Episode 2: Capturing and Organizing Creative Ideas

In Episode 2 of our NaPodPoMo 2024 series, join Greg, Alessandra, Bobby, and Gretchen as they dive into the art of capturing and organizing creative ideas. Explore strategies to manage ideas without feeling overwhelmed and organize them for easy access later. Discover the importance of choosing organizational tools that suit your style, utilizing color effectively, and fostering inclusivity in group discussions for enhanced creativity.

Hi. Well, welcome. This is November 2nd. This is the first Saturday in November 2024. And we have been working on this project together. We, being the crew of the Creative Work Hour. We're a group that gets together synchronously, in some configuration of us, every day of the year. Actually, a few times a day. So, but we've run this project more than 1300 times and most of the time it works beautifully, in that it works authentically, which means it's a little bit messy. Today was one of those days, um, because we use, right now we're using Zoom as the tool to be together across lands and across time, to just have the creative process be something that we share together. So the architect behind this project is Greg Shaw. Greg grew up around ham radios and had a big brother who did sound design, and this is just a thing that he loves. And I actually met him doing a social audio thing on Twitter. This is when Twitter was doing spaces. I know we all call it something else now, but I'm going to use my polite language and not call anything, anything. Greg, how are you today? And what direction would you like to take us? We're just going to talk for a few minutes and put something in the library for us.

Good. Glad everyone is here, you know. Last night at practice, not perfect, we had one of our members, Rashelle, posed a good question which I thought maybe we would ponder that to start with, and then just see where we go. And that was, how do you capture creative ideas without feeling overwhelmed, and then how do you organize those ideas to be able to retrieve them later? What do we think about that one? Are there any tools, or tips, or tricks, or hacks, or librarian code?

Well, it's I guess you know, we oftentimes think that we have to come up with our own organization, filing system, but, you know, I mean, librarians didn't, we left that up to Melvil Dewey, it was a mess before he came in, and he came in with the Dewey Decimal System, and I walked into a library and there was a system already in place, so sometimes it's not a matter of, we, we think, "Oh, I have to creatively come up with my own thing." Uh-uh. That's not what creativity necessarily is. It, you know, it's, it's not, it's what you're doing, not how you're doing it. And the how could be somebody else's system, if you, if that's what's necessary to you. I

I know she had mentioned, Nate had said Trello. I don't know if anyone, you guys have used Trello or not. I haven't. I think I might have experimented with it a couple of years ago amongst, you know, another hundred things at the same time. But

I have a friend who uses Trello, who loves it. I have another friend who uses Notion and loves it. You know, it just depends on if you want online or in-hand kind of things that you're doing.

I guess cross-platform would be the way to go, right? And then if you're on your phone, or your desktop, or your tablet, a lot of those

I keep looking over there because I have a book called Creative Calling by a gentleman named Chase Jarvis and he does a whole thing on creativity, and he just came out with his second book called Never Play It Safe, about creativity. I'll have to look at it to see what

And you know Chase, don't you?

Yeah. I do. I do. I met him, um, he was the founder of Creative Live in Seattle, which was, is, is actually, he's just recently sold it. It's an online learning platform. But

He sold it, didn't he? Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. But it had been around for a long time. And the studio is still basically in Seattle. There's a studio in Seattle, in San Francisco, and New York now, but it was a place where you could come and, and be a live audience for classes that were taught and things, and then those classes are then online for anybody, and they cover, uh, just a variety of different things, in all different kinds of ways. But he's gone on, so, and had, like I said, his first book was Creative Calling, and it talks about the process of being creative and what not. Let me go grab it.

Is a process.

Yeah. So while she's doing that, let me, say, say that there are some very, very amazing tools out there, and books, and software, and all that stuff, and it's useless if it doesn't match who you are and how you process.

Great point.

And so for me, because of my issues, I am a real in front of me kind of guy. I start the day by looking at the compilation I created and looked at the previous night.

You're using the Bobby System, right?

