Writing inspiration: dreams, creativity, and process edition

Some writing inspiration ahead.

First of all, Maria Konnikova's "How to Beat Writer's Block" at The New Yorker sums the research up in a nutshell. Here are two especially good parts:

“I think one must trust the writing process. Understand that creativity requires nonlinearity and unique associative combinations,” he says. “Creative people do a lot of trial and error and rarely know where they are going exactly until they get there.”

That, in the end, seems to be the main message of research into writer’s block: It’s useful to escape from external and internal judgment—by writing, for instance, in a dream diary, which you know will never be read—even if it’s only for a brief period.

 I'm glad to hear this. I started keeping a dream journal of sorts about four years ago, and while I can't prove that it's helped, simply writing things down seems to have made things better. I don't write the dreams down here, usually (some exceptions: the Mad Men writing group, hiking dreams, and blog wonderland), but a lot of times I dream in movies--that is, watching a movie that I wrote and directed. Sometimes they're just comic skits but more often whole movies. Move over, Stephen Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.

Seriously, though, the stories I tell myself in my dreams have, I think, gotten less formulaic and more creative since I've been writing them down, and writing while dreaming has to help with writing while not unconscious.

And recently the whole work process has gotten easier--lots of ideas and a willingness to work on them.  There's still a little dither and blather early in the morning, but this week (spring break) I've been moving from writing on Thing 1 to revising Project A to drafting Project B to editing project C. And I want to work on them. That's the most amazing part.

What's working?

1. Reconciling myself to the idea that, rain or shine, the only time I want--really want--to write new and creative things is after 7 p.m. and deciding that it's okay to do other things (edit, revise) before that. If you sit down to do it every day, who cares if it's 7 p.m. or 7 a.m.? 
2. Building in little breaks with Pomodoro. Sometimes when I've been concentrating on a paragraph or sentence, even a couple of minutes of distraction (news sites, a glass of water, putting in a load of laundry) sends me back to it with a fresh perspective. 
3. Logging the work, in the spreadsheet and in a little time notebook that I've been keeping. 
4. Getting the reward of an X in the box at 750words.com. 

Nicoleandmaggie have the second in their series of writing productivity posts up; go read it.  Unless someone forces me, I'm always going to fail on two of the measures: (1) drinking coffee (never learned how) and (2) writing in the morning. But this week is showing me that those aren't the only ways to go.

Procrastination: not the thief of time but the generator of creativity

At the New York Times, Adam Grant suggests not being a "pre-crastinator" but a procrastinator. He used to write everything weeks or months in advance but was convinced by a study that procrastination can actually help your creativity.

The short version: if you know you have to do something but put it off for a bit (but don't wait until the last minute), the ideas that emerge are likely to be more creative.

And some epic procrastinators are in this boat with you:

Steve Jobs procrastinated constantly, several of his collaborators have told me. Bill Clinton has been described as a “chronic procrastinator” who waits until the last minute to revise his speeches. Frank Lloyd Wright spent almost a year procrastinating on a commission, to the point that his patron drove out and insisted that he produce a drawing on the spot. It became Fallingwater, his masterpiece. Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter behind “Steve Jobs” and “The West Wing,” is known to put off writing until the last minute. When Katie Couric asked him about it, he replied, “You call it procrastination, I call it thinking.”

I'm hoping this works, since I've been taking care of a family member all week and haven't touched email or writing, despite deadlines. Time to face the music and dig in--but here's hoping that today, when I do, the ideas will be all the better for it. 

Writing inspiration: Creativity link roundup

After yesterday, when I did not do one scrap of writing (Thanksgiving, yes, but if I had time for a Godfather marathon with family, I had time to write), I figured it was time for some writing inspiration.

"How Environment Can Boost Creativity" is interesting, once you make your way past the blizzard of popups that The Atlantic has taken to hurling between its articles and the public.

Apparently a messy desk can help (check), dim lighting (check, though not dim by choice), and a little noise:

Evidence also supports the habits of people who eschew a desk altogether, instead opting to work in a coffee shop. A little bit of ambient noise (between 50 and 70 decibels—the average noise level of a coffee shop) slightly disrupts the mental process, which one study showed to help people engage in more abstract thinking during a word-association task.

This explains why so many people write in coffee shops, maybe, and why I ought to give it a try.  But I play music to drown out the voices within; does that count?

You can even listen to coffee shop sounds on your computer, if you want to: https://coffitivity.com/

And more interesting points:

Though few people actually do it anymore, writing by hand can help with idea generation, learning, and memorization.

