Love this list, everything really resonates with both my day job and creative output. I just want to comment on stepping back regularly. Specifically with music production, something I do most evenings, I find ‘actively forgetting’ what I’ve worked on the day before can really help keep things fresh. When I return to an unfinished track the less I can remember each sound and how they arranged the more I am able to elaborate an idea or find a new idea in what seemed old the last time I worked on it. To actively forget I force myself to not listen to what I worked on the day before until that evening when I sit down to work on it again. At that point I’ll have had 20-24 hours since last listening to what I’ve been working on and most times I honeslty cannot remember how the previous day’s work sounds. It does take some discipline because my ego wants to listen to what I’ve been making and judge whether it’s any good.
Ah, interesting to think about the stuff in these principles/ideas for non-mathy problems!
Regarding your point about actively forgetting: Yeah, it seems like there’s an interesting trade-off to consider in choosing how long to stay “steeped” in a task. I’m guessing it depends a lot on the “depth” of the problem being solved—i.e. for some problems I think it can take several days or more just to get to the point where you’ve loaded in enough “context” to start actually making any progress on it, and so you need to stay deep in it for several days at a time. Whereas with other problems it could take hours or less to get “deep” into the problem, and so in that case it probably makes sense to have a faster cadence of solving vs actively forgetting because you hit diminishing returns fairly quickly after attacking the problem for several hours. I’ll have to think more about this.
Love this list, everything really resonates with both my day job and creative output. I just want to comment on stepping back regularly. Specifically with music production, something I do most evenings, I find ‘actively forgetting’ what I’ve worked on the day before can really help keep things fresh. When I return to an unfinished track the less I can remember each sound and how they arranged the more I am able to elaborate an idea or find a new idea in what seemed old the last time I worked on it. To actively forget I force myself to not listen to what I worked on the day before until that evening when I sit down to work on it again. At that point I’ll have had 20-24 hours since last listening to what I’ve been working on and most times I honeslty cannot remember how the previous day’s work sounds. It does take some discipline because my ego wants to listen to what I’ve been making and judge whether it’s any good.
Ah, interesting to think about the stuff in these principles/ideas for non-mathy problems!
Regarding your point about actively forgetting: Yeah, it seems like there’s an interesting trade-off to consider in choosing how long to stay “steeped” in a task. I’m guessing it depends a lot on the “depth” of the problem being solved—i.e. for some problems I think it can take several days or more just to get to the point where you’ve loaded in enough “context” to start actually making any progress on it, and so you need to stay deep in it for several days at a time. Whereas with other problems it could take hours or less to get “deep” into the problem, and so in that case it probably makes sense to have a faster cadence of solving vs actively forgetting because you hit diminishing returns fairly quickly after attacking the problem for several hours. I’ll have to think more about this.
Thanks for your comment!