Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: What are those favorite books or those favorite articles or those favorite passages that resonated with you so much and and took you down a path of thinking that maybe ended up being really important in your work, in your life.

00:00:22 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Use this software for your iPad that helps you with ideation and problem solving. But this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about Muse the company and the small team behind it. My name is Mark and I’m here today with my colleague Adam. How’s it going, Adam?

00:00:39 - Speaker 1: It’s going pretty good, Mark. Thanks.

00:00:41 - Speaker 2: And today’s topic is having better ideas. And this is a pretty broad topic. So I’d like to start with what is that? What what what does that mean to you?

00:00:52 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the word idea somehow I think is connected with um Maybe sort of a trivial thing, the um the walking down the street, something pops into your head, the shower thought, that sort of thing, you know, if you type idea into Google Image search, you get a bunch of stock photos of people looking thoughtful with some representation of a light bulb over their head.

Um, I usually like to use the word ideation when I’m talking about muse specifically, but also more broadly about this, this topic, and I think that having Sort of the process by which you not just have the seed of an idea, which is really more that something popping into your head when you walk down the street, but how you develop the idea, how you take it from just a a a a hunch, let’s say, and turned it into something worthwhile, is actually really important for anyone that does creative or knowledge work.

00:01:46 - Speaker 2: Now, do you have a sort of process or framework for developing ideas over the long term?

00:01:52 - Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, I mean, it’s a it’s a big topic hard to even know fully where to start, but I think one of the things for me that’s key is treating ideation as a first class activity, is something important to do, something important to invest time in.

Basically thinking about an idea takes a lot of time. Uh, and that the process of turning those well formed ideas into some kind of output is really just the, the like the second half of that. So, to make it more concrete, if you’re um a graphic designer, you probably make uh the output in a tool like Illustrator, Photoshop, uh, or maybe even like, you know, if you’re a physical artist, you’re painting a painting with, uh, with paint and brushes.

Similarly, you’re an author, you might be using Scrivenner, Google Docs, and so on. But the moment of sitting down in front of the blank canvas, so to speak, to start, uh, creating the work is really only happens way deep in the process. And so that first half is what we call ideation. I feel like, um, maybe movies give us the wrong idea, specifically around authors because you have this, this image of someone sitting down in front of often a typewriter, if it’s an older movie, maybe more currently you have sitting down in front of a word processor, there’s the blank screen and the blinking cursor, and That’s not the start of the process. The start of the process is the ideation.

00:03:19 - Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And for me it’s not just the kind of wall clock time you’re spending on ideation. For me, it also takes a lot of, you know, calendar time. It often takes several days or weeks or even months to fully develop an idea, and you can’t force it just by like sitting down and thinking about it harder. You need the the time, the changes of scenery, the different inputs for that idea to fully develop. Is that is that the same for you?

00:03:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I would go with, um, I would of those on one hand.

Just expecting it to happen purely as a background process in your head.

Um, my long time colleague Ryan Henry likes to uses the word stewing usually. He kind of like likens it to a cooking one of these like, um, slow cooker processes where you, you leave it to stew over maybe many days, and that’s where the flavor really comes out.

But on the same time, I don’t think it’s just something that happens naturally, automatically.

I think you do need to work at it, you do need to invest in it and choosing for me at least, choosing to say there’s this important problem that I need to think through. I’m going to carve out time and space in my life and my calendar and. My emotional bandwidth to sit down and think hard to concentrate specifically on this problem is also necessary.

You get that just doesn’t force a conclusion. I think both, both parts, the focused upfront, uh, sort of the focused concentrated effort and the background stewing, I think are both necessary to the process.

00:04:46 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’d agree and to elaborate on that a little bit, I think of that first phase is a sort of feeding of the mind, you’re taking in. Uh, raw materials of sorts, you know, different ideas, different inputs, um, different possibilities, and often you’re sort of like chewing on them, you’re like, you know, turning them around in your mind, you’re holding that different combinations in your head at one time, and that’s kind of all raw material that goes to your, your sleeping mind. Uh, this, this background process is constantly working creatively to come up with new ideas and like you said, you need both of those fodder sometimes is a term I like to I like to use there.

