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| One's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. - Oliver Wendell Holmes | ||||||
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There are several phases in my thinking process. This page describes these as I seem them. I will try to keep it high-level and oriented toward the process, not the tools. Although I present these as distinct phases, they are much more integrated and iterative than they are distinct. It's more like [agile programming] than waterfall development. I find it difficult, for example, to keep from thinking about presentation at all levels of the process.
Ideas come to me fast and furiously. My thinking is much more interrupt driven than multi-tasking. I can be right in the middle of securing one idea when another one comes along and steals my attention. It is vitally important that tools and techniques used at this time are quick and agile.
One of the other issues is not one of getting ideas, but of filtering out all the junk which comes at you. I was struck earlier about the amount of noise in our environment. But, for the purpose of ideas, I'm wondering if this noise isn't just the audio and visual noise in which we live, but also the noise of ideas that comes at us in all forms.
So getting ideas boils down to several elements for me:
There are several tools which help with this. I'll explore these in Getting Ideas.
26-May-2007: I recently wrote a blog about [blogging] and one of the things I did was raise the question of what triggers blogging. That is, at what point does an idea get to the critical mass that it causes me to capture it? I think that this depends on the capture method I use. But, in this case, I was more interested in the actual capturing of the idea in a blog. That is committing the idea to a published media. What gets me motivated to get out the tool -- start the computer and actually put something down? This is an act which takes both time and effort on my part. I wonder just what that critical point is?
I have lots of different ideas. It is important to organize my thoughts related to these ideas. I try to put things down in some sort of order, but the process of doing so often points out problems with my thinking or presentation or both.
I'm a believer in outlining as a method of organizing thoughts. Some of the more visual methods can also work for some people and I use them when appropriate. Whatever your method, the idea is to put your initial thoughts into some organized presentation. This will often point out places where you are missing information or where your thinking may need some work.
Everything but the most trivial idea requires some form of research the flush out. I do a great deal of this online. A tool for this phase needs to be able to not only bookmark the site, but provide you with the opportunity to cut-and-paste the information into a tool which will perform the next phase of the process.
One interesting aspect of researching material today is the vast amount of material which is easily available. A problem with too much material is the need to differentiate between valuable material and chaff. It is easy to get mislead by biased material, specially when your topic has varying viewpoints (and what topic worth writing about doesn't?). The web makes it easy for groups espousing a particular viewpoint to publish. Discernment is a valuable skill when using the web for your research.
Once things are organized and researched, it is necessary to flush out the details. This is the point where examples, expansions, illustrations, etc. are added.
Here I need to clean up the language, make it more readable and understandable to the audience. This is also the point at which illustrations are added depending on the method of publication.
The choice of publication method can affect how the entire idea is put together. This is the part where the refined product is polished and published for general distribution. I'm going to concentrate on getting things ready to put on the web and some techniques to present the product as clearly as possible.
There are some common processes which span each of the thinking areas.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Thinking can be a solitary process, but with our ever-more interconnected society, it is more likely that you will communicate with someone during the process.
Sometimes, the more eyes on an idea, the better it becomes. Althought collaboration relies heavily on communications, it expands that concept to allow users to work on the idea together, sometimes in real time. Since we are a global society, this collaboration can involve real-time or near real-time interaction between individuals who are in different parts of the world and may never have met.
