Edward Vielmetti is inviting you to A2B3 lunch on Thursday at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Distraction, scatter, gather, focus, discardia: a five part cycle

Herein a recipe for producing what looks like some kind of careful long term reasonable insight into a question, but what is really a coping strategy for the complete inability to be attentive to anything for very long.

Be distracted away from the thing you are supposed to be doing; that part is pretty easy.  Wander off randomly into the wilderness of recent changes to the Internet or a random page in your personal knowledge management heap or some long-dusty book in Google Books.  Note some small fragment of something that isn't at all relevant to what everyone else seems to be looking at right now but that somehow temporarily holds your interest long enough to compose a few paragraphs with a few links.  Write about it here; try with desperation to find a category it should already belong to so that it has some illusion of continuity with what you have been doing all along.  Hit "save", hit "publish", and return to the task at hand.

Scatter your attention all over the Internet to a range of places where recent changes seem to be more predominant.  Post to Twitter, or Facebook, or your favorite online newspaper's best reader comments section, or to some seasonally or topically appropriate blog where you know that the author welcomes your readership.  Be outwardly visible and pay attention to someone else, something else, some place other than yourself.  Make the rounds of the usual places and hit a few new ones.  Stop before everyone is asleep.

Gather up things you have written on a topic, things captured during previous distractions or scattered to the four winds.  If there is a search engine, search for your own long-forgotten commentary on something, and collect it back to somewhere central.  If all you have is paper, leaf through it steadily and methodically until inevitably that journal yields a relevant fragment.   Pile up the fragments, enumerate them, list them out carefully as though they were bits of papyrus needing careful reassembly.  See what you might have known in the past and re-know it, relearn it.

Then, when all of the distract-scatter-gather process has all been put into motion, can you focus on that one thing you have been getting ready to do all this time.  Come back to what you have gathered up and re-assess the work as a whole.  Allow yourself to work methodically through the work you have gathered together, to pull it apart, to see what the whole set looks like and not just little bits of it.   Pull through everything that is relevant and stitch it all together into something new, something that lasts longer than a simple short distraction but that hold and sustain a concentrated narrative with examples and ideas and themes and notions pulled out from a long time.

The whole process should run on some cycle appropriate for the task or the season.  As I write, I think about the quarterly holiday of Discardia, where you celebrate letting go, and of all of the distracted and scattered thinking I have about that event that culminates in an every three months deliberate effort to tidy things up.  The collected effort of pulling things together means not only that you have everything in mind but also that you can free yourself of the distractions that eventually got you here - and that you get, periodically, a chance to edit out some randomness and make it look like you are more organized and orderly than your easily-distracted nature would allow.

This season's Discardia holiday is coming up on June 20-22, 2009.

Serendipity, a collection

Some collected thoughts on serendipity.

serendipity in book-finding: (via if:book)

the pinpoint accuracy of computer-searches, leaves those of us lucky enough to have spent time in library stacks, nostalgic for the unexpected discovery of something we didn't know we were looking for but which just happened, serendipitously, to be on a nearby shelf.

Lindsay Marshall on serendipity:

We are not, I believe, looking for tools to record our thoughts or to provide them with structure. What we seek is something that leads us to the unforeseen collisions, the copulations that lead to new thoughts, new connections and yet more new meetings.

Moyra Davis on the problem of reading:

Both books are filled not only with Davey's moody photos of bookshelves in various states of disarray and transition but also with her thoughts on the place of reading in a creative life, and the difficulty, in managing the habit, of striking the right balance between purpose and serendipity, and between work and pleasure. "'What to read?' is a recurring dilemma in my life," she admits in The Problem of Reading, which has, among other images, a great close-up of her mother's annotations of Swann's Way.

Rick Brenner on serendipity in project management

Serendipity in project management is rare, in part, because we're under too much pressure to see it. If we can reduce the pressure, wonderful things happen.

Thanks to Lindsay Marshall for the original spur to this line of thinking.

creativity vs productivity

Merlin Mann has relaunched 43 Folders; he doesn't want to be the productivity guy any more, he wants to be the creativity guy.  It's a good choice.

He notes some essential tension between the demand of professional bloggers to produce immense quantities of on-topic dreck that generates a lot of page views, vs the wise craft of intense creative types who sweat the details to edit things down to a fine polish.  (Or something like that; it probably overstates the issue.)  And he bemoans the tendency of people to consume an endless stream of shitty first drafts as if that was the only thing worth doing:

What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it.  (from better)

Since this post itself is a shitty first draft of a summary of what is probably 100 other things I've thought about, I'll keep it short.  Sometimes, when you want to have deep insight into a topic, you have to immerse yourself in the details.  Your makebelieve insight and fake-connectedness are exercises in helping you understand the world, and even though sometimes the explanation that comes up doesn't really sound any more insightful than what your wikipedia-quoting eight year old can come up with, it came from you.  Sometimes, if you are really lucky, you get to reflect on a bunch of first drafts and turn them into second and third drafts - hurray!  But at least you got that thinking out into public in a format that can get some feedback.  The best way to have one good idea is to have a thousand ideas.

Recommended reading: Alex Osborn's 1949 "Your Creative Power: How To Use Imagination".