Distraction Enhances Creativity
Wired Magazine: How Twitter and Facebook Make Us More Productive.
Studies that accuse social networks of reducing productivity assume that time spent microblogging is time strictly wasted. But that betrays an ignorance of the creative process. Humans weren’t designed to maintain a constant focus on assigned tasks. We need periodic breaks to relieve our conscious minds of the pressure to perform — pressure that can lock us into a single mode of thinking. Musing about something else for a while can clear away the mental detritus, letting us see an issue through fresh eyes, a process that creativity researchers call incubation.
Read the whole article.
A Great Man is One Sentence
In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, on of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy. ‘A great man,’ she told him, ‘is one sentence.’ Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: ‘He preserved the union and freed the slaves.’ Franklin Roosevelt’s was: ‘He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.’ Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.
…One way to orient your life toward greater purpose is to think about your sentence.
-Daniel Pink, Drive, pp. 154-155
Completing 2009; Beginning 2010
Last year, on the first day of 2009, my wife and I made a “What Happened in 2008″ list. We wrote down every significant event in our lives that we could think of from 2008 (birth of our second child, trips we took, major lessons God taught us, that hilarious night we’ll never forget, etc.). After making that list, we then began to talk, pray, and dream about 2009 and set some goals for 2009.
This year, we did the same thing. Today we wrote a 3 page “What Happened in 2009″ list. We then asked ourselves some questions and did some praying and dreaming for 2010. We’re finding that this new tradition gives a great sense of cohesiveness, history, and focus to our life together. In the future I imagine it will be helpful to look back at these “what happened” lists and remind ourselves of how God was at work in our lives in the past.
I got this idea from productivity guru David Allen. If you’re wanting to do something like this, below is an excerpt from Allen’s latest newsletter that can help jump start your listing and thinking. We don’t use all of Allen’s prompts and questions, and we have added questions of our own, but we’ve found that many of Allen’s prompts and questions generate great discussion in bringing closure to the old year and focus to the new year.
…here are some questions that can guide you in your 2009 review and 2010 goal setting. When I go through these kinds of questions I like to consider my answers in several areas:
Physical
Emotional
Mental
Spiritual
Financial
Family
Community Service
Fun / creativity / recreationCOMPLETING AND REMEMBERING 2009
Review the list of all completed projects
What was your biggest triumph in 2009?
What was the smartest decision you made in 2009?
What one word best sums up and describes your 2009 experience?
What was the greatest lesson you learned in 2009?
What was the most loving service you performed in 2009?
What is your biggest piece of unfinished business in 2009?
What are you most happy about completing in 2009?
Who were the three people that had the greatest impact on your life in 2009?
What was the biggest risk you took in 2009?
What was the biggest surprise in 2009?
What important relationship improved the most in 2009?
What compliment would you liked to have received in 2009?
What compliment would you liked to have given in 2009?
What else do you need to do or say to be complete with 2009?CREATING THE NEW YEAR
What would you like to be your biggest triumph in 2010?
What advice would you like to give yourself in 2010?
What is the major effort you are planning to improve your financial results in 2010?
What would you be most happy about completing in 2010?
What major indulgence are you willing to experience in 2010?
What would you most like to change about yourself in 2010?
What are you looking forward to learning in 2010?
What do you think your biggest risk will be in 2010?
What about your work, are you most committed to changing and improving in 2010?
What is one as yet undeveloped talent you are willing to explore in 2010?
What brings you the most joy and how are you going to do or have more of that in 2010?
Who or what, other than yourself, are you most committed to loving and serving in 2010?
What one word would you like to have as your theme in 2010?
Waiting
…waiting is living through those moments when you do not understand what God is doing and you have no power to change your circumstances for the better.
…waiting will always reveal the true character of your heart.
Theoretical faith is always easier than practical, functional faith, and when we are faced with the challenge of waiting it can be disturbing to realize how little of that real-life faith we have.
Your heart is always exposed by the way you wait.
Waiting is hard precisely because it calls us to live by faith and not by sight.
Waiting, therefore, is not a sign that your world is out of control. Rather, it is a sign that your world is under the wise and infinitely attentive control of a God of fathomless wisdom and boundless love. This means you can rest as you wait, not because you like to wait, but because you trust the One who is calling you to wait.
The wait itself is a gift…Waiting is about what you will become as you wait.
You see, waiting is not an interruption of God’s plan. It is his plan.
Waiting is not just about what I get at the end of the wait, but about who I become as I wait.
Quotes taken from chapter 9 of Paul Tripp, Broken-Down House: Living Productively in a World Gone Bad.
The Value of a Wandering Mind
Clive Thompson always has interesting things to say. His latest piece in Wired is thought provoking. Perhaps it’s a good thing for our minds to wander.