00:05:16 - Speaker 1: It’s just like feeding in raw material that may or may not be relevant, may or may not be helpful, uh, but is all part of the, the, um, kindling that gets the fire going.

00:05:32 - Speaker 2: I, I have some pretty uh unique experiences with this time aspect because when I was an undergrad I did math and uh you often had these problem sets, which is a fancy word for homework, but it’s like very hard homework. It often takes a couple of weeks to do, for example.

And you get these problem sets and uh they were so hard that you couldn’t actually do them in one sitting that regardless of how long that sitting was, you had to actually give it uh several days to like to ruminate on it, you know, you, you take it in, you chew on the problems, you’re ingesting this fodder and then over the course of 7 days and several nights, you might eventually come up with the answer.

So there was this weird dynamic where if you didn’t start, you know, like problems that do on Friday, for example, if you didn’t start it by like Tuesday, you’re already hosed, um, and that’s a, that’s an experience that I, I think about a lot in my creative work now where you really need to give these things time.

00:06:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, one, kind of Hollywood representation of the The stewing process or the background process is, uh, this show House MD, which is about a basically a brilliant jerk of a doctor, and every show is kind of a, it has a little bit of a Sherlock Holmes vibe, but basically he’s trying to solve some tough problem, which is diagnosing some difficult medical case, and they’re always showing him basically seeming to be screwing around somehow.

Um, he’s off in some weird corner of the hospital, messing with a vending machine or playing a video game or unrelated to the process of solving the problem, then you sort of, there’s the light bulb moment of someone says something that triggers an idea in his head, and then the pieces all kind of come together and then he’s rushing back to to say like I’ve got it. I’ve got the solution.

And obviously this is the Hollywood version of things. It’s not quite how real life works, but I, I like how they consistently show this need to leave the focus space and go to a new environment or or let your unconscious mind or your background thread work on the problem.

00:07:30 - Speaker 2: Now, do you have a particular way that you like to do that? Is it sitting on the hammock? Is it going for a walk? How do you approach that?

00:07:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I get a lot of mileage out of the dog walks for sure.

And notably, one of my reasons or something that fed into my decision to adopt a dog was I was already going for super long walks anyways, uh, and very often timing wise is that I sit down to do the focused session. And, you know, we, we can talk about the tools more later, but let’s just say for the sake of argument, I’m in my office and I’m with a, with a sketchbook and I’m I’m working through a problem or thinking about a thing. And then at some point, I feel, you know, I’m a couple of hours into it.

I feel mentally tired and and. Um, need a break and feel like I’m not making more progress and then that would be the moment I would go and just take a walk, say, in the park near my house, sometimes a pretty long walk, and something about the moving, the physical activity, the fresh air, the different kind of environments, settings, you know, trees are nice, all that kind of stuff. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a park, but I think just a different environment that I’m out and I’m exposed to new stimulus, and my, my mind is taken from that focus place. But the fact that I was just focusing on it so deeply means that that fodder is there and now it’s cooking in the slow cooker in the back of my mind.

00:08:47 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I’ve been amazed at how effective it is to just change my physical scenery. Um, often when I change locations, I start to have different ideas and ways of thinking and uh for a long time I thought that was kind of coincidence, uh, but then I, I learned that it was actually this um cause and effect, so I can actually have better ideas or at least different ideas just by physically going somewhere else. You can like book a plane ticket to better ideas, it’s pretty wild.

00:09:13 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, I think environment is really powerful and that comes in a lot of different forms. There’s the type of stimulus you’re getting, um, and maybe only tangentially related, but the word environment makes me think of, I was just in thinking about the topic here for today, um, I naturally went to reference the book by Steven Johnson called Where Good Ideas Come From. And this book is really more about kind of society level ideas, um, where did, you know, enlightenment thinking and Royal Society and and sort of innovations, uh, rather than individual having an idea. But there’s certainly lots of parallels there, and he, he talks a lot about environments, particularly urban spaces, cities that a particular city in a particular time will be sort of a pressure cooker for a particular set of ideas. Uh, he talks about the web is also having some of the same chaotic, uh, quality, uh, and, and he makes comparisons in the natural world to coral reefs as being places that are rich, diverse, sometimes kind of chaotic, sometimes kind of messy, uh, but that’s where the place where you see a lot of, say, biological innovation. And I think that also works on an individual level or just mapping my own experience, it works on an individual level because ideas don’t come from nowhere. It’s not this blank slate sitting in an ivory tower pondering the universe and then suddenly the eureka moment, or at least that’s not it for me. Ideas come from other inputs, other ideas coming back to that. Fodder thing, but also the shape of the environment, not only gives you ideas or exposes you to ideas, but also just puts your brain in different gears or activates the neurons in a different way, or I’m not exactly sure what. And for me, nature can be creatively stimulating, but so can an urban environment, a really interesting bustling urban environment.

