured linoleumed walls) might have cut it back in the 60’s but fast-forward to the 21st century and I think that you are a lot more likely to hear the muttered line of ‘All I need is (more) time’.

It would be fair to say that in this day and age people have a lot more freedom in their lives. They have jobs with flexible working hours, it is easier then ever to move up/down/around/across and through job positions and career options. This perceived freedom can definitely be empowering but as the late uncle of a certain webbed-friend of mine is quoted as saying,

“With great power comes great responsibility”.

Being self-motivated, self-promotional and ‘putting in the hours’ is now almost essential for even the most humble of career progressions. Gone are the days of the chai wallah -> delivery guy -> office chick -> mysterious middle manager -> executive managerette -> … -> profit career path (see what I did there with the crossing of languages, genders and gendered suffixes? – take THAT P.C. brigade); in are the days of intensive self-schooling, re-tooling, self-promotion, side-projects, entrepreneurism and (perplexingly) social media experts.

I am no exception to this general trend. I currently put a lot of my time, heart and effort into probably the biggest project of my life, my PhD. Doing a PhD is not a trivial undertaking and one of its biggest perks is the flexibility it affords my schedule. Now I am apparently a gemini and whatever stock you may hold in star signs I definitely fit the stereotype of getting easily bored and look for variety and challenge in my life. I am happiest when working on a number of different projects. To this end, as well as working on my PhD, I always have a number of side-projects running – the most major of these being Cognicology and the Wifi mapping project. There is barely enough time to share across these projects let alone leaving enough time aside for other activities such as networking, self-schooling, and maintaining relationships: it is kinda like trying to spread the remains of an almost-empty jar of vegemite (the 1.0 stuff, not that iSnack two-point-crap rubbish) on your mornings toast.

Have you ever been to Cold Rock? Visiting a cold rock store is my personal version of hell. Not only are they happy with providing an impossibly large variety of ice-cream flavours, but they insist on tempting you to add an even more impossiblier variety of ‘mix-ins’. This gives you, as the ice-creamee, literally thousands of possible ice-cream combinations! Presented with this variety and open-ended flexibility very nearly cripples me – I am over-my-head with choice, freedom and self-determination and drowning in it. I believe this is almost exactly similar to the problem people are faced with in their professional lives today: there is a strong focus on having freedom and flexibility to work on the projects we want and we are free to organise our schedule to suit our needs. Instead of giving us the time to do what we want to do and achieve, we end up working harder and inefficiently. Most of us are ill-prepared to deal with the time flexibility in modern life and, if presented with some free time, will spend 7/8th of it on facebook.

So how do I (and you, and we) survive is this procrastination-rich, time-deficit society? Well NASA are still ignoring my letters and well-drawn diagrams on how we could use the USS Enterprise to slow down the rotation of the earth to increase the average day length to something on the order of 36-48 hours. So I suppose we will have to settle with learning new techniques to improve our time management, reduce our levels of procrastination and effectively prioritise our tasks. I spend a non-trivial amount of optimising my day-to-day life. Something that I have found is that the fight against procrastination is 20% technique, and 80% attitude. To this end, Alborz and I write extensively about how you can improve your attitude to make yourself happier, optimistic and more productive on our site, Cognicology.com

Filed under: general by Chris