Other studies have shown that taking walks, or working in rooms with high ceilings, can promote divergent or abstract thinking.

Another tip: Get a little tipsy.

Handwriting: will try it again. Walks: absolutely. Rooms with high ceilings: is this the library effect? And a little tipsy? How about if you reach for a Diet Coke instead, even if wine is probably better for you?

What about coffee itself?  Just as I was about to try to learn to drink coffee because of all the health benefits, we were told that it might hamper creativity.
  
The New Yorker  reviews the research and concludes, "Yup, afraid so," whereas The Atlantic, in a deep state of denial and perhaps dizzy from all the popups, says, "Nah, don't worry about it.  Next to Adderall, it's the best thing we've got."

There's also a creativity search engine, Yossarian, from "I tried to make a search engine write me a poem" at NYTimes.  I didn't try it, because you have to create an account and log in, and I do not need one more password to write down.

I calculate that I spend at least 15 minutes a week tending passwords--looking them up in a book I have, since every one is a precious unique snowflake, as we are told to make them; having password reminders sent and then trying to remember the passwords for the email account where I have the reminders sent, and so on.

Now we're being told that maybe depression is related to creativity or at least deep problem-solving behaviors.  "What if We're Wrong about Depression?" suggests a physiological basis related to infection and a possibly adaptive evolutionary purpose, which the ubiquitous brain science writer Maria Popova puts in context over at BrainPickings. No one would ever, ever choose this as a strategy for creativity, but it helps to have another way to think about this debilitating problem.

But maybe the best strategy is Rachel Toor's "The Habits of Highly Productive Writers." It's a great piece of writing inspiration. She advises that a little self-hatred if you don't get your writing done can go a long way toward getting it out the door and that yes, you can get bored with your own writing midway through.

I'm not so sure about Toor's friend who has "trained his family" that he can ignore them because his writing is more important, though. Maybe he's Faulkner, who said the same thing, or maybe he's just this guy.  He'd better be pretty darned sure that his writing is worth it, and unless he's Faulkner, I doubt that it is.

Don't multitask; partition your day. Your brain demands it.

No post today, but "Hit the Reset Button in Your Brain" at the New York Times describes what the brain struggles with when interrupted. Read the whole thing; it's worth it.

Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.

If you want to be more productive and creative, and to have more energy, the science dictates that you should partition your day into project periods. Your social networking should be done during a designated time, not as constant interruptions to your day.
 Email, too, should be done at designated times. An email that you know is sitting there, unread, may sap attentional resources as your brain keeps thinking about it, distracting you from what you’re doing. What might be in it? Who’s it from? Is it good news or bad news? It’s better to leave your email program off than to hear that constant ping and know that you’re ignoring messages.

And this from the Wall Street Journal: 

“People can’t multitask very well, and when people say they can, they’re deluding themselves,” said MIT neuroscientist Earl Miller. “The brain is very good at deluding itself.” Simply put, we can’t focus on more than one thing at a time. What we do is shift focus, trying to manage multiple threads. “Switching from task to task, you think you’re actually paying attention to everything around you at the same time. But you’re actually not” said Miller. Researchers like Miller say they can actually see the brain struggling. “You cannot focus on one while doing the other. That’s because of what’s called interference between the two tasks” explains Miller. “They both involve communicating via speech or the written word, and so there’s a lot of conflict between the two of them. 

The challenge is to define the problem – and the solution. “The current system lets other people add things to my to-do list” says Esther [Dyson]. 

Creativity Link Roundup: The Brains! The Brains!

Apparently I am thoroughly sick of writing about academic topics this summer, so let's talk, or link to articles about, brains--sweet, nourishing brains.

• "Secrets of the Creative Brain" from The Atlantic has an account of an interesting long-term study of creative people. Among the findings: 

"So far, this study—which has examined 13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—has borne out a link between mental illness and creativity similar to the one I found in my Writers’ Workshop study. The creative subjects and their relatives have a higher rate of mental illness than the controls and their relatives do (though not as high a rate as I found in the first study), with the frequency being fairly even across the artists and the scientists."  I would only say that, from talking to people who have worked in psychiatric wards, the reverse is not necessarily true: madness does not necessarily mean creativity.

