Ubiquitous Capture: How to Keep Your Cashflow During a Creative Block

Photo by Paul Worthington.

Most freelancers—I’d say at least 80%—work in a creative field. And most freelancers—I’d say at least 100% (even those whose jobs aren’t really “creative”)—eventually run into some kind of creative block, whether it comes from burnout, or just getting bored of doing the same kind of work day after day.

Usually, this doesn’t mean that the designer or writer in question is no longer capable of doing their job: it just means they are having a damn near impossible time coming up with new, exciting ideas to feed their clients with.

If these blocks meant the inability to turn an idea into a product, most freelancers would be out of business once a year (or so, or less). But fortunately, that’s usually not the case, and so big disasters can be prevented with a little foresight and a little discipline.

How? Two words: ubiquitous capture. Truth is, we come up with ideas all the time—every day, every night. Some days we come up with more ideas than others, and as we just spoke about, sometimes you do come up dry, but those times should be few and far between. But since there are so many ideas flowing the rest of the time, that doesn’t matter. You just need a system to capture them as they come to you and you’ll have a stockpile to draw from, or be inspired by, any time you need.

Here’s the kicker: by developing the habit of capturing your ideas as soon as they come to you, your mind attaches a higher significance to the manufacture and capture of ideas. You produce more and more as you hone the art of getting an idea down in tangible form before it flees.

It’s the same principle at work with dream capture; if you jot down notes about your dreams as soon as you wake up, even if the details are scant, your brain assigns a higher priority to recalling those dreams and you start to remember dreams you didn’t know you were even having (dreams are, of course, an excellent place to find new ideas).

There are two main components to a good ubiquitous capture system (only one of which actually pertains to the capturing of ideas, but the second is just as important).

1. Consistent and Ubiquitous Capture

The easy part is setting up a system that ensures you’ve always got a way to record your ideas within a few metres of you, at all times of day.

The hard part is making the constant usage of this system such a habit that you can’t stop thinking about that idea until you’ve emptied it out of your skull and onto a sheet of paper (or a screen).

Here’s how you do it: list all the places you go in an average week, including “on the go.” Then you decide how you’d best capture ideas in each situation, based on what sort of ideas you need to capture (straight text? Melodies? Design ideas?) and what the most practical way of capturing that idea in that situation is. If you’re grocery shopping and you’re a painter, perhaps bringing a canvas and paintbrushes with you is not the best idea.

I’m mainly a writer but I do other things that necessitate other means of idea capture. I use Evernote on my laptop and desktop, but have a large notebook—the kind those artists use without any lines in it—on my desk in case I want to mind-map, or brainstorm in the backyard.

I’ve got a notepad and pen by the bed, accompanied, of course, by a lamp. I also use Evernote or Notes on my iPhone if I need to (grocery shopping, for example) but do my best not to resort to this. I’ve always hated taking notes on my phone—both those I’ve owned that ran Windows Mobile and the one that runs OS X!

The bottom line is that you want to make sure you are never without some way to capture your ideas. Ever. That’s what ubiquitous means. The tricky part is balancing practicality with convenience; if I wanted to draw a diagram while I’m shopping, I wouldn’t be able to, but I accept that compromise because it’s not as essential to me as it may be to a designer.

2. Processing Ideas into an Accessible System

So you’ve captured your ideas consistently, but any totally ubiquitous system is probably going to be a mish-mash of techniques; a notepad next to the bed, Evernote on your work computer, Jott on your phone, a text file on your laptop and yet another on your home desktop (and so on). This is great because it means there’s never a time nor place you can’t get your ideas captured, but if you wait six months until you’re desperate for an idea to go sorting through that system you’ll probably find it an unproductive exercise.

So, the answer to is to make processing your ubiquitous capture system a part of your weekly review. By the way, if you’re not doing a weekly review, you should—you don’t need to be a GTD geek to get some use out of it. It’s basically a time each week you can set aside to keep everything—your life—in order; evaluating your week’s performance, preparing your tasks and goals for the next week, processing information, keeping up with contacts, and so on.

In any case, even if you don’t want to use a weekly review in order to keep your life running smoothly, you need to set aside a regular time to grab each idea bucket—all your notebooks, your voice recordings, your scattered typings—and sit down with them all in one place, and process them. Be wary of deleting ideas, but if they’re truly unusable, you can scrap them so they don’t take up attention later on when you need to find something that is usable.

I like to process ideas into one place at the end of the week. For me, that place is Evernote, simply because I can access it from anywhere. I do find that Evernote isn’t the perfect capture system for everything—it works well for many things, but sometimes ideas are too big to type into Evernote from my iPhone, or I might need to draw diagrams to capture the idea.

Once I’ve stored everything into Evernote, I like to keep my capture system blank so I delete the processed ideas (or tear the pages out of the notebook). This step isn’t for everyone, and you’d sure as hell want to keep your idea file backed up; I have it synced to the cloud and backed up to my Time Capsule, and that’s probably not even enough.

Keep the System Working, Feed Your Muse

A system takes an input, processes it, and produces an output. Our brain is one of those systems. I’ve found in the past that, even with a working ubiquitous capture system, I’ve run out of ideas from sheer overproduction. When you get so busy that you’re producing but not taking in ideas, you run out of fuel, so to speak. I’m sure this is one of the ways that burnout creeps up on us. We forget to fill up the tank because we’re working so hard at emptying it.

To take a complicated subject and make it insultingly simple, we come up with new ideas by combining old ones (even then, how often are our ideas really new?). A line of dialogue from a movie you watched six months ago may just happen to collide with the characters in a painting you’re looking at and presto—a new idea strikes. As much as creative people may hate to admit that their ideas come from somewhere other than their muse, it’s essential to keep your mind chewing on new things.

So if you’ve got a system that can capture ideas instantly, but just can’t think of anything to fill that system up with, perhaps you’re not taking enough ideas in to make anything from.

You need to read books, listen to music, watch movies and enjoy life to produce ideas. So who said that maintaining a work-life balance didn’t allow you to become even more productive?