Accidental Creative

iPhone Apps for Creatives

Thus far I’ve managed to avoid writing this post, but because I get frequent requests from artists and creative-folk wanting to know how I use my iPhone, (REALLY?!?!), I decided to give this one a whirl.

Creating In A Negative Environment

I received an e-mail this week from an AC community member asking about how to deal with a negative environment in the workplace. This seems to be emerging as a top concern for creative pros as expectations continue to rise with increasing  emphasis on getting more done with fewer resources. This is especially a concern for agency creatives, as they see many of their clients consolidating their creative work in one or two places and forcing many specialty houses to fold or cut costs in an effort to survive.

With all of this swirling about, it can be difficult to “keep your head” and stay motivated in your work. Here are a few thoughts about keeping your creative edge in a…less…than…ideal…environment:

1. Make certain that you are seeking clear expectations from your supervisor. Know your deadlines, the strategy, the client’s strategy, how your work fits into all of it. Get metrics and document conversations. This is not paranoia, it is seeking clarity, which is the first thing to go in an emotionally-charged environment.

2. Find space for yourself. Have time on the calendar in your day - and a place to go - to catch a breath and get away from the craziness. Make it consistent and something you can look forward to. Even fifteen minutes of solitude can be a huge relief and can help you re-calibrate for the rest of your day.

3. Refuse to engage in negative office talk. When the talk turns south, politely excuse yourself or attempt to re-direct the conversation. Maybe you cannot change the environment, but you CAN choose not to let it affect your attitude.

4. Be jealously protective of your “unnecessary creating” time. If you’ve not done so, put regular time on the calendar - outside of your work day - to create for yourself. If the only creating you’re doing is “create-on-demand”, you will soon find yourself feeling exploited, used and unvalued. 

5. Keep an eye on the big picture. When we’re immersed in a negative environment it can seem as if the world is ending. In reality, this is only the latest pit-stop in your work life. Keep one eye on your work-at-hand, but don’t forget to keep one eye on the big picture, your vocation, and what you’re really up to in this world. Your life is much bigger than your work.

These are a few thoughts that I have around this. Are there specific tips you can offer our community members about how to stay “untainted” and energized in a negative environment?

How A Trip To New Orleans Saved My Conceptual Soul

From August 2-11 I was among three hundred and twenty (320) people from Cincinnati who invaded New Orleans. A seven-bus convoy. Our mission was to partner with Habitat For Humanity in its effort to rebuild sections of the city destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.

First was the seventeen-hour bus ride. Call it detox, really. It was my chance to escape for a while, gaze out at the passing landscape and simply forget myself. No agenda, no problems to solve (except how to get comfortable enough to sleep on a bus.)

It felt like we were all in something together.

After an overnight bus ride and a day of relative quiet, one of the first things we did in Nola was tour the region and survey the damage. I was shocked by the extent of the remaining devastation. Entire neighborhoods are still in shambles, teetering on the brink of collapse. In spite of hearing reports from the scouting trip, I was floored by what I witnessed.

On day three we began our labor. Two-hundred and eighty of us were charged with doing the Habitat work, and thirty-or-so of us had the opportunity to hang out with kids who had been displaced by the storm. Many of these kids had lost everything and had only recently been able to return to their homes.

Now on to the save-my-conceptual-soul part. I can’t adequately express what it felt like to get out of bed each day with a clear and simple purpose. Fellow ACer Rob Seddon was also on the trip and said that it was like we were “living the way we’re wired to live.” There was no arguing about what we should do, which direction to go, there was no questioning or solving problems, no moving “big rocks” around (unless they were real rocks.) There was the simple hammering and sawing and moving and engaging and loving kids. That was all. It was simple and it was beautiful.

I love concepts and I love working with my mind. I love solving problems. I love the challenge of it. But as July was coming to a close, I had been neck deep in problem-solving mode for a while. I had huge projects underway in multiple areas of life, the re-work of the AC site is still unfinished, and I was prepping for Nola. (Drowning is the most appropriate metaphor.)

This trip was the concrete answer to my conceptual problem.

There is something that happens when we engage others in generosity and simplicity. As I’ve written before, creativity is simultaneously outward-focused and inward-seeking. We act so that we can re-act. In doing so we recover ourselves from a lifetime of “positioning” and “mask-wearing.” When there are no titles, no bonuses to earn and no extrinsic motivations we are free to purely and simply see the world as we uniquely do and to share that with others as we creatively engage. We are free. And as Parker Palmer says, no act is truly creative unless it is born out of freedom.

So this is my encouragement to you: take the opportunity this week to serve. Do something at personal cost for someone else. Forget yourself for a few hours and lose your masks. Creatively engage.