00:11:07 - Speaker 2: Yep, and we’ve talked here about um the the second phase of you have your raw materials and you Use those to come up with an idea, but you alluded to a really important concept which is, um, ideas are just combinations of other ideas, which I think is is really powerful. So I’m curious, how do you build up your, your library of ideas to combine as you’re thinking.

00:11:28 - Speaker 1: Reading a lot is a big one, but you can also ingest information in lots of different forms.

Podcasts are quite good that way often. Uh, YouTube is a surprising trove of video essays and and things like that. I think it’s a little tricky with the information ingestion. We live in this world now where we just have these huge fire hoses of information available to us all the time.

News news sources, whether it’s industry news or current events, every book that’s ever been written, every, you know, TV show and movie more or less is available on streaming, the podcasts, torrent of podcasts that are available.

And there is a version of this that can be maybe almost a little mindless or a little more, maybe just more entertainment oriented, which is, which is fine, uh, but I try to make it so that at least a lot of the time that I spend, let’s say, consuming media is things that I feel like will feed into the ideas that I might have in the future. Uh, and so reading uh long form books is certainly one of the, one of the biggest items there.

Now I know you’re a heavy reader and and certainly a heavy reader of PDFs. What’s your, uh, what’s your flow on that stuff look like these days?

00:12:37 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I think if I’m on my game, I’m, I’m definitely actively reading.

It’s, it’s much easier just to casually read and just kind of read through stuff, but I think it’s very easy for that to go in one ear and out the other, so to speak.

Um, so I like to highlight, but I also like to do things like ask questions, summarize, challenge the arguments, um, pretend I was explaining this concept to someone else.

Um, those are, are take much more effort. They’re, they’re a lot harder, um, but I, I find that when I do those, I have a much better grasp of the material and it’s, uh, it’s, it’s more ready to be processed in that background mind later.

Well, should we venture into the world of tools here?

00:13:17 - Speaker 1: Yeah, well, all the classics are good and good for a very good reason.

So that’s a pen and a sketchbook, whether it’s, you know, a fancy moleskin field notes thing or just whatever GP thing you. Uh, by in your average stationary store.

Post-it notes are always a really nice one, whether they’re on a whiteboard, on a wall.

Um, I used to keep, um, big pieces of butcher paper, uh, in my, uh, office, and I would kind of pin those up on the, on the, on the board and, uh, put the Post-its there, you know, big fat markers, that kind of thing.

And, um, pin board, obviously can be, can be good there. And then, uh, I think the whiteboard is a really great one for more of the group ideation.

00:13:56 - Speaker 2: And maybe you can also tell the story of the commonplace book.

00:13:59 - Speaker 1: Yeah, commonplace book I think was common somewhat historically with um intellectual type people, which was basically a collection of notes about things you’d read and seen.

And so, um, that would include things like an excerpt from an article or a book, uh, could, could also include a uh little sketch that you did, a scribble, um, something like that, and, uh, sort of represented not just your personal notes and writings, although there may be some of that, but also this collection of input or fodder that maybe was personal to you.

Like you read a lot of things, but what are the things that really, what are those favorite books or those favorite articles or those favorite passages that resonated with you so much and and took you down a path of thinking that maybe ended up being really important in your work, in your life. And so a commonplace book is maybe a collection of these over time.

00:14:54 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and one of the things that I like about commonplace books is they are mixed media. So, at least for the media of that time, which is things like, you know, articles, books, poetry, uh, transcribed speeches, observations, drawings, those could go all in one place, your commonplace book. And I think for tools for inspiring creativity, that’s really important because we don’t think in terms of different buckets of media types, we don’t have an article brain and a book brain and a speech brain, right? Those things are all mixed together in our minds. So I think it’s interesting to have a tool for supporting creativity that uh combines different media types together.

