Coping 9: Magpie time

It's hard to be creative and come up with new ideas when your schedule is packed tight with things that require specific focus on particular topics. Some people manage it by bouncing off what others say, and manage to leave meetings richer than they entered.

For me, an important step is idle or not-so-idle collecting. Many different influences, ideas, bits, pieces, and shiny things go into my head, and at some point, something goes click and a nice idea pops out. I used to think about this using the metaphor of Tetris – the blocks are all falling, and eventually, with a little direction, they make a line. But the Tetris image places an emphasis on the "ah-ha!" moment. As I've considered over time how I work, how I get and refine ideas, and where the little "ah-ha!" moments come from, I've placed more of an emphasis on the process of collecting those bits. I call the time I spend doing this "magpie time" because I'm looking for the shiny things and bringing them back to my collection (like the popular image of the magpie).

Magpie time is sometimes a passive process, and sometimes an active one. Increasingly, though, I try to make sure that I allocate at least a little active magpie time into my life. Rather than relying on the right things to come to me, I actively seek out a variety of media and influences in order to enrich the magpie hoard. Like noticing, this commitment is a reminder that good things don't happen only through a task-focused attitude, but also through a little bit of happenstance and free association.