• "Why Your Brain Needs More Downtime" from Scientific American (and can't we all say a big "amen" to that?). Not only does the brain like to laze around from time to time, but it's a hearty eater: 

By the mid 1990s, however, Marcus Raichle of Washington University in Saint Louis and his colleagues had demonstrated that the human brain is in fact a glutton, constantly demanding 20 percent of all the energy the body produces and requiring only 5 to 10 percent more energy than usual when someone solves calculus problems or reads a book.  . . . Related research suggests that the default mode network is more active than is typical in especially creative people, and some studies have demonstrated that the mind obliquely solves tough problems while daydreaming—an experience many people have had while taking a shower. Epiphanies may seem to come out of nowhere, but they are often the product of unconscious mental activity during downtime. 

 "This is Your Brain on Writing" at The New York Times. This one gives a big implicit push to the idea that if you write every day, like a professional writer, you'll actually access different parts of your brain than a novice. 

As the scientists report in a new study in the journal NeuroImage, the brains of expert writers appeared to work differently, even before they set pen to paper. During brainstorming, the novice writers activated their visual centers. By contrast, the brains of expert writers showed more activity in regions involved in speech. 

“I think both groups are using different strategies,” Dr. Lotze said. It’s possible that the novices are watching their stories like a film inside their heads, while the writers are narrating it with an inner voice. 

When the two groups started to write, another set of differences emerged. Deep inside the brains of expert writers, a region called the caudate nucleus became active. In the novices, the caudate nucleus was quiet. 

The caudate nucleus is a familiar part of the brain for scientists like Dr. Lotze who study expertise. It plays an essential role in the skill that comes with practice, including activities like board games.

• Scientific American's blog informs us that there is no such thing as right brain/left brain activity: 

• In a recent large review, Rex Jung and colleagues provide a “first approximation” regarding how creative cognition might map on to the human brain. Their review suggests that when you want to loosen your associations, allow your mind to roam free, imagine new possibilities, and silence the inner critic, it’s good to reduce activation of the Executive Attention Network (a bit, but not completely) and increase activation of the Imagination and Salience Networks. Indeed, recent research on jazz musicians and rappers engaging in creative improvisation suggests that’s precisely what is happening in the brain while in a flow state.

 And because I can never let this alone as a topic, a reprise of "What's Lost as Handwriting Fades" at the New York Times: 

But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how. 

“When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain. 

“And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.

Breathe, just breathe

Summer has started, and so have the deadlines, some missed already and some for things due immediately.  That may be why my dreams are all about I'm writing a conference paper, but it's the wrong paper, not what I said I'd do at all. I can't see the words on the page when I type. I'm locked out of email--of course, since all the passwords for everything had to be changed because of Heartbleed, that's a waking reality, too. The nicest one was where it was the wrong paper I was writing, but for visuals someone had made silkscreened panels with portraits of the writer and gold thread embroidered in them, which was much better than PowerPoint.

But it's summer, or nearly so, and the trees are flowering. Between the smell of the early morning air, the trees, and the pine bark, walking and running every day is almost as good as chocolate. Although I have to stop working on it to work on the deadline things, the writing I've been doing has been going well and is interesting.

Breathing means taking a break from reading The Chronicle and maybe taking a break from Facebook and Twitter.  It also means mastering the art of replying to emails that say "Here's a great idea! Let's meet to talk about it!" by saying, "Fabulous idea! Why don't you look into it and we can talk about it in August?"  Like weekend emails, which I learned to stop seeing as something that had to be answered right away, these are expressions of enthusiasm and ideas, but that doesn't mean that they need a response.

Breathing means the kind of conscious spending of your time that you don't get to do during the school year.  You can choose your work, and you can choose to turn off the distractions, or some of them, anyway. Right now, with deadlines looming, it's easy to feel short of breath mentally, as though wherever you turn there is stressful work to do. I'm hoping that seeing this as being under my control (after all, I did agree to these deadlines) is going to help with the calming breathing that's going to get the projects done.

Brain change: can we still read long-form writing?

From WaPo, some research confirming what a lot of us have observed in our students and maybe ourselves.  Skimming and websurfing is changing the neural pathways of the way we read:

To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. 

 “I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” 

“They cannot read ‘Middlemarch.’ They cannot read William James or Henry James,” Wolf said. “I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.”

Henry James is kind of a special case--there are sentences where you want to say, "Please, Henry, throw me a verb. Any verb will do"--but there's truth to this. I've noticed it in classes. Students can identify skimmable main points, but they don't have a sense of what individual parts mean. I've tried to counter this by slowing down the reading process, not by giving them less work (since, as rational beings, they would likely skim that, too), but by spending more time looking at passages and words.