I'm using the Bobby System, and that is part, that's in two parts. Number one, the stuff that is real time that really needs to be thought of, and addressed, and decided, should it get torn up, does it need to get finished, that kind of stuff. So that is Part A. Part B are the thoughts that could feed long term, that might take something I'm doing to another level, things I would want to learn about, or look into, too. And those things also come and go. 

But for me, the way to do it is those little paper tablets, or notepads, that you get free in the mail from charities wanting your money, and Post-its. I, I believe I singularly have kept the Post-it company alive. And I use different colored Post-its to categorize.

And so that is my two-part method. And so, again, respect to all those tools out there, at a glance, they're amazing. But for my mind, and my abilities, that is the most functional method for me to be creative.

So what do you do with your Post-its? Do you like put them on the wall and organize them in front of you, or

No, actually I use the, I use the leading edge. So my desk here has shelving above it, and I use the leading edge of the shelf for those Post-its, because if it fills, that is a, that's a siren. It's like, "Nope, better stop right now, you filled the space and you have to act right now and make decisions."

If you need to switch order, that's the original drag and drop, right? The sticky method.

That's it. That's it.

Oh, I love it. The original drag and drop.

The original drag and drop. It's like, "Nope, you, you know, you consume the allowed space of what there is to, uh, consider." I like the idea of color, and it's time to decide.

So the book that in, in Chase's first book, Creative Calling, he uses, he designed a system that he called the Idea System, and step one is imagine, step two is design, step three is execute, and step four is amplify. But what he does, he says, first in the, read this first, um, "Ask yourself if the way you're working is the way you're working, working. Is the way you're living, living, working." 

This book is about creativity, but in a larger sense, it's about life and how you live it. It's not about starting a creative practice, or becoming a better designer, writer, photographer, or entrepreneur, though it will supercharge all your creative skills. It's about living a richer, deeper, more rewarding life than ever before. 

Embracing creativity in your life is like that moment when Dorothy steps out of her black and white Kansas home into blazing technicolor Munchkin Land. You know, it's, I think, you know, we so many times we've tried to put things in certain boxes, or been told it's got to be done certain ways, and stuff like that, but it's, it's just that, that searching for, and if you have steps, this, I happen to like this book.

I found it a very easy read. And Never Play It Safe, his next one is real, is, is very good, too. But it's about taking a little bit more risk. So.

I think you said something that made me think, just from an ADHD mind, Bobby mentioned it originally about his Post-it notes using color, and you mentioned stepping into, you know, Dory steps into the amazing technicolor, and stuff. And I know that Allesandre is kind of pretty off with colors and stuff. So I'm wondering how color, oh,

There's so much to do there. There is just so much, right? You can unpack that and unpack it, right? There's color psychology, there's color emotions, and stuff. So, how is that in the creative brain?

It's kind of how I'm wired. I've always, um, my very first toy was a color wheel that I can remember playing with at the, and I used to organize my classrooms by rainbow colors. So I would, I would literally put their name tags. If your name started with a, on your name tag, it was red, and then orange, and we would line up for, uh, you know, and so B was red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, red, and Bobby would have been an orange, and I then I would go through the whole alphabet. And so I would sing, sing the rainbow song, "Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, red, orange," and to do that. And so I would call color groups to come line up, color groups to do this or, and in my whole, everything, and the kids would know, "Well that, that's always how I did." Mom organized us in colors. You know, there were colors we could wear, and colors that weren't, that were your sister's and not yours. But color is kind of a big thing.

What's that? "Red and green should never be seen." Is that

No, no. I, I never had th-, those kind of things. It was like just that the, um, ones that, that fit with you. So kind of, but, but then in opposite of that, my favorite kind of photography is black and white. And I can, in black and white. So, yeah.

How do you see in black and white? Color blindness, or

No. Um, it's, uh, it's a, if you squint, it's something that I've always been able to do. I've been able to look out, I can look outside my window now and squint and know what shades of gray are going to come out back in, uh, a photograph. It's

Oh, wow.

It's kind of a

It's one of our superpowers. Weird, unique little superpower, but it's, it's probably because I spent so much time as a kid in the dark room doing black and white photographs and stuff like that, and studying that.

