A few mornings ago, I was sitting at my computer drinking my customary mug of tea when my fella, Mr. J, walked in and said, “So, are you doing that writing thing you do?”
I felt sheepish. I was not doing that writing thing I do, unless tapping out a stream of e-mails counts as such (it does not). “Uh, no,” I replied. “I had a bunch of e-mails to catch up on.”
This last segment of the “How to Focus Your Ideas” series is technique-free. Honestly, I’m much more comfortable speaking in abstracts and striving to understand the elusive “big picture,” rather than talking systems. It was really fun to dissect my brainstorming process and frame it for other people to try out, but like I said — I’m still figuring it out myself.
As the second post in a series about collecting and nurturing your ideas, this post will discuss the whole nurturing bit.
If you’re anything like me, your idea dump was a bit untidy. Perhaps it was even a chaotic eruption of words and squiggly lines. All that mess can be pretty rough on the eyes. Once you’ve opened the spout and allowed those ideas to get some oxygen, it makes sense to sort them out a bit so that you actually want to look at them.
If you’re expecting this post to to take the GTD world by storm with some groundbreaking, über-productive system I’ve invented, you can stop holding your breath. No drumroll here.
This series is not about a productivity system. It’s about the art of collecting and nurturing your ideas. I’m talking to the people who have so many ideas that they can’t spit any of them out. Or the people who have the shadow of an idea looming over them, but they can never quite put their hand around it. Or anyone who wants to see what’s haunting the back corners of their minds.
We creative types just love ideas. We want to be original, imaginative, and exciting. We want to write groundbreaking stories, paint mind-shattering canvases, and compose inconceivable verses.
But creativity these days isn’t limited to the novelists, the painters, and the poets. We’ve come to the so-called “Information Age,” when everyone’s going into raptures about creative thinking, to the point that it starts to sound like a boring cliché. But as tired as it may sound, it’s true — creative thinking is a most valuable asset in the unpredictable, ever-changing world we inhabit.
