Hypomnemata

When doing creative things, there are challenges at three basic stages: intimidation in starting, getting stuck in ruts while implementing, and chasing my tail while wrapping up.  In this post, I want to share three “techniques” to help get over the intimidation up front, get out of ruts as you’re building, and keep from chasing your tail as you wrap up.

First, a few examples of each problem.  When designing a system, I get intimidated by the openness of the blank page, and don’t want to write down anything until I’m confident that it’s Right (free fourth tip: this is why I always start out in tiny notebooks or on notecards).  It’s also nice to use whiteboards; something about the ephemerality of them is really helpful.  That said, there’s still a lot of ground to cover in getting over that initial hurdle, and Merlin Mann has some great quotes and reassurance to share.

Next up is getting stuck in a rut.  For instance, when designing an architecture, I sometimes can’t decide which component should own a particular piece of functionality.  If I’m not careful, I wind up getting stuck in little mental loops, recapitulating my own ideas over and over.  Once I recognize this, I break out a deck of cards with totally insane advice (think Tarot, but for the creative process), and give it a go.  This usually helps reset my state and reinstate some clarity.

But, sometimes I’m stuck in that rut because I’m simply overwhelmed.  This is most common when debugging a program crash that takes a certain sequence of operations to recreate, it’s hard to keep track of which operations I’ve tried.  In that case, I start taking notes of what I’ve tried, and then look for patterns, especially where I’ve missed some alternative way to go through things.

With those kinds of problem in mind, here’s some techniques (err, process hacks) for getting over each of them.

First up, getting over intimidation: Merlin Mann on Doing Creative Work.  Mr Mann talks at length about the mental hurdles you face in the creative process, and how to overcome/ignore them.  Here are the quotes that really resonated for me; I hope you find them helpful, or at least they help motivate you to spend half an hour listening to someone giving great, free advice.

@17:24  — “Anybody you know who does great work, sit and sweat it: I am a fraud,  I am never going to do anythign good again, and I’m going to die alone, with shit in my pants, watching cable”

@19:00 — “Develop an insane amount of tolerance for having no idea what something is turning into.”

@20:15 –  “If you let your brain give you ideas, you can execute them. You can’t force them out, you can’t think them out.  You think you can.  You think if you buy a  better mind-mapping app, you think if you get a new project management app, you think if you get a really cool pen, it’s gonna get easier, and it’s not.  You’ve got everything on your body right now, with your nerd phone or your space pen… you literally have everything you need right now to get started on that.”

@21:15 — “You’re going to have forgive yourself when it doesn’t work out on the very first day”

If, after all that, you’re not convinced that your fears of abject failure are normal, well, you need to go catch up on who that dude is, and maybe read more about how authors view themselves.  Just sayin’.

As for getting stuck in ruts, I really like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards.  I like them so much that, if I weren’t a starving entrepreneur at the moment, I might even buy them.  Until then, I’ll use the iPhone or JavaScript versions (search the App Store for the iPhone, JavaScript Oblique Strategies).  They’re a great way to knock yourself out of mental ruts you might get stuck in.  Sure, they’re totally inappropriate for the kind of work we do, but that’s half the benefit: try to make the bizarro-in-context advice (“Change instrument roles”) fit what you’re doing.  If nothing else, the mental exercise clears your mind of the patterns you keep following.  In the same vein, I have a tarot program on my iPhone.  Sure, it was $3, but that’s such a low price for a lifetime of bad advice and creative jostling.

Sometimes, though, that jostling just isn’t enough.  Especially when debugging, I sometimes keep track of which steps I’ve taken, which combinations of techniques I’ve tried, or what order of operations, etc.  In doing this, I can find new patterns to try, and keep from repeating the same steps to no avail.  This is one of those cases where the logbook idea I posted about last time really pays off: when you find a similar crash in the future, you can look back to your repro steps for this time.

All in all, I find myself relying on these more as I’m my own boss.  It’s key to keep myself productive, engaged, and not-frustrated.  A lot of that comes from being able to focus, recognize when I’m stuck in one of the above loops, and grab the right tool to pry myself out.  I hope this helps you, too.

If you have any further ideas or feedback, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Since I don’t remember when, I’ve kept a paper logbook next to my computers.  It’s my lab notebook, where I track what I work on each day, with tables of intermediate results and charts literally cut out of spreadsheet printouts and taped in.  This way, when I go into meetings, I just carry my notebook, and I have immediate access to the process I went through in a given tuning session, etc.  It’s most helpful when I’m coming back to something a week later: I can see what I’ve already tried, so I don’t wind up tuning in circles.  It’s second-most helpful when someone suggests pretty obvious refinements that didn’t pan out: “Shouldn’t we try inverting the score here, then doing this?” is answered with “If we do it that way, the recall goes down by 10% but we get a 0.5% improvement in precision, here’s the data.”  I love these notebooks (I keep nicer ones at home than I do at work, honestly), and find they’re really helpful for keeping me focused when working.  I’d highly recommend

These notebooks are obviously enough chock-full of proprietary information, so I can’t take them with me when I leave.  Therefore, they get handed off to some poor bastard who has to try and decipher my handwriting, process, etc.  It’s mostly a symbolic thing: “My time here is done; I leave these with you because I trust you to carry on what I was doing.”

Today, I handed off my notebooks for Aardvark (3 of ‘em) to my coworker Mike.  Tomorrow is my last day here; after that, I have a half-dozen little projects to chase down, as well as seeing how the world goes for a freelancing jack-of-all-trades.