I was recently surfing the web and I came across something on another website that I’d written to our Premium community a few months ago. (Yes…it was strange to be looking for a quote and to find my own…:)

Life is made up of moments and choices. We can choose to do the small things we must do with great care, or we can choose to stay focused on the “big things” and miss everything in the process. It’s the small, step-by-step, creatively and beautifully engaged act that changes us and ultimately changes the world.

Engage creatively today. Go outside of yourself and then…recover yourself.

Play vs. Work

“What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn’t have done it. Who was it who said, “Blessed is the man who has found his work”? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work–not somebody else’s work. The work that is really a man’s own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man’s work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.” Mark Twain 

Why is it that we feel the need to draw arbitrary lines between “work” and “play?” So many people, in fact, dream of working themselves around the clock for several years in order to claim the prize of “early retirement.” It’s thought that if we can only get all of this “work” stuff out of the way, then we could really enjoy ourselves and do whatever we want - take up a hobby, write our novel, etc. We have so cast the dichotomy between work and play that we are incapable of seeing them as two sides of the same coin - an expression of our engaged curiosity.

In fact, we’ve so taken this to categorical extremism that it affects our mindset about what we’re up to in the world. I often hear, “I’d really like someday to be engaged in helping orphans” or “after this I’d love to spend time mentoring young designers” or other types of “wishful” thinking. But, for now at least, we’re a prisoner of this thing called “work” until the “great someday.” We divide ourselves into two modes and assign a purpose to each. One is for our “passions and interests” and one is for our “work.”

We have confused “occupation” with “vocation.”

We each (hopefully) have an occupation. It is the way we make money, pay the bills and contribute to the economy. It’s our job. It leverages our skills to generate value for the organization of which we’re a part. It is largely extrinsically motivated (pay, rewards, recognition, etc.)

Though we often don’t realize it, we each also have a vocation, which is the unique contribution that we have to offer the world. It’s the central thing that puts a “fire in our gut” when we encounter it or engage in it. It is intrinsically motivated. It’s the thing that fuels our passion, keeps us moving forward and in some cases even obsesses us.

Vocation is typically much more aligned with our “gifts” than with our “skills.” Skills can be developed, but gifts are unique ways of engaging the world that cannot necessarily be taught. They seem to be innate. (For example, many visual artists simply see the world differently than other people. Others can be taught to replicate a shape or a line on a page, but the truly gifted visual artist simply has a unique way of seeing perspective, shape, texture, light, etc. The same holds true with the gifted musician. Playing a piece by rote is different than experiencing the world as music.)

The tension that causes us to draw lines between work and play is the tension between our occupation’s responsibilities and our vocation’s pull. We know what fires us up, but our day-to-day tasks do not fuel that fire. We feel robbed. Though some people are able to bring the vocation/occupation dissonance into alignment, most of us will spend our day-to-day activity performing tasks and engaging in activity that leverages our skills rather than our gifts. But when we begin to understand our vocation, we can cast our day-to-day activity in light of what we value as opposed to what we feel obligated to do.

The beginning of relieving this tension and reclaiming “work as play” is to identify our vocation. What is it that fires us up? What do we obsess on when there is no extrinsic reward? It is important to be a specific as possible. For example, a few years ago I began this journey of excavation and realized that underneath much of my passion is a desire to see people freed up to be brilliant. I noticed a pattern in my life of being deeply moved by stories of underdogs, people who had accomplished things in spite of the critics, and people who had taken extreme (though calculated) risks to deny fear and embrace possibility. This “freedom fighter” ethic had always been present in me, but I’d not identified it so specifically. Now much of my day is seen through that lens. My occupation does not always line up with my vocation as “freedom fighter,” but because I’m aware of this vocation I’m able to bring “who I am” to “what I do.”

Though the process can take a long time, I’d encourage you to make an attempt identify your vocation. Here are a few questions to help you get started:

1. When are you most “moved” emotionally? Cite a few specific instances. Are there any connections between them? What are the commonalities? 2. How can you better bring your occupation in-line with your vocation? Are there ways in which you could leverage your gifts in your work as well as your skills?
3. Are there any ideas you’ve had that you’ve always wanted to execute, but have been putting off? Do they line-up with your vocation? What would be the next step to get started?

In the next part of our series “Battle Lines”, we’ll be tackling masks vs. identity.

Paper vs. Electronic Planning

And now we get to the real crux of the matter, no? I’ve been thinking of late about ditching my old methods of planning in favor of some new ones. As much as I’ve often said that there is no such thing as the perfect system, the important thing is simply to choose a system and keep with it, I am in a place where I find that I’ve jumped the rails. I am a GTD ‘er and have been for a long time, (and will continue to be), but until recently I couldn’t put my finger on why the system isn’t working in my favor any longer. I’m pretty convinced that it’s for two reasons. (1) GTD doesn’t account for priority and calendaring as well as I need it to (let’s face it, buying wasp spray and deploying a strategic partnership are not on the same level of priority) and (2) I am simply bored with my planning and organizational tools and need a shake-up.

