What if we could eliminate noise and give our brains space to do harder work or process different things?
The Costanza Principle
There's a particularly funny episode of Seinfeld titled "The Abstinence," where George abstains from sex because his girlfriend has Mono, and strange things begin to happen to the serial underachiever. He appears to utilize more of his brain and becomes mentally sharp. He remembers where he left things years ago. He starts to read and understands math. He becomes more intelligent. Of course he ruined it all in a weak moment with a comely waitress.
That comedy sketch summarizes a simple and persistent myth that has stuck for years—that we use only 10% of our brain. That number may have more to do with 10 percent of our potential or capacity rather than 10% of brain use. But the idea sticks, I think, because of that hopeful notion of doing more than one thinks she is capable.
I thought of the Seinfeld sketch while I was reading Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice and it put me on a separate train of thought about creativity and productivity. What if we could take the idea of eliminating noise in order to give our brains space to focus, to do harder work, or to process different things?
Schwartz says that in effect we do this every day when we go into autopilot to take care of our morning routines—bathing, shaving, brushing, etc—because we don't need or want to waste time and effort considering choices all the time. So it started me wondering how this idea translates to the work I do.
The are two ways I thought this idea could have some benefit for me: first as a tool for freeing my mind in everyday creative activity, and second, as a tool for users of the things I design not to feel overwhelmed with choice and decision making.
So I started listing how I might make this idea work in each of those contexts. For now, I'm going to focus on how this relates to my creative process, and what I try to do that now seems related to this idea.
Processes
If I learn and use a technique or process, I write about it and when necessary turn it into a set of tools that support the process. I record the steps in the system for re-doing without having to re-learn. I modify what I learn and borrow from others when what I've gleaned limits my ability to get things done.
I've done this over and over with all of the information architecture and interaction design practices that I employ. I just stand on the shoulders of those who pioneer and test these processes, making use of what makes sense, and discarding aspects as needed. This is one of the aspects of agencies that I think is really great. Processes are so well defined for those inside and outside the agency to understand that it becomes part of the common language of the team.
Tool Sets
I find toolsets and frameworks for nearly everything I do, or I create them when I can't find them. They add rigor to my process, and allow me to re-use without thought. I break out of the frameworks as necessary, but start with a sense of the complete framework, even if only in concept, and expand to satisfy my use cases and needs.
One of the things I learned early in my career from Perl programmers I worked with is that code libraries help you to be lazy. Laziness can be a virtue if it means you don't want to sweat the routine and small things so you can focus on the bigger ideas. Designers also do this with design pattern libraries and component libraries. I don't limit myself to only what libraries provide, but I do exploit them when they're useful and save me time and effort.
So what does this buy you?
I think to sum up, this all comes back to the idea of freeing your mind from the tyranny of small decisions, so you can focus on the bigger, more intellectual or creative ones. A lot of this isn't exactly auto-pilot, or may not feel that way in the beginning. But after years of developing and evolving these things, I feel some of the routines or toolsets I've created have become a part of my vocabulary. The only problem is maybe that other things compete for the open space I create. I have more to say about that, and the issue of focus, but will leave that to another entry.
I'll end as I often do with a question. What kinds of things are you doing to put your work life on autopilot?
And here I thought I was the only crazy one.
I do likewise reading various books & articles, highlighting interesting passages to notate with a "tip" or "step" if it's something that I think can add rigor to my process which of course is fully written out.
IMHO it comes down to 4 things, philosophy, principles, process & practice... tracking & upgrading the last 3 of those whenever you come across information that challenges what you thought or clears up ignorance oftentimes in areas we're completely unaware ignorance existed (the what I don't know, I don't know areas as I like to call them).
Bottomline, I find you HAVE TO love what you're doing enough to develop ways to enable you to be lazy in it (through your processes, frameworks, cliff notes, etc.) and I mean in the fundamental areas to make room for acquiring & learning more advanced approaches.
Or to say it even simpler PAY ATTENTION TO EVERYTHING AND ITERATE ON YOUR PROCESS... AS IT'S NEVER DONE.
My .02 - F
Great post. I've been kicking around this problem quite a bit lately. Quantity vs. Quality and how diminishing returns stem from trying to force creativity. I think it's more of a philosophy: creativity cannot always be conjured up when requested. Most of the time for me, creativity is more like tinkering - and best done when in a relaxed and open state of mind.
Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts is an awesome study of what creativitity is and where it comes from. Glass says it's like an underground river that you know is there, but you can't always see it or tap into it.
Good stuff.
Thanks for the excellent post Michael. I think there may be something to be said for taking time out, clearing ones mind and then put a flag in the sand for what you want your life to be like in 2 - 5 years. Then with the subconscious having a firm grasp on that handrail let go ahead and live/work day to day - scratch items off the todo list - stay organized all the while moving to that long term goal.
I am totally on board with this. It came after I was reading Peter Drucker in which he was discussing how performance is the concentration of resources into a particular form.
Defined thus, I imagined what I would need to do concentrate my own resources. Since I trade in information and ultimately lease my brain out to cogitate peoples' problems, I found that my factors of production are data and attention. I borrowed some concepts from Linda Stone who is doing some amazing work on attention, mashed it up with some old-school George Pólya and of course Christopher Alexander and a pile of neuro/cogsci papers. What I came up with is what I am beginning to call A Surfeit of Precursors.
The idea goes like this: I am ultimately an information processor and I am made of meat. This meat operates within a heavily-constrained envelope. I do not create anything ex nihilo; everything is from something else. As such, I need to feed myself with precursors on a regular basis. A precursor is any half-finished piece of whatever I either find or make. The rule is I can only ever produce within one degree of my precursors. If I try for two, I am extremely likely to fail.
Consider this: Most of my best work I did between minutes and hours? Why? because everything was already lying around waiting to be fitted together. If I have a sea of this stuff, like so much LEGO, I can combine and recombine it together for a lifetime. By contrast, if I have to run around fetching these precursors, my experience is a slog at best and a failure at worst.
Imagine yourself as a painter living on a remote farm somewhere at some point in the middle ages. Imagine that in order to practice your craft you had to 1) grow hemp for and weave canvas 2) chop down trees and build frames 3) hunt a wild boar for bristles 4) mine pigments and so on. How much of your time would you be able to consecrate toward your chosen profession? Probably not much, especially since I didn't take subsistence activities into account.
So what should I be doing with my time? Continually finding and/or generating precursors as tangible, retrievable artifacts. The rest of the time I should be shaping my attention so that I can press these things into something great.
(Incidentally the way I understood the 10% brain remark was that our brains are made up of mostly axons that are like networking and the 10% is the neurons that do the thinking. It's just an incidental result of our physiology.)
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