00:15:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, those, those are the sort of the analog classics, but in the digital tools space, ideation has never quite found its footing.

Uh, you do see that people repurpose what I would call authoring tools. That’s like a word processor, a spreadsheet, a text editor, um, maybe there’s something like, um, yeah, we did an interview with a, a master someone was working on their master thesis and they did it all in illustrator, basically. It was mostly text. They created this big sort of 2D spatial map of all the research they were doing.

You also see the very narrow focus tools, so that’s something like maybe a diagramming tool. Like Omnigraphle, or there’s a a pretty solid mind mapping app for uh the iPad called Mind Node. Uh, and these are, these are good, but they’re pretty narrow and focused.

And then probably notes and note taking apps end up being Kind of a place where people do a lot of this, particularly nowadays when you have such easy access to a note taking app on your phone, whether that’s Google Keep or Apple Notes, Bear drafts, Evernote, there’s a long list of them, and it’s very natural to, yeah, you’re sitting on that park bench and the some ideas are starting to coalesce and you want a place to write it down, your sketchbook isn’t handy or whatever you you pull out the notes.

App and Apple Notes, for example, and this is true of others as well, are mixed. You can do a little scribble there, you can drop in a link, you can drop in an image. Um, I think in many cases they’re not really designed for this, but I think to some degree notes apps because they’re so widely available and because they’re so at your fingers. Tips end up being probably the top place that people do digital ideation, even if it’s not a great, uh, not a great fit.

00:17:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that’s true. Although we’ve seen with our user interviews that even for people who do a lot of authoring and digital tools, they still lean very heavily on analog um tools for ideation. So it’s extremely common, for example, for folks who produce something in Google Docs or Final Cut Pro to just carry around a mollusk andopic everywhere and that’s their preferred tool for ideation.

00:17:37 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and and folks will talk about, you know, they like the tactile aspect of the page, they like that there’s No distractions. There’s no chance that a notification is going to pop up and try to engage your dopamine receptors to go see that someone liked your Instagram posts when you open your sketchbook, right? It’s always a blank page. It only sits there quietly and lets you draw on it.

00:17:57 - Speaker 2: OK, well, let’s turn from the tools to the techniques here. Uh, what are some techniques that you like to use for having better ideas?

00:18:05 - Speaker 1: Ultimately, the Uber technique in some ways is, first of all, making time to sit down and focus on developing an idea.

And second, that part of the process of focusing is both pulling in the the raw materials, the fodder, but also writing down, writing down your half finished thoughts and trying to find some way to make it concrete. Um, maybe there’s shaping is is a verb that um. Is used in Ryan Singer’s book Shape Up, uh, or you can talk about like wire framing if you’re a designer, maybe, um, you know, if you’re a filmmaker, you talk about storyboarding or you’re just doing these very simple sketches of, you know, what the framing might look like or where the story might go.

But ultimately that Writing down and trying to bring out of your mind and into physical space the idea, even though you’re not ready to do the authoring, you’re not ready to shoot the film or make the, you know, make the design in figMA or whatever, you’re still in this mode of trying to figure out what the idea is, develop the idea, and that at some point I can only hold so much in my head and to truly develop an idea I need the. I need the sketchbook or I need the whiteboard, or I need something so that I can start to make a thing with my hands rather than doing it all in my mind.

00:19:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and I always find this externalized thinking, this writing down half form thoughts to be uh So powerful, but it’s also a sort of leap of faith because, you know, by definition you only have half the idea there, yet you’re going to write it down and I’m always amazed by how when I get the first half out, it creates space in my head for the rest of the idea to come back in.

00:19:43 - Speaker 1: Well, or there’s the other side around which maybe just indicates that I tend towards overconfidence, but I often feel like there’s this idea in my mind that’s so clear and so complete. And I feel like it’s ready to go. And then the attempt at writing it down I see start to see all the holes and flaws and places I haven’t thought through yet and I go, OK, actually this is not as far along as I was thinking.

00:20:07 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s let’s look at an example. Is there an example of a long term process you’ve been through recently?

