February 11, 2003
Ideas NEW, Violets are BLUE
So, I was thinking about my previous entry. And I looked up some outliners yesterday. And I came across an opinion (sorry, can't find it now) that believed outliners are not good thinking utilities because they force us into a structured way of thinking that isn't the most conducive to new ideas. Top-down, hierarchical, single-parent, etc. Sure, I agree with that, why not?And I was thinking about my todo list app. Multiple parents. What I like about it is that it helps me free up my head in one particular way - I come up with a goal, and then I can say, "okay, what do I need to do before I can do this?" But it's still structured.
Which got me thinking about thinking, which is something I'm especially good at. What's the best way to come up with ideas?
Ideas are elusive. They do need to be captured somehow so you can refer back to them. But you don't want to overcontrol them and make the structure too rigid.
And somewhere in here, I realized that the whole process reminded me of poetry. The problem with ideas isn't that there's too many of them, it's that they have all this cruft embedded in them. They just need to be distilled down to their smallest essence and then allowed to interrelate freely.
I haven't really gotten further than that and am just letting my brain blather, but I thought that was interesting enough to weblog... make brainstorming like poetry.
Posted by Curt at February 11, 2003 12:50 PM