7 Old-School Tools for Maximizing Creativity
Here's a perfect excuse to buy
some of those old-school supplies for "work" reasons. As it turns
out, most of these classic products have real-life creativity benefits.
It's back-to-school time, and you don't have to
look very far to find evidence that adults, too, like buying supplies to feel
organized.
Moleskine went public in 2013 and posted 2014
sales of $104 million. Its budding partnerships with tech companies like
Evernote, Adobe, and Livescribe show that a brand associated with traditional
handwriting can be a powerful ally.
It would be one thing if Moleskine were the
only brand attempting to bridge classic school/office supplies with
contemporary gadgets. In fact, startup Baron Fig raised $168,000 in 30 days
during its 2013 launch, amassing 4,242 backers who preordered 8,760
notebooks. Public Supply, another startup devoted to the elegant design of
paper notebooks, cracked the New York Times style section last
year.
What's
more, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence: artists, entrepreneurs, and experts
who swear by the creativity and productivity virtues of old-school supplies.
Which supplies, in particular? Here's a short list.
1. The traditional paper notebook or
journal
Entrepreneur Damon Brown makes a strong case for writing by hand (as
opposed to typing) as a way to slow down your thinking--and to better remember
what you've written.
The research of Pam Mueller, co-author of a
2014 study on note taking that appeared in Psychological
Science,
affirms Brown's experience. "People who handwrite reframe the content
and understand it better. On a computer, they write it all down without
thinking about it," she tells The Wall Street Journal.
Author Joyce Carol Oates, who writes her novels
longhand, points out that when you write something down, it's distinctly
yours--for no one else has your handwriting. "Our handwriting is unique to
us, like our fingerprints," she tells the Journal. "It seems bizarre to me that anyone
would wish only to 'write' via a keyboard in an impersonal idiom."
2. Colored pencils
For most entrepreneurs, sketching is a useful
skill. It's a fast way to take notes and remember presentations.
Even if you don't sketch, per se, you can use colors to create borders and
highlight key points.
What's more, sketching is an essential part of
prototyping, especially in the early phases of product design. There's a reason
most design sprints include a lightning-round of sketch exercises.
C. Todd Lombardo, who leads design sprints as Constant Contact's innovation architect, champions an exercise known
as the "6-up" in which participants draw out six possibilities in
five minutes. "It forces your brain to be in a state of generation, not one
of judgment, because you don't have the time," he says. Another
benefit, he adds, is that, "once everyone sees the various drawings up on
the wall, the room starts to build [ideas] on top of each other, and that
momentum leads to creative solutions."
3. The big pink eraser
Revisions are an essential part of any creative
process, whether you're brainstorming a business plan or devising a new
product. "Your first idea likely won't be your best. In fact, brilliant
work often results from much tweaking, redoing, and going back to the drawing
board," notes David Margolis, author of The
Billion-Dollar Creative: Inspiring Insights for Unleashing Your Creativity and
Achieving Higher Levels of Success.
4. The book strap
Before
electric devices could hold a thousand books, students and prolific readers
often had to carry around several books by hand. If you were born in the 1970s
or earlier, you might even remember buying book straps every September, so you
could more easily transport your load from class to class.
So why might the old-school book strap be
useful to a founder? Mainly because there's ample evidence you'll retain more of what
you read if you read it in a paperback form, as opposed
to on a Kindle or comparable device.
"This very gradual unfolding of paper as
you progress through a story is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the
visual sense of progress when you're reading," researcher Anne Mangen
tells The Guardian. "Perhaps this somehow aids the reader,
providing more fixity and solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and
progress of the text, and hence the story."
5. The paper calendar
Productivity expert Joelle K. Jay teaches
executives to become more efficient by"modeling"
their time:
sitting down and sketching how you'd like your ideal week or month to look.
Turning the model calendar into scheduling reality is always a challenge. But
if you begin by drawing it out, you'll have a clearer idea of your
priorities.
6. Post-it Notes
Mark McGuinness, a poet, creative coach, and
author, uses a stack of 3" x 3" Post-it Notes to break his to-do list
into manageable chunks. The top Post-it in the stack contains his list for
today. "Because my day is a limited size, I figure it makes sense to
limit the size of my to-do list," he explains on 99u.com. "If I can't fit the day’s tasks on the
Post-it, I'm not likely to fit them into the day."
7. Desk trays
Do cluttered workspaces inhibit or foster
creativity? You can argue it both ways. But if you want to avoid
clutter, one useful template is entrepreneur Neil Patel's two-tray
system for handling incoming paper.
Here's how it works: One tray is for new
(unread, unopened) documents. The other is for documents you've looked at and
need to take action on. The "old" tray serves as a visual to-do list.
"This is a very simple approach," he writes, "but it works wonders
for eliminating paper clutter from a desk, freeing you to be more
productive."
BY ILAN MOCHARI
No comments:
Post a Comment