Because of organizational constraints, I’ve been using a Treo equipped with LifeBalance software to manage most of my GTD tasks and projects. This has worked well (other than the fact that I have to use a Treo.) But lately I find myself being drawn back to using paper as my primary planning tool. I like the tactile nature of it, and I like the ability to make quick changes “on the fly” without navigating my Treo menu system (which, quite frankly, is not unlikely traveling from the Atlantic to the Pacific in a rowboat via North Dakota.) But I’ve not been able to find the “right” fit in terms of a paper-based planning system. And I’m also a bit hesitant to become one of “those people” who walk into a meeting with the monarch-sized leather case containing their schedule, tasks, birth certificate, college transcript, map of Portugal, etc.

I’ve been eyeing OmniFocus as a possible solution (and they have a really great iPod Touch/iPhone app in the queue for release) but again it doesn’t offer me the flexibility and tactile-nature of a paper-based system. It also doesn’t account for calendaring, it is simply a task-management system.

I have used Levenger’s 3×5 Notecard system to hack together a Hipster PDA, and while this worked well for tasks, it doesn’t have the calendaring capability that I need.

I’ve also been checking out the paper planners from Quo Vadis, especially this one. I will need to carry an extra notebook with me to capture meeting notes and plans, but the design and appeal of these planners is tempting, though there is limited room for task management and idea collection.

So… I guess I am looking for a new “holy grail of planning systems.” I’m looking for something that can help shake-up my methodology a bit and keep everything in the same place. I’ll report back if I have an organizational epiphany.

Executional Love

In his amazing work, Orbiting The Giant Hairball , former Hallmark Creative Director Gordon MacKenzie likens a large organization to…well…a hairball. He says that every new bureaucratic rule or organizational system adds one hair to the hairball until it’s all a giant, messy and impossible-to-navigate mess. MacKenzie suggests in the book that creatives within organizations, (by our definition anyone who has to solve problems or create new solutions on a regular basis), needs to learn to “orbit” the hairball and draw from its resources without getting caught in the muck and mire of organizational life.

I’ve often felt that one of the difficult things for creatives to combat is the organizational temptation to “roll to the middle of the bed.” In other words, we tend to eventually end up in the most familiar places because that’s where the ruts and grooves are, and it takes a lot of intentionality and effort to create new ones. One of the ways this happens is when we fall in love with executions rather than results.

Because organizations have a vested interest in producing predictable results, (as they should), the tendency is to try to replicate success by reproducing the executions that led to those results rather than the process that led to the executions. Because of this, it can be a constant uphill battle to innovate even in small ways. This can leave creatives within the organization languishing in imposed ruts. Over time, this leads to a victim mindset, bitterness and even active subversion within the organization. At best it causes group-think.

As we’ve discussed before, the biggest part of the creative effort is process and only the tiniest little bit is the actual product. By focusing our efforts on replicating “product”, we can prevent duplicated effort but we can also unintentionally limit our thinking and reproduce the “form” of something without the all-too-necessary “heart” of it. This is often what happens when companies “reverse-engineer” a brand or product and end up producing something that lacks the authenticity of the original. (iPhone knockoffs, anyone?)

This is another reason why it’s important to establish the discipline of valuing process and product together in our organizations. By entering into “process” rather than fixating on “product” we can see all of the available forks in the road of the design process rather than seeing it as simply a way to get to the next place. Asking “why” questions about the process itself can be a valuable way of unearthing new innovative solutions.

For leaders, it’s important that we be asking the “why” and “how” questions of the creatives on our teams. For creatives, it’s important that we understand the pressures and constraints that come with leading organizations. No one is out to “get you” (I don’t think.) Your ability to create and engage rests squarely in your hands.

Five Lies Creatives Believe

Having been involved in the world of “how-on-earth-do-things-get-made” for a while now, there are some patterns I’ve noticed within the minds and lives of artists - especially those creating within organizations. When these lies become a part of the way we see the world, they become artificial boundaries that limit our ability to engage and create.

Here are five believable lies that seem to be common:

1. I am what I make. This lie tells us that our value as a team member - nay, as a human being, is dependent upon the perceived value of what we make. This one is a sinister little devil because most organizations are set up to reward those who live out this lie to the extreme. That makes it tougher to opt-out without opting-out.

2. Why try? I’ll never be as good as (insert accomplished artist here)… This lie tells us that unless we hit some invisible standard (and probably unrealistic) standard we’ve set, nothing is worth making. We fail to realize that (insert accomplished artist here) probably felt the same thing from time to time.

