Podless Days and Productive Boredom

I recently saw a fun talk about advice for young researchers by Barrie
Frost, the very successful and entertaining octagenarian animal psychology
prof at Queen's. One of the things he said was about how he got one of his
best ideas (a flight simulator for butterflies!) while walking home for
lunch. He said, "A good way to have ideas is to walk home for lunch!"

This struck me, both because of how it tied in with what all those
computer scientists in my review said about their most creative times -
unstructured, quiet, regular and of a fixed duration, involving exercise -
and because it provides a possible criticism of my way of doing things. I
had been listening to podcasts every single day for my half hour walk to
school and back, and the talk started me wondering if it was stunting my
creativity. I can't mull over whatever problems I may be facing in my
research life if my mind is busy being stimulated and wildly entertained
by the likes of Ira Glass, Terry Gross, Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, Jad
Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, Jesse Thorn and Jordan Morris, and Dan
Savage.

So mondays, wednesdays and (possibly) fridays are now podless days, where
I leave my iPod at home so there's not even the temptation. (the fact that
this feels like a big step is testament to just how much I adore these
shows - and how completely they alleviated the pain of trudging through
the snow for an hour a day this winter) And I have found a slight increase
in creativity. Even if I spend 25 minutes of the time thinking about Phil
Hartman sketches or sex - which are both likely - I'll likely spend 5
minutes touching on the problems I'm about to (or just finished) grappling
with at work, and with that time come up with an idea or two I never could
have in front of my computer.

Basically I wasn't letting myself be bored enough. Think about if you're
filling your day too full of entertainment or tasks, and not allowing for
enough boredom. Your mind needs time to wander and take the *long* way to
a totally novel solution, one that might seem too offbeat to contemplate
and explore when the pressure is on. One of the major foodgroups of
creativity has got to be big blocks of boring time, which a mind that is
already creatively revved up can make good use of.

My Photo System: Archive and Souvenirs

My system for managing my digital photos broke down for good around the
time when more photos I wanted to save were coming from friends cameras
(usually via facebook) than my own. But it was already crumbling
around about the time when the novelty of snapping photos with
my first digital camera wore off. Now I have a new system. It's tuned
for my specific priorities and setup (an ancient iMac and the free
iPhoto), but you may find things you can use with your system.

The central dilemma with regard to photos boils down to: keep or throw
away? Do you err on the side of having oceans of photos, gradually filling
up your hard drive and impossible to find anything in, or carefully
selecting the best? I do both. There are two tiers:

THE ARCHIVE

Basically a bucket for all the photos that have something to do with my
life to collect in. From my camera, facebook, email, etc. The only
winnowing that I do is to erase the worthless blurry ones, or the near
duplicates, or ones taken for special purposes (like a web page). I also
don't put in just cool or funny pictures off the net - these are photos to
do with my life.

Each photo is saved at its original size, more or less unretouched, as
uncompressed as possible (my camera saves them as jpegs, so whatever)

This would still work if it was just a huge list of files - photo
management software could sort through them. But to make things a little
bit easier to find, I put them into folders by term (4 month stretch), and
in those folders I have optional subfolders by the batch of photos - like
"Lindsay's Birthday"

The archive allays my fears of deleting a photo I might value later, gives
me a resource if I feel like wallowing in plentiful images from a
particular time in my life, and lets me indulge the fantasy that someday
something in the corner of one of my photos may be needed in a criminal
investigation, like in Blow Up. (and what if I had just deleted it??)

On the other end of the spectrum are:

SOUVENIR PHOTOS

Complementing my term souvenir system which I discussed in a previous
post, this is a file of photos, divided by term, which have been carefully
selected for maximum enjoyment and reminiscing. Exactly 50 photos per 4
months selected, each retouched, cropped, and exported at 1024x768. Also
ordered chronologically, by hand if necessary.

This gives me a way to get a quick blast of a term - people, places,
events - without having to page through hundreds of repetitive photos.

An organizational system only works if it also comes with processes to
maintain it. Here are the processes for my system:
- Over a term, collect all the photos that come my way to the archive.
- When the term is over, actually a few months after its over so that
those last few photos come in, start going through the archive for that
term and select the photos.
- Every year or so, have the souvenir photos for that year printed and
mailed to me. So 2 years will fit in a 300 photo album.
- When the photo archive gets to be the size of a DVD, burn it and delete
from hard drive.