Our modern info-culture lionizes those who possess laserlike focus, particularly at work. Drifting off into a reverie is considered the enemy of productivity, which is partly why some companies control employee access to the Internet…
But what if we’re wrong about daydreaming? What if it’s crucial to solving problems in our personal lives and at work?
Brain scientists are beginning to suspect that it is. And if they’re right, we might need to rethink the way we work — perhaps even develop tools that actually encourage mental drift.
For years, brain scientists viewed a wandering mind as merely a lapse in cognition. But recent studies have found that we lose concentration shockingly often. A 2007 study by Michael Kane of the University of North Carolina found that our minds drift away from our tasks fully one-third of the time. And this suggests that daydreaming can actually be useful — because if it were such a bad thing, it’s unlikely that we’d do it so often.
Why do our minds wander? Brain-scanning technology has uncovered some clues. It turns out that when your mind drifts, your temporal lobes — which are associated with processing long-term memories — become busier. So when you float off into a reverie, you’re actually doing important data-storage work.
Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though. Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving. The upshot, says Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara who is studying this area, is that your idling mind is likely doing deeply creative work, tackling your hairiest long-term tasks — projects you’ve been trying to address for months, the arc of your career, the state of your marriage. “Mind-wandering is actually a very involved task,” Schooler says. “You leave the here and now and focus on more remote concerns that nevertheless might be more important. We’ve been focusing on the downside of this, but we need to think about the upside.”
Checking Email 2x a Day
While on vacation I did some thinking, praying, and goal setting for my life and my work. One of the goals I set calls for a change in how I use email as a pastor. Preparing for 2 weeks of vacation, I made a decision to not check email once during vacation. I loved it.
During my time away I realized how easily email can:
1) distract me/get me off task from the work I’m doing (how email can lead to an unwise use to time)
2) act as a default to-do list instead of my prepared to-d0 list (how email can control me, instead of me controlling email)
So, my new goal is to check email only 2-3x a day. I’m 3 days into my experiment. So far, so good.
I check email 1x in the morning, somewhere around 10am. This gives me a few hours in the morning to focus on solid blocks of work. Around 10am I tackle my inbox.
I next check email once or twice in the afternoon. At about 2 or 3pm, me and my inbox go at it again. Many of those emails have something to do with the morning email session. I also might pay my inbox a quick visit right before I leave the office for the day.
For several months not I’ve also been leaving my laptop at the office most days so that I have a cleaner break from work, so that email doesn’t punctuate my evening at home with my family. My wife loves this. I dig it too.
This doesn’t mean that I only send email 2-3x a day. Throughout the work day I’m still sending original emails as needed (making sure at those times to avert my eyes and not even look at my inbox).
We’ll see how this new goal/experiment goes. I can see this becoming a habit. Visiting my inbox only 2-3x a day is feeling about right.
Thoughts? What are you doing with email?
New Surfboard
Fellow surfers (I’m a really bad surfer), a Bay Area surfer/designer has reinvented the longboard. From today’s Chronicle:
The first thing you notice is the shape. It looks like a tadpole. Maybe a duckbill. Yet there’s something feminine about its curvy waist and tapered end.
The Swedish designer responsible for Apple’s first translucent laptop has gone outside the box again to deliver what he calls his best – and most personal – product to date: a makeover of the classic long board.
It does not look like a surfboard, which explains the dubious looks Thomas Meyerhoffer gets when he totes his around.
Read the whole thing. I want to give this a surf.
Time Wasting Efficiency
David Powlison on how he manages his time:
cultural ideal of tightly scheduled efficiency. For me, effective and
productive often operate in ways that seem quite “inefficient.” I’m
more “third-world” in my use of time: event-oriented and
person-oriented, rather than time-conscious and to-do-list-conscious. I
operate with an inner gyroscope tuned to whether or not any particular
experience or interaction is complete – not to how long it
takes or whether it fits the schedule. I’m attuned to whether or not
any particular thought is actually finished thinking, rather than
whether the product is done on time. So I tend to take the time it
takes to get something right—whether that “something” is the close
attentiveness of getting fully engaged in this conversation of
consequence, or how to craft this sentence and paragraph, or whether
I’m stopping and actually noticing the hawk flying overhead right now.
Read the whole piece.
Too Much Input
“In the context of stress, the great paradox of the modern age may be that there is not more hardship, just more news–and too much of it. The 24/7 streaming torrent of tragedy and demands flashing at us from an array of digital displays keeps the amygdala flying. The negative and the hectic and the hopeless heap on the stress, but we figure we can handle it because we always have. Up to a point. Then, we just want to relax and take a break, so we grab a drink and plop down in front of the TV or go sit on a beach somewhere. It’s not wonder that obesity has doubled in the past twenty years–our lifestyle today is both more stressful and more sedentary.”
SPARK, p. 69
