Sometimes, though, *habits, regular things* can also help with creativity. Often, when I've been talking about creativity in these videos, it's been about sort of inspiration, those moments, things that are unplanned, often quite chaotic. Sometimes you want the kick that makes us think of something entirely new. But sometimes actually having *regularity* can be a positive thing as well.
So, we're going to talk a little bit about that. Often actually changing your physical location, we've talked about the importance of designing physical locations, but actually just the act of having multiple ones can be an important thing to do. So, for instance, if I'm sitting at my desk, I'm in a different mode of working than if I sit on a comfy chair. I might sit on my comfy chair and read a book, or perhaps comment on something that I've got to read and comment back on.
Whereas on my desk, I might feel more I need to be productive in typing things. If the computer is in front of me, even if it's closed and I'm reading a book, I might be constantly itching to open it and read email. The very act of being in a different place *resets your mind*, says, 'I'm doing something different.' So, it may be you want to try and design your working environment. Now, that might be about almost being in different rooms. It might be about facing different walls. It might be going to a coffee shop.
The early Harry Potter's were written in a particular coffee shop in Edinburgh. There may be places you go to; it might be, I said, as simple as looking in a different direction, sitting in a different chair that puts you into a different frame of mind. So, some frames of mind might be more, 'I'm being productive and doing something.' Others might be more expansive in thinking. So, that's about habits of mind, so you create these slightly different circumstances
that help you to think differently. Now, that's true of where you sit. But it's also true perhaps of what you're wearing. So, I mean, literally perhaps the hats – we often talk about wearing different hats. Now, if you're a hat-wearer, you might actually have your thinking cap that you put on. I certainly use T-shirts quite a lot. I mean, I wear T-shirts, and I actually sometimes use them to create little personas for myself.
So, at the moment, in these creativity slides I've been wearing this T-shirt. I do wash it in between. And it was given to me by my daughter, who is an actor, and it's sort of geometric and slightly perhaps ambiguous and unstructured. And so, it feels like quite a nice one to wear when I'm talking about creativity. Also, when I've been doing statistics slides, I've been wearing this T-shirt, which is – actually, it's not statistics, what's on it – it's semantic web keywords.
But it looks a bit techie, so again feels quite a good one to wear for statistics. And of course if I go running, I wear different T-shirts, perhaps my Tiree Ultramarathon T-shirt, just to show that I can put some fitness in as well. So, by wearing *different clothes*, you might again put yourself into different frames of mind but also create a persona of yourself.
So, by doing something different, by being somewhere different, you go from being the 'I'm working on graphic design.' to 'I'm working on thinking about people.' modes. Or it might be going from management to creative modes, but choosing different ways of being. So, *dressing up*, *where you are*. Sometimes by *time* – we can organize time. Now, this is a particular place where we cross over to
bits of time management, but – and there's different video series about that – but *time routines can often help us*. I'm a James Bond fan. I've got – this is *Goldfinger*, one of the very early – it's a 1961 copy of *Goldfinger*. Ian Fleming worked for – I've forgotten which it is – one of the major London newspapers. But he had two months a year when he went to Jamaica,
to – he had a house there called 'Goldeneye'. And every morning – and I've forgotten the numbers for this; I was trying to look them up and I've missed them – but it was something like he would get up and he would write a thousand words. And then he would go snorkeling in the water, and lovely warm Jamaican waters. Then he would go back, presumably dry, have some breakfast, and then write another 500 words. And then that was him done for the day, and he did other things.
And every day he did that. And at the end of two months – and you could do the sums to work out if I've got my number of words right – but he had the next James Bond novel written. So, he created a timetable for himself during the day. Now, that was a timetable about *producing*. Sometimes, it's more inspirational things. So, there's a technique that some people do, which is that you go to a dictionary and every morning you sort of randomly open it,
you choose a word, and you write a *poem* where that word is crucial, or at least that word is in it somewhere and it's a crucial part of the poem. Now, the poems don't have to be that good. So, this is not about producing the wonderful work of poetry that's going to change the world. But it's about getting yourself into a mindset where *you are being productive* and thinking about things and building that habit that says, 'When I want to write a poem, I can write a poem. That's easy.' – you know.
'And when I want to write a particular poem about a particular thing, that's different.' But the actual act of just writing a poem becomes something that's natural, something you can almost turn on. A personal example of that for me was some years ago I wrote a regular editorial on HCI education for SIGCHI Bulletin, which was the members' magazine for ACM SIGCHI. What would happen is each – it was every two months,
and every two months I'd come to deadline day and I'd not written anything, I'd not thought about it at all, and it had to be one page of ACM two-column layout, which is about 850 words. And what would happen is I was completely blank; I'd get up and I'd often go off for a walk or something like that; thoughts would mill through my head; and I'd come back and I'd write it, and by midday I had something written. And I knew I had to do it; the deadline helped. I'm rotten at doing things without deadlines.
But I would get to that deadline and I would have written something that had a patterning to it, had a focus, usually a little bit of something current, some sort of deep issue all mixed together. And that taught me a lot. I learnt to write – my craft of writing. It wasn't necessarily the best writing ever produced, but I learned my craft. I was doing something regularly and therefore building up the skill set. That then meant that when I wrote other kinds of writing I was better prepared to do that.
Now, these kind of things – none of these work necessarily for everyone, and some techniques work better for some, just like all the other kinds of techniques we've talked about. But it's certainly worth trying these kinds of things.