A powerful method for developing ideas – leave it. Give an idea the time and attention it needs. No more. No less. If you’re sitting at your desk and you can’t think of what to write next, or come up with any new thought or idea, give it a rest and leave it. Chances are you’ve expended your decision-making tank of energy. Sitting there forcing yourself to come up with ideas, new thoughts might force you to come up with bad ideas and or start finding sub-par thoughts acceptable. Creativity requires the freshest, most ample amount of energy. You need an over-abundance of mental energy to get the most of what you want.
Leaving the work, and putting it aside to do something else, frees up the part of the brain you’ve been working. Your brain will get repetition fatigue, similar to only doing squats or throwing a baseball 100 times in a row. Your body and brain can only do so much. By using a different part of your brain you’re letting the creative, thought-developing part of your brain take a break, to recover for another sprint.
So that means repetition and frequency is an important part of this process. Come back to the work at regular intervals, whether that’s daily, every other day, weekly or even monthly. You are programming a creative working rhythm for your mind. A pattern of rest, work, rest, work. Leaving it doesn’t mean not planning a regular schedule to return to it, or forgetting about it and coming back to it the next time you remember or feel the motivation to do get back at it.
Building this pattern does a couple things, it establishes multiple connection points in time. These connections over days, weeks, months and years, builds, develops and strengthens your thought processing power, ability and capacity. It also connect ideas through time, which will make your idea more developed, tested, filtered, processed, enhanced and developed. Developing your ideas in an active, direct and focused way i.e. an idea that seemed good yesterday, might not seem as good the next day, forcing you to come up with something different, better but that you couldn’t have come up with, without thinking of the “bad” idea first.
But this pattern also activates your mind to do subconscious work. Establishing a routine of coming back to the idea development or creative work, programs your brain work in the background. You might be watching a completely unrelated show but something someone says, or something that happens becomes a key to the puzzle of the idea you’re developing. Or you’ll be in the shower and the idea or thought suddenly surfaces to your mind. Your brain is constantly working, even when we think it isn’t. Even in our sleep, our brain is trying to process things that are on our mind, working on, confusing us, we have questions to, trying to recognize patterns and make sense of what we’re not aware of. I think this is the most powerful, high-capacity, calculative part of our brain. We just have to know how to enable it, use it, and trust that it’s working but also then be able to access it. Which is probably the more seemingly unintuitive part, which is why it makes it all about intuition.
Trust your instincts. Trust your intuition. What’s internal and subconscious accessed through instincts and intuition, rest and trust. So don’t create unnecessary stress by trying to force ideas or intuition. Your internal brain is doing subconscious work but take physical notes. Always be jotting things down. Create a smooth, unobtrusive pathway from your brain to the externality of your fingertips.
Another tip to accessing your intuition, know where you left off when you leave your work. So that you can quickly resume your work when you come back. In fact, better yet, leave your work at the beginning of a new thought or idea. Don’t leave your idea at a point of not knowing what do do next or state of confusion. Although sometimes you have to, then at least know what the question is you’re trying to answer. So that your mind can work on it while you’re away. When you leave your work at the beginning of a thought, there’s a fresh wave of momentum when you come back to it, a whole store of ideas and thoughts that your mind had been developing in the background. And this is where intuition and instinct energizes. The mistake is assuming the thoughts and ideas are being generated as you’re sitting doing your work. What’s actually happening is that sitting and doing the work is actually just a spigot of what’s been ruminating and being developed subconsciously in the in-between time.