In “How to Keep an Idea Log You Will Actually Use” you talked, in part, about rereading your archive of ideas every 3 months.  That is manageable, but I struggle with the revisiting of all the other information including: bookmarks, downloaded files, saved emails, hand written notes, etc.

I would very much like to know how you cope with the incredible amount of useful information at your fingertips.  How do you organize everything that you collect (in different forms)?  –Software Engineer

Hi Software Engineer,

I keep all of the data you’re talking about in simply structured (hardly tagged, mostly just thorough file names) folders on my hard drive.

1. I want to make things with people who are energetic, smart, and unusually interesting.
2. I want to be at a company that is clear about what it is, inspired by what it wants to become, and admired for being exceptionally good at what it does. (I’m anthropomorphizing. Forgive me.)
3. I want to be able to dress like myself. Edgy and bold and professional. My workplace cannot require heels or suits (only my clients can); I live in the hills and I like to walk too much.
4. I want to be respected for my ideas (ooh!), my rigor (hmm…) and my irreverence (gasp!).
5. I want to use my skills as a social scientist to further a creative agenda of problem solving.
6. I want to use my skills as a teacher, persuader and story-teller to lead challenging changes in how people work, behave, and think.
7. White boards, sketchbooks and post-its are a must. I love my Macbook Pro to an almost fetishist degree, but for creative collaboration, nothing beats analog.

Some of these requirements (like the last) may seem mundane, but they are culturally significant: It’s important that my workplace that supports visual thinking, rapid prototyping, and collaborative problem solving.

And some of them are just things I’ve learned that I want in a workplace, time and time again. My former acting coach taught me that it’s essential to love using the tools of your trade. It’s important not to ignore those things.

So let me know…..  where should I work?  And what do you want in your next job?

I wanted to announce a few big changes in my life of late.

LON–>SFO

I’ve moved back to San Francisco to be closer to family and the amazing pulse of California life that I know and love.

ACADEMIA–>INDUSTRY

I am now on indefinite leave from the tenure track at the London School of Economics. We are still working out the details, but I hope to keep working with the Department of Management in some capacity while I’m away, perhaps still teaching on some executive programs like our new Global MiM and the Executive Summer School.

I am also looking for ways to continue “teaching” here in the Bay Area, whether in a classroom or as an innovation coach like I did with Haas@Work. (If you have a need for a facilitator or guest speaker, I’d love to hear from you.)

KICKING ASS & TAKING NAMES!

I’m thrilled to get to focus on the design strategy work I love so much - I’m officially on the job market. (I’m having so much fun visiting friends of friends at SF’s most exciting design firms. Keep the leads coming!)

I am also getting to dedicate more time on my freelance organizational consulting practice, Kickass Creative. I have been involved in some very innovative projects lately, applying behavioral and social psychology research to making things and solving business problems through design (like at Nutmeg, an exciting financial startup I advise in the UK).

I’M STILL UP IN THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING….

…but for different reasons than before. I’m a proud new mom of a delightful baby boy, born in London this past August!  I miss London (and going out) but couldn’t be happier to get to glimpse the world through my precious baby’s eyes. Going to bed early is the new sleeping in!

That’s the gist of it. I’ll keep you updated as my plans evolve…  in the meantime, if you’re in the Bay Area I’d love to hear from you!  – Caneel

Choosing a thesis topic is kind of crazy.  I feel like I’m committing to marriage or something. Is it the right one? Will I be happy? Will I get bored? Will it keep my interest? Is there something better out there? 

- A Masters Student

Dear Masters Student,

I know, the decision can be crippling!!!  Don’t let it paralyze you.  The best way to pick is to write out your thought process.  Play with ideas.  Talk to yourself in your journal about the pros and cons of each idea that pops into your head, not worrying about the order.

Most importantly, free-write through your thoughts, feelings, fears, and fascinations relating to your thesis.  They are extremely relevant to your progress.  I like handwriting best as I have more access to my emotional evaluation of my ideas when pen touches paper. I go to a café where I can noodle in my journal without being lulled into the safe distractions of the internet.

THINK BY WRITING…  This is my biggest advice for the whole entire process!  15 minutes a day free-writing, every single day except Sunday. Let it flow, writing “I don’t know what to write” when you’re stuck – don’t wait till you know what you want to say. You figure out what you want to say by writing.

Feels disorderly?  That’s okay, and a necessary part of the process you need to push through.  Probably you don’t have a list of distinct dissertation topics or ideas that you could list and write pros/cons for at this stage.  There are probably many that are similar.  Or maybe you don’t have any ideas (or so you think!).  This method acknowledges that.  Instead, it allows you to investigate the blurry edges between ideas – the overlaps.

I often hear people say that they no longer read novels; that if they’re going to take the time to read a book, they want to learn something.

But “nonfiction” means neither objective nor important.

Fiction teaches empathy and truth about the impossible diversity human experience: This is NOT a waste of time.

Reading novels is both enjoyable and enlightening. Practice it. Allow yourself.

(And for some book-loving inspiration, check out my favorite tumblr blog, Bookshelf Porn.)

This morning I sat stuck in the London Underground for about 90 minutes. I was listening to the Mac Power User Podcast – their “workflows” podcasts are great. Anyway, it got me thinking about the tools that I’ve wasted hours on over the years. I jotted down a little list on my iPhone as I waited for my train to start moving again.  Here is that list.