I wonder, too, whether the popularity of graphic novels and comics has something to do with shifting reading patterns.  Those can be complex visually, but the way the information is presented doesn't train the brain to slow down and do long-form reading.

A lot of people complain that students don't read anymore, but this suggests it's not due to laziness but to brain issues.

And like the people in the article, I've noticed that my natural reading patterns have changed, so much so that I've shut off some social media for now and read books in the morning rather than news, to try to retrain them.

Have you seen this, too? 

Decision fatigue

Dame Eleanor has a fascinating post and links to good articles about something called "decision fatigue." Put simply, researchers have found that your willpower goes down, as does your ability to make good decisions, when you've had to make a series of decisions over the course of a day.  You'll do anything to make it stop, including compromising in ways that you don't want to do or refusing to make any decision at all. The effect is magnified if your brain is starved of glucose: it needs that energy for willpower, which is in keeping with what other brain researchers found earlier this year.

In personal terms, this makes a stunning amount of sense. All those chirpy self-help fillers in magazines and web sites urge us to "Try something different! Break up your routine! Take a new route home from work! Brush your teeth in a different direction!" as a route to creativity. But if you've ever tried those strategies, you realize that they're only for leisure times when you have no work to do, because they are exhausting.

Think about it.  When you have to shop at a different grocery store, everything is in a different place and finding what you want among innumerable brands is tiring. Unless you have the fashion gene, which I do not, shopping for clothes is exhausting.  Controlled novelty--going to the farmer's market or an art gallery--can be stimulating and get the creative juices flowing, but what allows creativity to survive on a daily basis is the certainty of a physical routine that lets your mind go free. Thoreau had this one right: "Simplify, simplify." So did William James on the value of habit. One person's controlled novelty might be another person's occasion for decision fatigue, but the principle is still there.

The recent Vanity Fair article on President Obama indicated that he's cut his wardrobe down to blue suits and gray suits, or something like that, so that he can cut down on the time spent deciding.  Good call, Mr. President. Don't we do the same kinds of thing when we buy the same pair of pants or sweater in a couple of colors, just so we don't have to go to the department store again for a couple of years (or is that just my strategy)?

According to the researcher quoted in the New York Times article above,  "people with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower. They don’t schedule endless back-to-back meetings. They avoid temptations like all-you-can-eat buffets, and they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions."

In other words, a regular routine isn't limiting to creativity. It's freeing because it conserves your energy to make the important decisions related to your creative life.

Creativity: the best time to do everything

In "Your Body's Best Time to Do Everything," The Wall Street Journal provides a little pop psych that I can believe in, more or less.

• 8 a.m. Write upbeat tweets. [No thanks.]
• 9 a.m. High energy and clarity; have difficult talks now. [No thanks. Use that energy ]
• 10 a.m. Do cognitive work. Working memory and concentration tend to peak mid-morning. [Good writing time!] 
• 2 p.m. Take a short nap. Sleepiness hits its peak. [Don't we wish we could all do this?]
• 4 p.m. Do physical work. Eye-hand coordination rises in late afternoon.
• 5 p.m. Work out. Muscle strength and flexibility rises later in the day. 
• 9 p.m. Work creatively. People's freshest, most original thinking may occur at non-peak times of the day, which for most people is evening. Fatigue may lower inhibitions and open the mind to offbeat ideas and solutions. [Finally a research finding that confirms what I've experienced for years.]

Here's a writing inspiration post from Inside Higher Ed. 

More on creativity

A little Monday morning inspiration: The Wall Street Journal has a long article by Jonah Lehrer about creativity this week. A few snippets:

• Flashes of insight are real flashes: "Research led by Mark Beeman and John Kounios has identified where that flash probably came from. In the seconds before the insight appears, a brain area called the superior anterior temporal gyrus (aSTG) exhibits a sharp spike in activity. This region, located on the surface of the right hemisphere, excels at drawing together distantly related information, which is precisely what's needed when working on a hard creative problem."
• What helps? Surprisingly, comedy and alcohol: "And this is why relaxation helps: It isn't until we're soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we're able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain's right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer."
• Unfortunately, you need to do the slogging kind of work before that kind of creativity can descend: "There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It's the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the 'rejecting process,' noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. 'All great artists and thinkers are great workers,' he wrote."
• When should we work and when should we take a shower or go for a walk? "The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions "feelings of knowing," and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don't require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we're getting "warmer" or not, without knowing the solution."
• Get more information. "Another kind of creative problem, though, is when you don't have the right kind of raw material kicking around in your head. If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed."

