Mysterious Flame

Not enough to qualify for me to use to write complete posts (although one or two have the potential for me to expand upon at some future date), here are some links I’ve come across recently that you might find useful in your creative efforts.

• 19 Online Destinations for Boosting Creativity | LifeDev
  What the title says. Not all of these are favorites of mine, but they may help you.
• TED Talks: Do schools kill creativity?
  Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
• Designing Through the Storm | A List Apart
  “We’ve all experienced low points, and whether they’re caused by tight timelines, hostile clients, infighting, personal disasters, or something else entirely, we have to find a way to work through them.”
• 30 Tips to Rejuvenate Your Creativity
  Lifehack.org talks about some tips to get your creativity rolling.
• 12 Ways to Tap Into an Endless Well of Creativity
  Photoshop-centric tutorial site PSDTuts runs a list that is very similar to my Ten Ways to Jump-Start Your Creativity
• On Creativity | A List Apart
  Andy Rutlege talks about the benefits of constraints on design projects. “Indeed, without constraint, creativity (and design) is irrelevant.”

A few months ago I picked up the book The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, who also wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance. It’s an excellent book that deals with getting yourself off your rear end and doing whatever it is you were meant to do, whether it’s writing The Great American Novel or starting a business.

Summary

Pressfield begins by taking a good, hard look at what he calls “Resistance,” that thing that keeps us from doing anything difficult or end up with a good long-term result. Book One, “Defining the Enemy” talks about the many forms Resistance takes, many of which you will recognize right away. In Book Two, he quickly moves on to the idea of “Turning Pro” — resisting Resistance by not procrastinating and treating your art as a job. Just plug away at it, even if it’s crap. It’s the old “quantity over quality” idea that says if you work hard enough and long enough and make enough, the quality will happen on it’s own. Finally, he conludes this short book with third section about his fervent belief in angels and muses, who inspire him. He even cites Homer’s Invocation of the Muse (it’s his prayer before he begins writing) and touches on Jungian psychology.

My take: no nonsense (or very little, anyway)

I really appreciate Pressfield’s no-nonsense, tell-it-straight writing style that mixes in humor and an uplifting moment or two along with the career successes and failures he shares. The former Marine has an in-the-trenches attitude that says: “Cut the crap and get the art done.” I will say that the last section of the book, “Beyond Resistance: Higher Realm” gets a bit weird with all the talk about angels and muses. Then it takes a weird turn where he starts swearing at the first novel he ever finished. Nonetheless it’s a great book, and I enjoyed the tidbits of Greek history and philosophy.

It’s written in an almost devotional sort of format, with each “chapter” rarely going more than one or two pages. The chapters had a bite-sized “blog post” feel. One could read a page a day at random as they get fired up to go to their studio and do their art. I loved the lack of New-Agey fluff that’s so common to art/self-help books like The Artist’s Way. It’s a great book that will inspire you to get off your butt and get moving. There are great tidbits of advice and pep-talk without any sugar-coating at all. I highly recommend it to any creative person, whether they’re stuck or not.

On the wall of our copywriter’s office, I saw something on her whiteboard that made me take notice. “Nice spider-web,” I said. She explained to me what it was: a sort of modified mind-map called UNO, short for UNiversal Organizer, developed by Paul Borzo, a teacher and writing tutor at Metropolitan State University in Minneapolis/St. Paul. My co-worker found out about it from a writing newsletter she recieves.

The idea is to start off with a primary concept and break it down into finer concepts and more granular points or supporting ideas. It’s a nice twist on a classic idea.

Art & GTD Part 1 of 5

I know, I know. Artists aren’t typically the organized types. They often take pride in how scattershot they are, finding inspiration everywhere. But as we’ve discussed elsewhere and will definitely touch on again, it’s so easy to forget all those wonderful ideas we have. It’s easy to forget what that thing was we were going to paint that we were so excited about when the idea came to us. The Getting Things Done system lets us capture all those thoughts and successfully deploy them into productive work.

Getting things Done (aka GTD) is a personal productivity system outlined in a book of the same name by David Allen. The idea is to capture what needs to be done so that it’s out of your head and off your mind so you don’t stress out about it. You put all your “stuff” into a logical system so that you can deal with it appropriately. It helps you be disciplined in such a way that you can quickly make decisions regarding whatever comes up so that you can have a plan in place to immediately act on everything that comes your way, or otherwise safely renegotiate them. What happens is you end up avoiding getting things lost in the shuffle, so you become a more effective manager of your time. Is your head spinning yet? Don’t worry — we’ll clear some things up.

Two Main Questions

GTD is primarily concerned with two main questions: What’s the context? is the first one, and What’s the next action? is the next one, perhaps the most important of the two. Clearly answering these questions will guide you to efficiency. Context is how much time you have available, where you physically are at the moment, and how much energy you have at the moment. When you are fully aware of what your context is, you are better able to answer the question of “What’s the next physical action?”. You can use this to plan ahead to do certain things in certain situations (contexts). You probably already have a list of errands to run the next time you are out and about, and a list of supplies to get the next time you are at the art store. How about a list of things you can tackle the next time you feel really energetic? That way you can harness all that creative energy when you find yourself in that situation, instead of forcing yourself to do something you don’t have the energy for. Luck, as they say, favors the prepared.

The Getting Things Done Workflow, Summarized

There are a lot of excellent resources for getting a handle on the GTD workflow, including a variety of free downloadable PDFs at David Allen’s website. (My favorite is the WorkFlow Diagram - Advanced, since it lays it all out in a nice, graphical way that visually-oriented people can understand.) The six basic steps are:

1. Collect
2. Process
3. Do
4. Delegate
5. Defer
6. Delete

Collecting refers to gathering all of your “stuff,” putting everything in one place, rather than having it scattered all over your house, office, and car. It all goes in ONE inbox. Processing is where you deal with each item in your inbox and decide if it’s something that can be acted upon or not. If you can do it in two minutes or less, go ahead and Do it and get it off your mind. If you’re not the right person to do it or you don’t have the time, energy, or resources for it, Delegate that task to someone else. (Just remember to put a note on your calendar or in your tickler file to follow up with that person later.) If you want to do it at some future date, you can Defer it and put it on your calendar to look into it or act on it later. Finally, if what you have collected in your inbox is not actionable and it’s not some sort of reference material, you Delete it.

Yesterday as I was perusing my daily feeds, I came across an interesting link on Steve Rubel’s Lifestream: an Idea Generator from The Director’s Bureau. It looks like all there is to the site is just a simple Flash application (if you can call it an application, since it does only one thing) that randomly complies three words from a list. It reminds me somewhat of the game Catch Phrase.

The site doesn’t give any explanation at all as to what this is for or who made it. (I Googled ‘The Director’s Bureau” and it seems there’s a group of Hollywood directors who call themselves by that name, but I get the feeling this is not affiliated with them.) At any rate, it looks like an interesting tool to help people find jumping-off points for free-association, so it can be useful in brainstorming sessions, much like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.