That last point was the key to my system, when I realized that my whole
enormous glut of photos from my camera over 2 years was only about 3 gigs.
You may use your camera a lot more. But still, I think it makes sense to
keep *everything*. If a photo is 1 meg, then you can fit 4700 photos onto
a DVD. Whether that lasts you 2 years, a year, or 4 months, it's still a
tiny cost in terms of both money and time. DVDs are not the most stable
and long term medium in the world, but it wouldn't be a horrible loss to
lose part of my archive. I can save the heavy backup guns for my souvenir
photos - which will have a tiny size.

Online Discretionary Income Calculator

Following up on my blog post, here's a nice calculator for factoring in at
some of the common expenses into your discretionary (here called
disposable) income calculation, to get you started:

http://www.disposableincome.net/

A nice feature is a calculation of how much time it takes you at your job
to earn things like a coffee, a night at the movies, or a laptop.

The Golden Mango Regime

When thinking about how to work effectively, it's worth looking back on
those times in your life when you just found a groove. In 2001 I had the
wonderful opportunity to write a book chapter for a cognitive science
professor. I set aside 4 months to do almost nothing but research, think,
and write it. But I had a terrible time with it. I was isolated, my time
had no structure, I was too timid to ask for enough help from the project
head, and as far as research went, I had no idea what the fuck I was
doing. It was ok when I was gathering materials and reading for it, but
when I had to admit I had collected as much information as I could use and
it was time to start writing, I stalled out. That blank screen would stare
me down. I had many many days where I did nothing for it, unless you count
worrying.

Finally, by accident, I hit on a fairly extreme regime that nevertheless,
over about a 3 week period, got my draft written. Every single day, I
would do practically no work on it during the day. I would chat with
friends, relax, go for a bike ride, maybe read a littlet for the or do a
couple mindless chores for it. Then every evening - and this seemed key -
I would order the #7 at the Golden Mango in Waterloo (that's shredded pork
on vermicelli with spring roll, yum). Then I would go for a long long walk
by myself, often travelling way out into the agricultural areas, walking
along the roadside or on biketrails in the dusk. Then at 9 o'clock every
day I would get to my little tiny office (actually a storage closet with a
computer in it) and get 2-3 hours of very solid writing done. I'd reread
what I did the day before, fix it up, and power onwards. It wasn't even
hard.

I'd completely forgot about this till just today, but now that it's in
my mind I want to ask, why was this so effective? What can I take from it
for my current life as a graduate student?
* I worked on it every single day. That meant it was always somewhere in
my mind, meaning I was actually doing some work during those unstructured
times.
* I had those unstructured times, when I wasn't trying to force myself to
think about it but had no other real demands on my intellect either. The
daytime, and especially those long walks were good for that.
* I had a workspace with no distractions (surely it had internet - I must
just not have been such an addict back then. See the Privoxy entry for one
approach to combat that)
* I had good food in my belly. There's a famous quote about how
stimulating and encouraging that can be to the cognitive faculties, but
I'm too lazy to hunt it up.
* I was getting some regular exercise.

So this was no doubt a tremendously inefficient routine (not to mention
impractical for most people; and what if you don't like vietnamese food?)
but there's lots I can take from it to add to what I know about how I work
- that is the very hardest parts of what I do, which are writing and
trying to come up with creative research ideas. I want to get back to the
feeling that I had, if only for a little while, then: that I was in
excellent mental and creative shape, with my powers in hand, running with
a long stride and easily jumping obstacles that came along.

Somewhat coincidentally, the point about needing unstructured time to
think was one of the major conclusions of mypaper, which was about
creativity in computer science: creative people need long blocks of time
to let their mind wander. Many of the computer scientists in a survey I
relied heavily on said that the times when they had their best ideas were
on their daily commute, just before or after bed, or in the bath or
shower. In fact Alan Kaye, one of the most creative of them all, had a
special shower installed in the Xerox PARC building just for that purpose,
to help him think! If you were there at 4 in the morning - when he got in
- you might hear him showering merrily away. So one way to be more
creative: take more baths.