I’ve never had a good idea sitting at a desk. Ever. All of my ideas have arrived apparently unbidden, usually while I’m doing something totally unrelated, like standing in the shower, drifting off to sleep, or strolling aimlessly around Sandton City.
Driving is especially productive, I’ve found. For some reason, perhaps because my mind is focused at least in part on paying attention to road conditions and what other motorists are doing, it is prevented from interfering with that mysterious mental process that produces eureka moments.
Scientific research bears out my experience. The kind of thinking processes that most of us associate with our jobs — sitting at desks, in airless meeting rooms, writing up notes on whiteboards — seldom results in new solutions to old, vexing problems. University of British Columbia psychology professor Kalina Christoff argues that daydreaming rather than focused, goal-orientated thinking is more likely to produce creative responses to problems. Letting your mind wander is crucial to creativity. Citing research by UCLA, this blogger describes the “focus and drift” method as a more structured way of daydreaming in order to generate good ideas.
Finding different ways of thinking about an issue or challenge — or, in the words of that horribly overused cliche, thinking out the box — can be phenomenally difficult, as this article in Wired argues —
“In order to think creatively, you must develop new neural pathways and break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorisation. As Mark Twain said, ‘Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned’. For most people, this does not come naturally. Often, the harder you try to think differently, the more rigid the categories become.”
To come up with new ideas, it seems — the kind of ideas that change companies, or lives, or industries — the brain must not be able to predict what will happen next. In my own experience, the best way to come up with ideas is what I call the “percolator” approach: feed the mind with information from a wide range of sources (some of them immediately and obviously relevant and others not) and then allow time for processing. Just as a percolator turns beans into coffee, so the mind, given the space and time to mull over a challenge, will invariably come back with some kind of solution.
What all of this research suggests is that the way we work might actually impede instead of catalyse the generation of good ideas. How many of us sit in offices or brainstorm around boardroom tables, usually with the same people we work with day after day after day? How many of us make sure we’re seen sitting at our desks in order to put in the hours, rather than actually accomplishing anything of value? I work in an industry that depends on creativity for its very survival — and yet the way in which we try to generate new ways of doing things is fundamentally uncreative.
So next time I feel the urge to leave my desk, walk around, perhaps take a drive or visit the shops down the road, I’m not going to feel guilty about it. After all, I’m being more productive than if I stayed in the office and stared at this screen.
My best teachers were those that got us out the class as often as possible, away from routine, and the stuffiness of conformity…I learnt the most from them…routine is enough to drive me bonkers, are to take walk with me the next time your are in Sandton Sarah?
Here’s a link for the TED channel devoted to reflection on what catalyses the creative spark:
http://www.ted.com/themes/the_creative_spark.html
Then again, here’s a different angle:
http://despair.com/creativity.html
All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.
Friedrich Nietzsche
My new job requires no regular office hours besides two hours a week so students can call me. I have tasks to do as an academic and all my teaching is online or other distant means. I have never been more productive in my writing and in developing other materials. This is despite all my distractions being able to be embraced. I am off to build a dog house before I finish a grant proposal and I know after the time away from the desk it will be better than ever and definitely better than had I sat for the next few hours plugging away at it.
Beer gives you very good ideas.
But they’re often the wrong ideas too.
Curses!
I believe in the ‘perculator’ approach. I must admit though that my best and most creative doodles have come from sitting in dreadfully long teleconferences and ‘strategy’ meetings…
My niece said that doing her thesis involved spending an awful lot of hours sitting in the pub, just musing…the difficulty was to stick to only only beer while she did it.
Same here – long meetings result in long swatches of notes and ideas on my part – it’s high time we have some long meetings again!
I can identify with what you are saying, as an artist , I have to continually come up with fresh ideas and seem to have developed a similar approach….I started hiking as walking seems to get the oxygen flowing into those hidden cavities and loosens the creative brain cells…It’s like when you have forgotton someone’s name…think about something else and it will just come to you….when you try too hard, it just jams up the works….hahahha
Love your column.
Beer is like a self-erasing whiteboard. All the good equations go up on it, exponentially increasing as you imbibe. And then you fall asleep. Upon awakening, the whiteboard has self-erased and you STILL have a bar tab.
It’s like Ixion’s curse. Or was it Sisyphus?
Something’s erasing the board again.