00:20:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, so many that it’s sort of this sort of technique of ideation to Big choices in my life, things to do with family, things to do with home, but also clearly to business, career, work, uh, things that I’m making a lot of them are probably hard to fully describe because my main, you know, my work is being a founder, entrepreneur, building companies, products, teams. This happens over the course of many years. It’s hard to sort of encapsulate that in a short example.

Um, but maybe writing is actually a really nice one in terms of, I think the purpose of a written piece is ultimately to share ideas and a good piece is one that shares good ideas. So in a way it’s almost the purest form of that.

So for example, all the writing, uh, sort of more academic style writing that I did for, uh, the ink and Switch research lab. So we wrote about things including tablet platforms and software performance and. Um, ways to store data.

So if I was to walk through a little bit the process of what it looks like there, you know, it does always start with that initial inspiration, the, again, walking down the street, taking the shower, sitting in a cafe, and, and, you know, the, the light bulb, the metaphorical light bulb turns on above the head. And so from there I’m gonna go to more of the kind of focused ideation of like, let’s sit down and try to sketch this idea out. Um, and in that case, it really is going to be starting with that fodder, particularly the prior art. What other articles have I read? What other books have I read? What other material have I, what have I come across where people have talked about or approached this problem, um, and kind of collecting all of that together and then looking through all of that to try to better understand, OK, what is it that I think that I have to say that’s unique that adds to, you know, I don’t want to repeat. An insight that’s already been made well in some other work. I want to make sure that I’m bringing something new and so looking through that may give me a sense of like, OK, well, here’s, here’s the knowledge that’s out in the world, uh, humanities like knowledge sphere today, and then what’s the delta, what’s the small diff that I can potentially add on top of that?

00:22:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that makes sense. Do you have, do you have any particular Techniques or approaches you use there or just googling around?

00:22:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of it is things that I’ve saved, so maybe maybe this comes back to the to the modern commonplace book. Uh, for me, I use Pocket, which is a sort of read later for um tool for for the web, and so I’ll use my favorites and basically start.

In there, um, although realistically I am often thinking, oh, you know what, something, you know what really kind of turned on a light bulb for me was, uh, was this article. I think so and so shared it in Slack three years ago. Let me search and someone sent it to me on email and I’m, I’m trying to dig it up again or I’m trying to remember the email, the keywords in Google. Um, but I also have my saved spaces like pocket, um, some of my personal archives that are kept in Dropbox. Um, yeah, I don’t do the bookmarking thing so much anymore.

So in some cases I’m going from stuff that I’ve already read, consumed in the past, that Kindle highlights another good one. Goodreads actually is one I’ll go back and just kind of search and filter. For books I’ve read, and then that’ll remind me, oh yeah, this book here had a lot of good ideas. Let me go dig that one up and look through my highlights and it’ll spark some spark some memory on that.

And that’s stuff I’ve already consumed, but the other side of it is things I haven’t found yet. And so I’m often surprised how often like I have what I think is this brilliant original idea. And then I, that tells me what I should search the web for, uh, in in order to find, um, someone else that’s thought about or tackled this problem. And in many cases, I find an amazing article that someone’s written that much better encapsulates whatever insight I wanted to share, and I think, OK, great, I could just read this article. I don’t, I don’t need to write it.

00:24:03 - Speaker 2: I think this is called uh Cowan Soft or Tyler Cowen. There’s a literature on everything.

00:24:06 - Speaker 1: There is. Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean that restating some ideas in a different form to a different audience in a different context. In some cases just better. Sometimes there’s, you know, an academic paper that’s really dry and Um, kind of maybe not written in the most engaging style and not too many people have seen, and wrapping those ideas up in a different way and publishing them in a different medium could in fact, you know, reach a new audience.

00:24:31 - Speaker 2: And going back to the beginning of your example, you mentioned this idea of hunch or something that you felt like you had to tell the world.

To me that’s really important. I, I think we tend to really heavily weight ideas that we can verbalize and articulate, you know, in our training and like school and in business. It’s all about what you can put on the test and what you can put in the email, for example. Um, but, but so many ideas are good before you can actually articulate them. And so I think it’s really important to tune into your, your hunches and your intuitions and to start working and developing ideas in that phase even before they’re fully, you know, written out.

