On trying hard not to think
I’ve never been a good sleeper, and when someone says this:
From time to time I’ve got real trouble sleeping. My mind literally races. My thoughts coming in and out faster than I can deal with them. It’s almost like a thousand bees buzzing in my head.
I sympathize. So what’s the solution?
What happens to me is that my creative processes are largely subconscious and totally asynchronous. I’ll puzzle over a problem in need of a creative solution, and if I don’t get it within an hour or so, I’ll move on to something else. A small thread is launched in my mind, however, and it’ll pop up when I’ve finally come up with something.
Unfortunately for me, it tends to pop up in two places: the shower, or in the middle of the night. It never fails: I’ll be naked and covered in soap, and–pop–it comes to me, whatever it is: the proper way to refactor an app into reusable objects, the kink in an algorithm, an awesome product idea, a good visual, whatever. And of course I leap from the shower (much to the amusement of my flatmates) and frantically scribble it out on pieces of paper while wiping the soap from my eyes. In a towel, of course. I’m not a barbarian.
At night, it’s worse. I usually spend about 30 minutes trying to let go of the day, and that bit of relaxation is just enough idle CPU time for my solution to finish, and then I’ve got a head full of ideas bouncing off each other like popcorn. And, much to my girlfriend’s annoyance, I’m up until 6am in my PJs typing into my wiki, bathed in the glow of my LCD.
That’s not healthy.
I’ve missed out entire days because I spent the eight hours most people spent asleep bashing out a user narrative for a cool new app or something. Waking up at 3pm totally sober and without a traffic cone next to me (read: without a good excuse) is no way to live your life.
Keith’s solution is GTD, but I’m not convinced that would help me. It’s not so much getting the ideas out of my head as much as being able to choose when the ideas arrive. Yeah, I write it down, but I’m doing it at 4am because that’s when it occurs to me.
Any ideas?