A great video. Also check out Steven Johnson’s excellent book. Also check out his recent project The Writing Project on Medium. Also check out his explanation of what he calls a Spark File:
a single document where I keep all my hunches: ideas for articles, speeches, software features, start-ups, ways of framing a chapter I know I’m going to write, even whole books. I now keep it as a Google document so I can update it from wherever I happen to be. There’s no organizing principle to it, no taxonomy–just a chronological list of semi-random ideas that I’ve managed to capture before I forgot them.
I do something very similar. I keep running lists in my trusty moleskin and in a file in my dropbox. This list is just of titles, from near term projects to long term grand plans. Every once in a while I go through my file and my book from cover to cover and am sometimes astonished at what I find (or see repeated multiple times). Those are the things I know I need to do (no matter what the world thinks, I need to do them). I wonder how many other people do something similar? At least one it seems.