00:25:06 - Speaker 1: Yeah, the hunch phase for me is almost always manifests itself as extreme irritation, and I start to get once that irritation crosses a certain certain threshold, I want to do something about it, and that doing something about it is basically developing the.

The idea and in some cases, the output of that, if I indeed follow through with it, is making a new product, making a new company, writing an article about something.

But I’ve seen this in others as well, and I’ve actually learned to tune in to this on Teams, particularly when I’m in some kind of management role. Uh, which is when I see someone or hear someone, and this has certainly been the case working with, with you these many years we’ve been together, which is like when I see you start to become a little agitated or irritated about something but you can’t express what it is you’re agitated or irritated about. It’s just, it seems to circle some. You know, some area or topic, I tend to, when I see someone in that state, I basically want to encourage them to like pursue that because that that is the start of a hunch. But I’d be curious to hear, Mark, what uh what your experience is like.

00:26:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, the Genesis is often a hunch. Um, and, and for me that usually comes from reading or some other content like that, often from different domains.

So you mentioned these articles that we wrote together at ink and Switch. Uh, one of those was called Slow Software, it’s about software performance. In that case, I had been reading about, you know, software architecture, uh, user interface design. I’d also been reading about the kind of ergonomics and human factors of like, you know, the physical biology of how humans work with tools. um and I’d also been reading about the uh the hardware and software that goes into games, uh, computer games, which is the tends to be like the highest performing. Uh, consumer facing software that we have and combining all of those things at once created this hunch in my mind that software performance was slow, it was unacceptably slow, but there was also a path to making it fast because in fact, software performance is pretty good in the case of many games. And then from there I often go into that prior art search like you described where I read a bunch, I do citation crawling where I find one article and I read all the references in that article or all read about all the terms that I didn’t know.

00:27:23 - Speaker 1: That article is a great example because it did connect a bunch of pretty deep academic research about what you call the human factors.

So for example, measuring. How much latency a human can be sensitive to on a screen, you know, what frame rate. Uh, and that’s very dependent on the action you’re doing and some other things, but there’s some really great and deep academic research about that.

But you’re also connecting that to, for example, some things from the gaming industry or some things from the way that you sort of deep, um, software and hardware engineering things. I don’t necessarily know that the groups of people that worked on those two different domains were very likely to share ideas, but actually connected together, they fit together really well and produced fresh insights by by putting those together. And in fact that article was quite successful, I think, uh, largely because of connecting those ideas from different but very complementary domains.

00:28:15 - Speaker 2: Once we have the, the kind of uh raw material, I often go to write an outline, that’s when you really start testing, you know, your idea and the way that that you mentioned where you feel like you have something, but it’s not until you actually go to write out that you understand if you, if you have a coherent argument and if it all connects together.

And then this is often the the point where I apply Wiggin’s law, you know, when in doubt cut scope. And so we have all these ideas and some, but some of them end up being kind of dead ends or not really supported or or indeed not even true. And so you kind of trim down to the The pieces of the idea, the kernel of the idea that’s that’s really strong.

00:28:49 - Speaker 1: An outline is the, the, because I can imagine one way to make it concrete is take a specific section or a specific point you want to make and write a page or write a couple paragraphs or something, but the more top down outline table of contents thing is a better, that’s how you like to do it.

00:29:05 - Speaker 2: Oh, that’s a good that’s a good question. I actually like to do both the kind of vertical and the horizontal so that.

The horizontal would be the table of contents, breadth first, sketch out the ideas and then fill in the details.

I also do like to do vertical slices. uh, so for example, I did this where we were talking about the latency of, uh, styluses on, on tablets and I basically did. Uh, the full media for one particular case, like I actually filmed the stylus on the tablet. I calculate the latency. I compared that to the literature about what kind of latencies are acceptable to people and kind of had a a a complete vertical slice as we would call it of the argument and that um in a different way informs if the approach is viable.

00:29:50 - Speaker 1: Do you have an idea just off the cuff? How often you get something to this stage. Let’s say you, you both do the, the top down outline table of contents thing and sketch out one section, including maybe, yeah, the, the, the media that goes with it, how often you get to a stage like that and think, well, this thing isn’t really very good and just kind of set it down, uh, versus something that does go on to find its legs and you eventually publish into the world.