3. I’d might as well just give them what they want. This lie tells us that challenging clients or managers is useless because they’re only going to tell us to do something “compromised” anyway. The assumption underlying this lie is that striving for our best work is only valuable if the work is accepted and praised.

4. Because of my abilities, I am entitled to (insert benefit, award, promotion, peer approval, etc. here). This lie causes us to turn inward and withhold ourselves from the creative process. It’s a “my way or no way” kind of thinking that ultimately results in us eating our own heart. (Quick tip: except for your bookie, no one owes you anything.)

5. Risk is bad. Certainty is good. When a culture of fear emerges within an organization, whether it’s fear of failure or fear of success, it squelches personal and organizational innovation. All brilliance demands risk. It is the novelty of the connection that is the very definition of brilliance, and the closer “to the expected” an idea is the less likely it is to be brilliant.

So…these are a few of mine. (All of these, by the way, have been present and accounted for in my creating life from time to time.)

Can you add some to the list?

Sean’s Wallet

I was having lunch last week with my good friend Sean.** We get together on a semi-regular basis to shoot the breeze about our latest projects and to catch up on family life, etc. When the check came, we each pulled out our wallets to pay and I thought for a brief moment that Sean had mistakenly packed a small concrete brick in his pocket by mistake. It turns out I was wrong - it was, in fact, his wallet.

Sean explained to me that, in spite of the fact that he doesn’t really need everything that’s in his wallet everyday, he can’t remove any items from it or they will all fall out. The wallet has now stretched to accommodate the number of credit and membership cards currently contained within. If one goes, they all go.

As we discussed this, the subject turned to organizations. I think that we’ve all probably experienced this phenomenon within our teams at one time or another. Objectives lead to systems, systems lead to derivations of systems, we hire around those derivations, and eventually we have a giant, complex, clunky organization set-up to accomplish various derivations of the “main thing.” This is necessary, of course, but at some point the focus can shift from being organized around an objective to being organized for the sake of organization. This is when “why” and “what” cease to line up and when dissonance can creep into our teams. The organization has stretched to accommodate the systems - if we remove even one, they all fall down. The goal, it seems, has become to perpetuate the system.

The same dynamic can emerge in our personal creating. We can obligate ourselves to the point that there is no joy in our creating. We are simply doing it to fulfill some mandate we’ve placed on ourselves, but there is no longer an inherent intrinsic motivation. It’s all flat. We’re doing it simply to remind ourselves that we can - to make sure the pipes aren’t frozen.

Leaders need to be constantly scanning the horizon for the emergence of this kind of dissonance. We need to make certain that the “why” and the “what” line up and that our systems are in-line with both. (Of course, the “why” is often the sticking point, no?) Artists need to ensure that we are not creating complex and unnecessary systems that are “stretching the wallet.” Beginning with simplicity (”what are we really trying to do now?“) facilitates complexity, but beginning with complexity all but ensures confusion. There are more places for the system to break down.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this… feel free to add pics of your wallet or purse…

(** Cruelty free assurance: No friendships were harmed in the writing of this post. In fact, it was Sean’s idea…)

My Four Folders

OK…I’ve officially carved my desktop down to four folders. I’m SO proud of myself.
They are:
PROJECTS = materials relevant to current projects
NA MATERIALS = things related to “Next Actions” on my lists
REFERENCE = non-actionable stuff I want to keep close-by.
INBOX = anything I’m tempted to let sit on my desktop for more than 3 minutes.

Click the thumbnail for a close-up.

Facebook and the Proliferation of the Click-Rut

I am a creature of habit. I like patterns and I like to push the right lever to get "the pellet." (This is a big reason why I had to eliminate my Treo for a while - I was constantly pressing "get mail" even though it was set to receive mail every five minutes.)

I notice the same patterns in my computer usage. If left in an empty room with my Macbook Pro, I could probably spend an entire day retracing the same click patterns over and over. (Stats, Facebook, news sites, blogs, wash, rinse, repeat.)

I’ve learned a few tricks to keep me from falling into a clickstream zombie. First, I’ve removed most of the blogs from my bookmarks and only read them via RSS. This keeps me up to date without the extra effort to visit each blog every day. (Hey…you can do the same for AC!)

Second, I’m developing the discipline of scheduled internet surfing time. Just like I have my TV time and study time planned, I’ve found that I need to keep tabs on my internet addiction. (It’s like giving me free soda on-tap all day long. What might seem like a few soft drinks will soon turn into 25 lbs of excess waist-weight.)

Third, I’ve found that most of what I find on the net is snack food. I’m trying to be conscious of how what I see and experience affects my overall mood and sense of sociability. I try to have real conversations as often as possible throughout the day. The net seems to drain all of my desire for sociability while simultaneously wiring me to billions of my fellow humans.

So…have you developed any means of dealing with "click-rut" and stemming the tide of the info age?