Hey, Alex!
When it comes to creativity and ingenuity (especially for the attention difficient), there’s always a temptation to depart from the single-minded mentality. Especially if you’re used to multitasking in your day to day life, it seems like the conveyer belt of activities never stops moving. We abandon one incomplete task to start another and then move on from that still incomplete task to resume yet another chore and we end up leaving everything in a big mess. It’s a cliché from every inventor imaginable that finds his way onto the big screen. Every workshop is cluttered with tools and gizmos and every workbench invisible from all the various parts and pieces of the next invention! (It reminds me of the old adage “A cluttered desk is the sign of a genius”) How do they keep it straight?
Well, if we’ve learned anything from chaos theory, it’s that just because something has the appearance of disorder and entropy, it does not mean that there is no order in it. In my own experience, sometimes letting things come out in a disorganized fashion may lend itself to an unrestricted creative outflow and then to some organization later. Personally, I keep a black notebook where I write all of my ideas about stories, games, business, really anything. But as I run out of thought for one subject and my mind starts working on the next idea, I switch ink colors so I can find it all later. Now, I’ve kept the same book now for 4 or 5 years and I finally got around to sort everything out into cohesive thoughts and plans. In fact, I’m getting pretty close to starting a new notebook. But, the ultimate goal, much like a sketchbook, is to get your ideas on paper and see what sticks.
You don’t need that organizational hurdle to hop in order for you to get your ideas out. Yes, there are certain things you can do in order to be able to look back and know what you were talking about, but beyond that simple rule, just let your ideas spill out onto the page. From there and on you can see which ideas deserve more attention and which ideas can wait a bit longer. You’ll make the right kind of progress that way and everything else will fall into place.
Alex, we’ll talk on Tuesday!
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