Update: This letter ("Persist"), via Notorious PhD, exactly describes the two kinds of creativity.

Update: If you haven't checked Dame Eleanor's writing inspiration posts yet, you should!

Blogworld creativity

All right, it was a dream (hence the OT qualifier), but I think it says something about the relationship between blogging and "real writing," so I'm posting it. I think it was inspired by a message I received recently from an acquisitions editor at a press where I've reviewed several manuscripts, asking me to have coffee at an upcoming conference.

In the dream, a colleague and I were part of some focus group about academic blogging, and he began to pontificate at great length about it. In real life I like and respect this colleague, but you know that Mark Twain saying "it is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt"? It became clear that he knew nothing about blogging, although that didn't stop him from expressing a lot of opinions dressed as theories, and that I had a whole lot of ideas about it just from reading blogs and from writing this one for three years.

The editor and I walked to a nearby coffeeshop through a thicket of blogs, which were posted on beautiful wooden signposts (all of your blogs on the blogroll were there) on gentle green slopes, and the comments pages were paper pages left beneath them where people could write things with the attached pencils. Once at the shop, I outlined something like a theory of blogology--if not like Mr. Casaubon's Key to All Mythologies--and the editor thought this should be a book.

Now, I'm not writing a book about blogs. Instead, I think it signifies a lot of things that blogs seem to mean to us all:

The ability to try out ideas and be heard by a supportive (but honest) community, even if it's largely a pseudonymous one.

The ability to be playful in writing.

The liberating quality of writing about what you know, and what you know you know even if it doesn't square with someone else's theories (as Professor Z often discusses).

The beauty of a writing space--for it was very much a space--in which writing does not need to respond to deadlines, is never stressful, and makes the writer feel as though the expression of ideas and emotions is a good thing.

In short, I think it was about the ways in which blogs foster creativity, and who could say that that's a bad thing?
[Title changed to be less confusing]

What makes you write?

Over at Edge of the American West, there's a good post and comment thread about the kinds of things people keep on their desks to make them write.

In the comment thread at EAW, people mentioned quotations, figurines, pictures, and, of course, the ever-popular terror inspired by a deadline. If you take as a given that time is part of it is time (see the 43folders post on Neal Stephenson), what makes you actually start writing?

I know I'm about ready to start writing if I get the urge to start rereading things I've recently published and things other people have recently published. At some level this seems reassuring, as though to say "you've done this before and you can do it again. Other people can do this, and you can, too." And despite my best efforts to use all the morning creativity I keep reading about, I am much more apt to start something and to find the real concentration needed if I work on it from late afternoon through the evening.

So is there a talisman, a quotation, a favorite pen, a mood, a piece of music that makes you get started?

Repurposing and creativity

Yesterday morning at about 7 a.m., I was standing in the open garage trying to look helpful as the sprinkler repairman worked his magic on the sprinkler head I had previously duct-taped together. On a previous visit, he'd tried to explain to me the various types of heads and why it was important to get the right kind, but even in dutiful apprentice mode, I had obviously failed to repair the head, so the least I could do was to stand and watch as he worked on it again. To add to the confusion, the neighbor's new kitten, who looks like a mini-me for one of my cats, had gotten into the garage and was tearing around.

As I stood there, I saw the ancient rope hammock that had recently been replaced with a new one, one that wouldn't dump random knees and elbows onto the ground when someone sat in it. It was trash day, so I thought I would put the old one in the trash.

To back up for a minute: I've been trying to be a little more green and careful this summer: growing vegetables, setting up a compost bin, going to the farmers' market, not eating out, putting appliances on power strips and turning them off when they're not used, and, of course, basking in the alien-like green glow of CF bulbs. As a lot of people do, I also save paper and print on the back sides of drafts, although that has come back to haunt me a few times when I've had stuff copied for class and the unwanted text in the drafts, with a big X through it, gets copied by mistake.

As I'm carrying the hammock across the garage and out to the trash barrels, it hits me: this isn't a hammock to discard. It's a whole lot of cotton rope connected to two wooden poles. With a little effort, it can go from useless to useful. I was having a repurposing epiphany.

As the repairman worked on the head, I set to work on the hammock, cutting the knots (Alexander the Great and his sword have nothing on me when it comes to that), untangling the weave, and coiling up the pieces of rope for later use. I'm not going to rely on those ropes if I get the urge to rappel down a cliff, but they're fine for tying up tomato plants.

