003 · Enhance your creativity by capturing ideas effectively

This issue is for the creators…

This is going to be a walkthrough of the system that I have in place to boost my creativity and ensure I’ve always got something to write about.

I’ll explain my system to capture ideas and turn them into topics for articles, but first, we must look at the nature of creativity…

I was listening to a podcast by Huberman Lab recently. Dr. Huberman’s guest was the prolific music producer Rick Rubin, who’s known for his ability to bring out the best in the artists he works with.

When talking about takeaways from Rubin’s book (The Creative Act: A Way of Being), Huberman mentioned he’s now a believer that an internal source of creativity doesn’t exist:

"I’m now convinced that there may not actually be an internal source of creativity that exists on its own."

Dr. Andrew Huberman

Where then does creativity, and therefore ideas for content creation, come from?

In the words of Rubin during the podcast, creativity is ‘a new combination of existing ideas presented in a new way’.

The key here is existing ideas. They inform the new ones.

Therefore we cannot expect to continue to create unique and interesting content if we aren’t consuming new and interesting content.

Consume the ideas of those you admire, those who educate you, and those who have created what you want to create. Optimise your media feeds so that you’re only exposed to the ideas and content of these people.

When your brain encounters a new concept, it’s sized up against your knowledge in a way only your brain is capable of.

And then, if you’re lucky, you might generate ‘a new combination of existing ideas presented in a new way’.

In other words, creativity’s kicked in and you’ve had a new idea!

Now many of us struggle to generate meaningful ideas on command - they’re more likely to spring out of nowhere whilst doing something less demanding. Walking the dog, in the gym or taking a shower, perhaps.

This is where a solid system for idea capture comes in…

There’s a reason that the most popular productivity systems start with idea/task capture (think Getting Things Done, Building a Second Brain). Your perception is constantly changing - the way your brain perceives an idea can completely change within an hour. This means that if it’s something good, you’d better make it concrete quickly or you might never encounter it again.

The best systems for idea capture are the ones that allow you to bring that notion from the depths of your mind and convert it to meaningful text with as little friction as possible. These systems are also flexible because ideas can take any form.

Ideally, you have a few different tools in place to capture your ideas. Here are mine:

• Todoist - I put off using a digital service to capture things, but there’s minimal friction with a point of input just a button or a keyboard shortcut away. Todoist detects due dates and priorities just from the text in the input too, as well as supporting text-to-speech input

• Pen and paper - I’ll always advocate using pen and paper when you don’t want to be distracted. This is good for journaling, but also to have as a capture mechanism next to your bed at night when you don’t want to be near a mobile device.

• Whiteboard - phones, laptops and paper don’t work well with water, so I have a whiteboard and pen tacked to the wall of my shower. Shout out to Dickie Bush for this idea.

Have something in place wherever ideas are likely to hit you.

I’ve learned quite a bit about idea capture since having to juggle creative business and university…

As someone who likes to be quite organised, I struggled with building a structured idea capture system. I switched from trying to manage everything in Todoist, then to bullet journaling, then back to Todoist again.

This continued until I realised the principle of idea capture was simply so you didn’t forget things. The system didn’t have to be organised or structured. I stopped chasing a perfect system with these tools, and started seeing the tools as buckets…

I could simply capture whenever I hit me, throwing the idea into a bucket without worrying about how the idea was going to integrate into the rest of my system.

Following this change, I began setting aside some time at the end of each day to triage what had built up in each of the buckets. I’d assign due dates to tasks, and add content ideas to my system, ready for the next step in creating work to share with the world.

Expanding the means of idea capture and letting go of structure lead to me capturing more freely, therefore leading to more and better content.

Takeaways:

• Creativity is novel combinations and expressions of old ideas

• It’s harder to generate these novel combinations if you don’t consume ideas that are new to you

• Put tools in place so that when inspiration strikes, there’s as little friction as possible between the idea and recording it

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading.

Stay creative.