Don't Like Your Job? Change It (Without Quitting) - Amy Gallo - Best Practices. Why Boredom Is Good for Your Creativity. Like most creatives, you probably have a low boredom threshold. You’re hardwired to pursue novelty and inspiration, and to run from admin and drudgery. Boredom is the enemy of creativity, to be avoided at all costs. Or is it? Consider these remarks by comedy writer Graham Linehan, in a recent interview for the Guardian: I have to use all these programs that cut off the internet, force me to be bored, because being bored is an essential part of writing, and the internet has made it very hard to be bored. I know how he feels. Of course, Steven Pressfield would have no hesitation in nailing this kind of boredom as Resistance – the invisible force that rises up within us, whenever we set our minds to a difficult creative challenge.
Like Linehan, I’ve come to expect the boredom and prepare myself to deal with it. Resistance knows how hard the task will be, and uses boredom to nudge us away from it, while offering us all kinds of easy ways out. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Over To You. MUD: Minimum Usable Design. Advertisement There is a paradox that fits my life. Doesn’t matter what aspect of my life I am talking about because it always seems to apply. Even more so when I think about this paradox and the design of this website and other websites. I really hate this paradox. “To walk through the woods, you first need to walk halfway through. This example is based off of Zeno’s paradoxes, which are even more mind-boggling than the one above.
No matter what stage of a design I am in, I am always halfway there. A Totally Made Up Theory Let’s use our good ol’ sparring partner Google as an example. If the very first half makes the design at least 50% usable then what would you design first? Next step is to get halfway from where we are now to where we need to be. If you continue on with this process of knocking out half of what you need to do, eventually you will get close enough to your goal where good enough is as good as you are going to get. An Example The 50% mark. Now the design is 75% there. Innovation Is About Arguing, Not Brainstorming. Here's How To Argue Productively. Turns out that brainstorming--that go-to approach to generating new ideas since the 1940s--isn’t the golden ticket to innovation after all. Both Jonah Lehrer, in a recent article in The New Yorker , and Susan Cain, in her new book Quiet , have asserted as much.
Science shows that brainstorms can activate a neurological fear of rejection and that groups are not necessarily more creative than individuals. Brainstorming can actually be detrimental to good ideas. But the idea behind brainstorming is right. To innovate, we need environments that support imaginative thinking, where we can go through many crazy, tangential, and even bad ideas to come up with good ones.
We need to work both collaboratively and individually. We also need a healthy amount of heated discussion, even arguing. So if not from brainstorming, where do good ideas come from? At Continuum, we use deliberative discourse--or what we fondly call “Argue. So we argue. But I’m also a fan of “no, BECAUSE.” A Day Without Distraction: Lessons Learned from 12 Hrs of Forced Focus. Here are the rules: All work must be done in blocks of at least 30 minutes.
If I start editing a paper, for example, I have to spend at least 30 minutes editing. If I need to complete a small task, like handing in a form, I have to spend at least 30 minutes doing small tasks. Crucially, checking email and looking up information online count as small tasks. If I need to check my inbox or grab a quick stat from the web, I have to spend at least 30 minutes dedicated to similarly small diversions. I followed these rules for one full work day. Continuous Partial Attention The motivation for my experiment should sound familiar. For some jobs, where responsiveness is crucial, this work style might be necessary. The solution to this quandary is well-known by now: batching. Check email only a small number of times per day! This is why I launched my experiment. Ignoring the small stuff isn’t an option, but living in a state of continuous partial attention won’t cut it either.
Conclusions.