Where Do Good Ideas Come From? Using Quiet Times to Prepare for the Year Ahead

For teachers, the summer vacation is often seen as the quiet time of year that they might find a moment, after the sand, sea and switching off, to start preparing for the year ahead. We can head off potential problems, the rest brings some of our most creative ideas to light, and we have that rare commodity – time – to think about how we could best teach particular areas of work.

School leaders don’t have that same stretch of time, but with fewer fire-fights to tackle in our classrooms and schools there is a chance to block out some thinking time of our own.   However, as some of Jim Spillane’s research on principals’ and Head Teachers’ working habits shows, we can in education spend too much time working alone on the wrong things.

Here are the eight ‘mind hacks’ that some of the most inspirational and creative leaders I know have drawn out of their work:

1.    Clear your decks for the next year

One of the first 'productivity' titles I ever read was Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen.

I'd normally not touch a book from the Life Coach section of a bookshop.  This on came recommended from one of the most sceptical journalist types I know,  so it was worth a shot.   I think you should get it, too.

The most important element to get started on is clearing one's decks.  A spring cleaning you can do at any time of the year.

•    Take two days out of the diary (yes, two days) and preferably get someone to join you as a critical friend. They'll help you chuck out double the amount of stuff that's cluttering your office or home, and your mind.
•    For each piece of paper you find create a physical grouped file in which it lives with similar types of stuff.
•    For each thought that springs into your mind create a single sheet of paper that, likewise, joins the other pieces of paper to be referenced or acted upon.
•    If a piece of paper represents an action that takes more than two minutes to accomplish, put it in a pile marked "ACTIONS".

If it takes less than two minutes to do, then just do it right there.

2.    One must-do activity a day

Taking GTD one extreme step further, by making all these long lists have some more sense in our packed lives, try doing what Four Hour Working Week man, Tim Ferriss does: next to key priority actions on the list you have made, write the day of the week you'd be happy to have achieved it by.  Keep the items per day realistic: about one or two at most.   If an action is going to take less time than those one or two key ideas, then you should probably be doing it now instead of reading this blog post.

3.    Set aside "Desk Time"

Leave some water in the well when you’ve been for a drink. As you set out on a creative journey the beginning is always the best bit, followed by the slippery slope down towards completion. Most of us put the brakes on somewhere on that slope and the carcasses of incomplete work lie around us. If we leave work when it’s going well, then we’ll come back to it with more fervour, and a fresher head, the next day.

4.    Don't Procrastinate

The video says it all:

5.    Getting rid of "Extraneous Pillars"

"I'll get started on (my book / learning how to drive / my dance lessons / a great creative project I've not yet had time to work out) just as soon as I get through all this paperwork and urgent/important tasks."
Hugh McLeod elegantly captures the modern-day curse of the creative with his abolition of "extraneous pillars". These are the notebooks, iPhones or Blackberrys, ultrathin laptops, dictaphones, desktop PCs, locations of work, hours of work that get in the way of us just doing stuff.   Worst of all, the need we eventually have to be in possession of our extraneous pillars the moment a creative thought comes across us only helps us lose those thoughts forever, for wont of the correct notebook in which to write them or smart-phone app with which to capture them.

Hugh's world-famous art does not take pride of place on gallery walls, require special shipping arrangements or, in its creation, a studio with just the right kind of light. In fact, dark and dingy bars with only a pen and a day's unsuccessful business meetings behind him led to his "cartoons on the back of business cards" empire. By only ever requiring something business card shape, something that as an ad copywriter he frequently had stuffed in his back pocket, Hugh was able to indulge his creative moments the minute they arrived.

Compare that to the poet Ruth Stone, describing her creative process to Elizabeth Gilbert:

"When she was growing up in rural Virginia (Ruth) would be out working the fields and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape, and she said it was like a thunderous train of air, and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew that she had only only one thing to do at that point. In her words: She had to run like hell.

"She had to run like hell to the house and she'd be chased by this poem. And the idea was that she'd have to get to a pencil and paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her she could collect and grab it on the page.

"And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, and she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and the poem would run through her and it would continue off into the landscape looking, as she put it, for another poet.

"And there are were times where she'd almost miss it and the poem would almost transfer through her and she grabs a pencil to catch it, and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it, she would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwords into her body as she was transcribing onto the page and the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwords, from the last word to the first.

"So when I heard that I was like: "That's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like..." [cue deep sarcasm]

A halfway house is, of course, to make sure that we just do something in order to capture the leading thought before it disappears. We don't need our extraneous pillars but rather, anything on which to carve our thoughts for later on, when we have time to finish them off. A mobile phone video camera might just be the ticket, and is perhaps the one pillar that, increasingly, isn't extraneous to anyone on the planet.

6.    Kill assumptions: Only do stuff you want to do

JP Rangaswami in his Reboot11 talk points out that BT Group, where he's Chief Scientist, spent too much time getting people to pay for stuff that they didn't want to pay for, at the expense of coming up with new services that people wouldn't imagine not paying for.   If you spent more time doing the stuff that you enjoyed doing and felt was right, would anyone miss the stuff that you hate undertaking, that you feel wastes your time (and probably theirs, too)?

7.    Do, don't think

Merlin Mann is the kind of clever chap that big Californian computer companies get in to rejunivate their thinking. You want him as a friend.   But, in the absence of that possibility, you can still pick up a great set of lessons from him.   This one, hidden in an interview with a bunch of coders and designers, is a gem, really: do stuff, don't think about doing it. But then go and put in place barriers that appear when you don't do it.   For example, Merlin when he needs to write will set himself the do-able target of 100 words per day but make himself write those 100 words before he's allowed to go to the toilet, drink a cup of tea, or have.   The result: the 100 words get written.   Try it the next time you’re arranging a catch-up meeting or policy debate.

8.    Abandon the quest for perfection

Merlin also makes sure that he doesn't seek out perfection at the very first jump. We can always need more information, need to look up just one more resource or get that piece of equipment to do the job properly. The fact is, the longer we spend gathering our instruments of perfection the longer it takes to get that idea out there in the open. Give up the question for perfection. It can bog you down.

This leads us to an interesting question regarding school planning and policy. Hugh puts it best:
 

Aiming for intangibles is the stuff of every mission statement in the land, every forward plan and, all too often, every goal whose timeframe is longer than "this morning".   Instead, aim for something closer to home that you're going to achieve right now.