00:30:18 - Speaker 2: I feel like maybe. A half or a third make it from the sketch to a final draft, and then even before that, there’s another factor of 2 or 3 of ideas or concepts or instigations that I might write about at some point. So it’s a pretty steep funnel.

00:30:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s my experience too. It’d be hard to Hard to hard pressed to guess it, but it’s certainly less than half get to any, you know, I invest a lot in that ideation. In some cases, even writing partial drafts and outlines and things like that and just kind of look at it and go, yeah. It seemed good in my head, but I just don’t think there’s enough here, and maybe I need to research it more, maybe I need to develop more and maybe the time isn’t quite right, or maybe it just turns out there really isn’t something here worth uh worth writing about. Yeah, makes sense.

You also made uh just kind of a. A sidebar, but earlier you made the point of like, in the case of writing specifically, you go in to make a point and then you’re using your supporting materials. Hopefully that’s something you collected as part of the prior art fodder research phase, and you think, OK, well, you want to make this particular. Point and so you’re going to support it with this, you know, citation link out or footnote or whatever it is. And then it’s happened to me with some frequency that I go to do that and then I actually dig in a little bit because I realized that the thing I want to use as support doesn’t actually support my point, and then I dig deeper and I realize the point’s actually a little bit wrong, um, you know, maybe in a nuanced way, maybe in a more direct way, and I just misremembered something or misconnected something and of course the, the part of the benefit of externalizing a thing in this case and. You know, the written word is to bring that clarity.

The job of the writer is to be right, so it’s not enough to write a compelling argument. The argument has to be based on sound facts and the process of writing forces you to confront that and find the gaps and flaws in your own thinking.

00:32:16 - Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I wish this is actually something that uh the, the American educational institutions took to heart more. The the model there is much more like the adversarial argumentative approach where you kind of pick a side and defend it to the best of your ability, whereas I’m a much bigger fan of writing as a process to discover and communicate the truth. So one last topic I want to talk about here, Adam, is deep work, sense of flow. I think that’s really important for generating good ideas. How do you think about getting into a sense of flow and using that for your process?

00:32:49 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so to decompose a couple or define a couple of the things there.

The state of flow, which is this idea from psychology that Uh, when you really sort of get in the zone and you’re able to focus and concentrate that there’s satisfaction that comes from that, but also you’re able to perform at your maximum capability, whatever that is, whether it’s physical for an athlete or mental for, uh, creative, creative professionals like we’re talking about, uh, and then there’s this concept of deep work which is uh. This book by Cal Newport that I rather like. He’s an academic computer science kind of guy, and he is basically just making the, uh, the observation that you need big blocks of uninterrupted time to focus on problems if you want to, um, be able to do really breakthrough things, which is sort of a feels sort of obvious when you state it that way, but in a world where we’re increasingly surrounded by distractions all the time, notifications on our phone and Group chat from our teams and um news cycles and basically there’s always there’s always distraction around us um everywhere and the idea of sort of making specific time scheduling time to think, to work on problems, what I would call the idea, uh, is a really uh valuable and important thing to do and in fact is a differentiated thing to do that if you can find ways to. To make that time in your, in your daily schedule to go and think deeply and work on a problem for say 2 or 3 hours, uh, that that will allow you to be much more effective at your craft than maybe many of your more distracted peers.

00:34:25 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and do you have particular practices here for your own work?

00:34:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. Um, one, of course, again, it’s just kind of scheduling that time or in my case, I have the benefit that there’s a uh a natural time in my cycle or in my There’s a natural time in my schedule in the morning, which is after I was done my morning chores, um, but before, uh, the rest of my team wakes up, since most of them are based in the United States. And so in that moment I have a few hours when I’m in a good creative mindset. Um, and I can turn off all my notifications, close the door to my office, which I do whether or not there’s anyone, this is my home office, but I actually closed the door to my home office even if there’s no one else home because that’s actually a signal to me that I’m here to focus, um, and it’s a small thing, but this ritual of sort of turning away anything that could be a distraction and saying, all right, I’ve got this block of time and I’m gonna do nothing. but focus on and think about the problem that’s in front of me right now. It’s harder than it sounds to create that focus, but for me, you build a technique, you build a habit. Do you have uh habits of this uh for yourself?

