Tag: Creativity

Creativity happens in two stages: first, unbounded imagination; then — more importantly — ruthless editing.

Loads of great advice in this post from Jason on the part of “ideas” that tends to get less attention: editing.

One of the ones that jumped out to me was his note about the importance of underutilizing people’s time:

On top of that, a healthy team is intentionally underutilized. This creates free time for chasing shiny things with low risk. A roadmap with this kind of slack built-in supports exploratory tinkering by defining a clear plan with clear boundaries: I know I need to complete these 5 tasks this week to keep us on track; I finish them by lunchtime Thursday; I now have a day and a half to do whatever I find exciting without hurting the overall strategic goals or slowing things down.

What a healthy (and wise!) counter from the way most organizations tend to operate.a

I was just talking to Marcin Wichary last week about my love for post-it notes and he admitted the most common colors are not exactly aesthetically pleasing. Looks like we have pure convenience to blame.

The yellow color was chosen for convenience, according to Nicholson: it was what the lab next door had available, so they used it.