To save you some time, I am only including my tried-and-true favorites. These are tools and software applications I use effortlessly every day, without even thinking about  it.  I am intentionally not including links to any of these apps; if I did, I would be tempting you to read about each, try each one out, and not spend any time writing.  But I did decide to share my list, because I always wish people would share their work processes.  This list reveals a bit about my own academic/writing workflow, and gives props to some of the developers who have made damn good products.

*Writing

1. Scrivener
2. Taskpaper (synced to iPhone with Simpletext.app)
3. Writeroom
4. Textmate

*Thinking

1. Omnigraffle
2. Mindmanager
3. Omnioutliner

*Utilities I couldn’t live without

1. Textexpander
2. Clips
3. and most of all, Quicksilver. I am nearly certain that I truly could not live without Quicksilver.
4. Dropbox (ditto)

*Data storage

1. Devonthink
2. Evernote
3. Notational Velocity (synced to iPhone with Simplenote.app)

*Research

1. Sente
2. Papers
3. PASW Statistics (used to be called SPSS)
4. ISI Web of Knowledge

*Time managers

1. Time Out break reminder software
2. Apimac timer (for timing myself while writing – or using the Pomodoro Technique)!
3. A little clip-on digital kitchen clock and a pad of paper where I write what I’m working on RIGHT NOW and the time I start and end
4. RescueTime

*Excel functions for data analysis

1. Pivot tables
2. Conditional formatting
3. Vlookup

*writing support resources

1. Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing podcast
2. Dr. Wicked’s Write or Die web tool
3. Gina Hiatt’s Academic Writing Club
4. Howard Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists

Join the debate: How do you decide when, where, and with whom an idea is worth sharing??

Help inspire cutting-edge innovation research: When are you most likely to share your new ideas with others? Why? Please share your thoughts in the comments, or privately email me at caneel [[at]] g mail.  I will credit very helpful responses when I eventually publish this research.  Thanks!

How great that Jonathan will be able to watch this when he’s a teenager, wondering if any of the glowing things his parents said about him were ever true… Sometimes, Moms are not exaggerating when they said their kids are brilliant.  Enjoy.

Ratatat

I have written before about the evils of multi-tasking and especially task-switching. However I’d like to offer a caveat.

One part of the brain – the critic – is logical, rational, judgmental, and oriented to language and analysis. Distract this part with other words or quantitative, patterned, or analytical input (like music), and you can occupy your inner critic… thus allowing the fun and playful part of your brain to have free rein,  much like a child playing alone in a room or a garden.

For instance, I like to paint to music. I try to keep with one song or one album throughout a whole piece, but you could do either way. While music with vocals is distracting to me while doing statistics or writing up my academic research (I love lyrics too much!), I find the opposite is true with painting. I can only last painting in silence for 30 minutes or so, before being frustrated or disgusted or antsy, but I can actually relax and paint for hours at a time while listening vocal music.

If you’ve been struggling with Resistance against doing your Creative Work, you should try turning on a light-handed distractor, like ambient music (I do love Ratatat for writing).  The desire to over-ride your distractor, and actually engage with your creative task, may surprise even the worst procrastinators.  A little surround-sound offers the same thing that a deadline does – a need to just focus on the task at hand, no matter what the inner critic says.

Earlier this week, Steven Johnson came to the London School of Economics to present his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: A Natural History of Innovation. This thought leader’s fascinating talk was sponsored by my department.

(You can watch the video or download the podcast on the LSE Events website.)

At the end of his talk, I asked Johnson to explain how we as individuals can come up with more “good ideas”.

Steven described his method: He keeps one single document of all of his idea and hunches.  It’s a running log of book ideas, article ideas, new theories, ideas about people to talk to, and so forth….  anything, really, that could be called an idea.

The idea of keeping one running log of ideas is related to the tradition of keeping a commonplace book, an enlightenment-era practice that Johnson himself is quite fond of – although he keeps his in a very high-tech way.

But unlike a commonplace book, this chronological list of ideas is exclusive, separated from all other thoughts and reference materials (an information-storage distinction Scott Belsky might advocate).

Then – and here’s the important bit – he reads over it every three months or so. Revisiting one’s own archive of ideas is a recurrent theme of Johnson’s. Keeping ideas in a separate log is crucial for this step, because it allows him to actually USE them eventually, when the building blocks – or he himself – are ready.

He called this process of re-reading what you’ve written at regular intervals “networking with yourself.”  It’s seeing if something the present you has at your disposal is useful for the past you. It’s Johnson’s “slow hunch” concept happening inside the asynchronous neural network of the mind as it stretches across time, rather than across dense diverse networks of a city or the internet.

Re-reading has a self-affirming benefit – he often discovers years later that’s he’s done something with an idea (“Hey, that one became a book!”).

But re-reading also has a practical payoff.  Personal innovation becomes more efficient and the ROI on each creative half-baked idea is multiplied. Maybe when you first have an idea, you don’t know the right people or you lack the resources needed to make things happen. Perhaps, you were missing a crucial piece of knowledge or technology. Often, you are simply not ready to implement an idea due to your own personal circumstances.  In short, a “slow hunch” from years ago suddenly becomes useful because you revisited your idea log.

Check out Steven Johnson’s blog, a clever 5-minute RSA Animation illustrating Where Good Ideas Come From, and this video from his talk at the LSE.

I have started my own single-document idea log…. have you?