00:35:35 - Speaker 2: Well, I feel like it’s better now with the remote set up because I can create time for myself uh in my home office and also because we have this this thing where people are in different time zones, so there are parts of the day that are naturally more quiet.

Um, this also actually reminds me of a, a practice that I or kind of pattern that I picked up from the academic world. So think about how, how corporate time works. You basically, you come into the office for, for your work day, and it’s all like, you know, kind of a busy time. You don’t have a lot of time to think necessarily, and then you might have some weekends off and you have some holidays, but you have these basically two modes. You have the, the busy work times and you have every, you know, year or so you have a vacation, uh, and you have your weekends.

Um, the, the, the pattern in academia is much more kind of spread out. So on any given day, a professor often has, uh, classes, which is kind of their busy work time, and they have their, their office hours and their research time and those are kind of three different types of time that they have within any given day, and then often within their week, they have different types of days, so there are some days where they have more classes and some days where they just do research.

Um, and then they have different times of the year. So they have the within a semester, they have between semesters and they have between summers or kind of in the summer, uh, and then they have typically a sabbatical every 6 or 7 years. So you have this kind of spectrum of breaks, you have the like the 1 hour break, the 2 day. break, you know, the 2 month break, the year break, and the 6 year break, and I, I find that having that those kind of different timescales um that are that are spread out amongst themselves gives you the opportunity to have different types of ideas. So it’s a practice or a pattern that I’ve tried to incorporate into my own work where I I don’t just have like a 5 days on, 2 days off schedule. It’s more, it’s more flexible, um, and I also try to take a longer periods of time off every few months or even uh even longer periods every few years.

00:37:32 - Speaker 1: One other thing this makes me think of, or I hadn’t thought about it until now, but um I guess coming back to kind of connecting ideas here to um philosophies that I think fed into The best way to get those um uninterrupted blocks of focus time because it’s not just external distractions, it’s it’s, um, your own mind is a source of distractions. So even in that completely quiet room with the phone ringer turned off and you know, the, the schedule blocked out in your calendar and you’re not gonna be disrupt interrupted, the tendency to think about anything and everything other than the problem you sat down to work on. It can sometimes be challenging when you’ve got a thing that’s just worrying you, going on in your life or your work, you know, there’s that critical bug that needs to be fixed or in your, uh, in your personal life, there’s something going on that needs attention. Um, and two things, two philosophies I’ve really drawn from to help with that is, one is, uh, David Allen’s getting things done, which is sort of a classic in the productivity. Nerd space but basically he has a lot of good ideas there, but one of them is one of the reasons you have things like calendars and to do lists and these like productivity systems is to get this stuff out of your head. He talks about his open loops. So you don’t, as soon as you have a quiet moment to sit down and think about an important problem, you don’t want to instantly be thinking, oh, but what about I left the oven on, right? And that’s the classic classic open loop. Um, you want to feel like, OK, there is stuff to take care of out there. I do need to do my taxes. There’s this thing going on in my kid’s school. There is this thing my colleague needs from me on a pretty urgent schedule, but I’ve already put those things into other systems where I know they’ll get done at the right time, so I can remove all that from my mind and give my full emotional and mental bandwidth to the task that’s in front of me. And that’s the, that’s the getting things done side. And then the other one actually is mindfulness meditation, which has a a similar sort of thing on the emotion side, which is the ability to I guess disconnect a little bit or have be able to step away from your emotions uh and sort of observe them at a little bit of a distance and both of those in their own way, the open loops thing and the kind of mindfulness step back from your emotions thing, um, can be helpful to me in giving your full, full, full attention to the problem at hand.

00:40:01 - Speaker 2: Those sound like two good ideas to close on, Adam.

00:40:04 - Speaker 1: Well, I really enjoyed the chat, Mark. I’m sure we’ll talk about this more because sort of having ideas, developing ideas, ideation tools and techniques is, um, I think, pretty core to what we’re working on here at Muse.

00:40:19 - Speaker 2: Indeed, and if any of our listeners out there have ideas or feedback, feel free to reach out to us at @museapphq on Twitter or hello at musesApp.com by email. Love to hear your comments and ideas for future episodes.

00:40:35 - Speaker 1: Thanks, Mark, see you next time.

00:40:37 - Speaker 2: See you, Adam, bye.