The thing that struck me about this experience was that the hammock had, in my mind, turned into something else: a worthless thing had become something of worth just by revealing itself as a collection of parts rather than a whole. What would you call this? Reverse synergy?

And what made this idea happen? Trying to focus on something that I'd already failed at (becoming a sprinkler head technician)? Being distracted by the kitten? Having to stand in place while watching someone else work? Being mindful about being more green this summer? The fact that I was holding rope and wood in my hands instead of holding words in my head? A combination?

As you've probably gathered, I've been thinking a lot about creativity lately, especially how to coax it from its elusive lair. Maybe looking at the components, the small parts, rather than the bigger picture is part of that.

Barak Obama and Jonah Lehrer on thinking and creativity

Support for taking large chunks of time for thinking and writing, for working in the morning, and for going for a walk or otherwise distracting yourself at intervals while working.

From the New York Times, via 43folders:

Mr. Obama: . . . actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be …

Mr. Cameron: These guys just chalk your diary up.

Mr. Obama: Right. … In 15 minute increments and …

Mr. Cameron: We call it the dentist waiting room. You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.

And Jonah Lehrer, "The Eureka Hunt," in the July 28 issue of The New Yorker:

Shorter Lehrer: A lot of new studies in brain science are demonstrating the power of the right hemisphere in producing insight, which is physically as well as intellectually distinct from the kind of problem-solving produced by analysis. The article isn't online, but here are some extracts:

The insight process, as sketched by Jung-Beeman and Kounios, is a delicate mental balancing act. At first, the brain lavishes the scarce resource of attention on a single problem. but, once the brain is sufficiently focussed, the cortex needs to relax in order to seek out the more remote association in the right hemisphere, which will produce the insight. "The relaxation phase is crucial," Jung-Beeman said. "That's why so many insights happen during warm showers." Another ideal moment for insights, according to the scientists, is the early morning, right after we wake up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right brain hemisphere is also unusually active (43).

In his 1908 essay "Mathematical Creation," Poincare insisted that the best way to think about complex problems is to immerse yourself in the problem until you hit an impasse. Then, when it seems that "nothing good is accomplished," you should find a way to distract yourself, preferably by going on a "walk or a journey." The answer will arrive when you least expect it (43-44).

"You've got to know when to step back," Kounios said. "If you're in an environment that forces you to produce and produce, and you feel very stressed, then you're not going to have any insights." [He goes on to say that Adderall, etc. can help concentration but "may actually make insights less likely, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity" (44).]

Productivity tools

If all of these really worked perfectly, I'd be done with this article by now, but here's a sort of assessment/update/review of what helps:

1. Turn off internet access. This one is pretty obvious, but it's not always practical if you are doing bibliographic searches, say, or downloading articles.
2. Xobni. I installed this a few months ago, and, if you use Outlook, it really is helpful for finding phone numbers and especially file attachments. It does more, too, like showing you when you typically get e-mails from those on your contact list.
3. Leechblock. This is the new and improved version of the Greasemonkey script that blocks certain web sites for specified periods of time; it's a Firefox add-on, and you don't need Greasemonkey to use it. You can tell it to block the sites for certain periods of time (7-5, for example), or set up a different set of rules to allow yourself X amount of minutes on certain sites. It's almost as good a timesaver as turning off the internet access.
4. [Edited to add] Eggtimer. This is still useful for doing "sprints" of writing. You lucky Mac people have a free version.
5. Music. The music CDs that Dr. Brazen Hussy suggested look good, but if you've already spent your stimulus check, there are alternatives.

• If you already have a lot of this classical music (Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Vivaldi, etc.) on CDs or in iTunes, you can group them in playlists so that they mimic the brain effects of the CDs (at least I hope this is true).


• Also in iTunes: try the Classical tab for radio stations. Good ones for working include the Adagio station, All Classic Baroque, WCPE, and even Whisperings, although the free version of the latter plays the same tracks over and over. Some of the public radio stations work well, too, although the big city ones tend to play "challenging" and modern--i.e., too noisy for work purposes--classical rather than the quiet stuff, and they interrupt the quiet music with opera at odd moments, a total distraction.


• Pandora, of course. Pandora has a lot of generic classical stations already set up (although Piano Solo, Romantic Period is heavy on Schubert), or you can create your own by specifying a composer.


• Local classical radio stations. These are good for times when the internet is off, although if your local station has jumped on the "challenging" bandwagon or prefers a lot of rousing marches, you're out of luck.

More tips?