As, uh, fellow photographer, I absolutely understand and embrace that. And as many colors as there are in the universe, to me there are 10 times, maybe 100 times more shades of color between black and white. And so yeah, I often take images, color images, and change them over to grayscale, or something like that, just to absorb what's really there and strip away the dominance of a certain color attracting my eye.

What's really interesting about that, I was, um, I was studying graphic design at UC Berkeley, and one of the things that I learned from their approach is that when you're designing, let's just say you're designing a logo, when you're designing, you need to keep color as far away from the picture as you can get because that clouds everything. Your nervous system starts reacting to that when you're just trying to get the shape and the contrast down. So it's, the design process is 90% in black and white, and then you can add separately, like you start working color as far away as you can get from the artwork that you've been working on in black and white. 

You work the color in isolation and let your nervous system respond to it and give you the feedback of, "Is this going to match what it is that we're about?" For example, there are three key colors for Creative Work Hour. The core is a deep indigo. And so it's based in black, but it rises up through violet and blue. And what that's about is about imagination, and bringing what is not a thing yet into the real world. It's that inspiration becomes aspiration. And so I may be using, in some of our, in some of our, our branding, I may be using a black, but what only I technically know is that that, that black is really a very, very, very deep indigo, and that indigo actually communicates something a little bit mystic, whether you realize it or not. That's just an example of keeping the color at bay until it's time to do that work because it requires a lot of sensitivity, especially when you're creating for creatives. No pressure.

You just reminded me of something I just threw out there. Oh, go ahead.

For the stories I write that talk about human-to-human engagement, or relationship, I have taken to challenging myself by writing it without anything that would indicate the gender of the people involved.

Oh, I love that.

And then when I've really written the human, con-, all the right human connections and everything, then I, I will sit back and say, "Okay, what gender, or genders, do I want the people to be?" I love that so much.

I can see why they would keep color out of the design as well. Now I'm thinking-, just thinking about it, the whole color thing, and the whole individual thing, and stuff like that, and the whole emotional thing is colors are not truly universal, right? What, what means one thing in, uh, one country, it could mean royalty, it could mean death, it could be a curse or something to someone else. So I guess that kind of comes in factors into the, the bigger picture, too, right? Especially if you're trying to, you know, talk to a global audience or

Yeah, exactly. So, like, but we're a fun group, too. You know, we laugh and cut up, and we, we have developed a conversational, I don't want to call it a skill, because that makes it sound like work, but we've learned how to, people who like to talk a lot, learn how to pull that back a little bit and share the floor for more, more exciting conversation. And I have been in so many productivity courses, or writing courses, or this course, or that course, where you go into breakout rooms, and it's a nightmare because you get that, that lady or that man who just won't shut the f up, and it's like, "What are we, chopped liver?"

It's like, "Let's share the time. Let's, let's, let's share." And we've learned how to do that in our group. And so that's part of what the magenta color of Creative Work Hour is about. It's about living. We're not here to do. We're here to be, and to live, and to let that be an expression. And fun comes out of part of that hue of magenta, that pink, that childlike-ness. 

And then the third key color is yellow. And the yellow is about, there's a bright side of things. Even if your creativity has got you stuck, and you're frustrated, maybe even depressed a little, you're not going to stay there. This too will move along. This too will pass. And that, that yellow, interestingly enough, our crew member and friend, Devvin, he's colorblind. And the color that he actually can see more accurately than anything else on the color spectrum is yellow. 

So, as I was showing a color block, a colorblind man, the development of the, the, the, uh, the color scheme for Creative Work Hour, he's like, "Yeah, that's gray, gray, and a little brown." "Yep, that's gray, gray, and a little brown." And then when I dropped in the yellow, he was like, "Oh, that's gorgeous." And all of a sudden, his energy picked up because he could see that.

But it can't always be pinks and yellows, you know? Sometimes you got to, because contrast is everything. It's how flavor works. It's how vision works. It's how hearing works. The silence versus the music, or the noise versus what's tacit. Colors tell the story.

Mhm.

How did we end up there?

I think we did pretty good.

Thank you for just showing up and being present and thinking what you're feeling as we went. I mean, that's the good stuff right there.