By Ilan
Mochari Ilan Mochari's debut novel, Zinsky the Obscure (Fomite Press,
2013), earned rave reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and
Booklist . Boston's NPR station named it one of 10 "Good Reads for the
Summer." He is a senior writer for Inc. magazine. @ IlanMochari Senior
writer, Inc. @ IlanMochari
It's back-to-school time, and you don't have to look very far to find
evidence that adults, too, like buying supplies to feel organized.
For most entrepreneurs, sketching is a useful skill. It's a fast way to take notes and remember presentations. Even if you don't sketch, per se, you can use colors to create borders and highlight key points.
Jane Wurwand, co-founder of Dermalogica, explains how to plan your creative meetings.
Moleskine went public in 2013 and posted 2014 sales of $104 million. Its budding partnerships
with tech companies like Evernote, Adobe, and Livescribe show that a
brand associated with traditional handwriting can be a powerful ally.
It would be one thing if Moleskine were the only brand
attempting to bridge classic school/office supplies with contemporary
gadgets. In fact, startup Baron Fig
raised $168,000 in 30 days during its 2013 launch, amassing 4,242
backers who preordered 8,760 notebooks. Public Supply, another startup
devoted to the elegant design of paper notebooks, cracked the New York Times style section last year.
What's more, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence: artists,
entrepreneurs, and experts who swear by the creativity and productivity
virtues of old-school supplies. Which supplies, in particular? Here's a
short list.
1. The traditional paper notebook or journal
Entrepreneur Damon Brown makes a strong case for writing by hand (as opposed to typing) as a way to slow down your thinking--and to better remember what you've written.
The research of Pam Mueller, co-author of a 2014 study on note taking that appeared in Psychological Science,
affirms Brown's experience. "People who handwrite reframe the content
and understand it better. On a computer, they write it all down without
thinking about it," she tells The Wall Street Journal.
Author Joyce Carol Oates, who writes her novels longhand,
points out that when you write something down, it's distinctly
yours--for no one else has your handwriting. "Our handwriting is unique
to us, like our fingerprints," she tells the Journal. "It seems bizarre to me that anyone would wish only to 'write' via a keyboard in an impersonal idiom."
2. Colored pencils For most entrepreneurs, sketching is a useful skill. It's a fast way to take notes and remember presentations. Even if you don't sketch, per se, you can use colors to create borders and highlight key points.
What's more, sketching is an essential part of prototyping,
especially in the early phases of product design. There's a reason most
design sprints include a lightning-round of sketch exercises.
C. Todd Lombardo, who leads design sprints as Constant Contact's innovation architect,
champions an exercise known as the "6-up" in which participants draw
out six possibilities in five minutes. "It forces your brain to be in a
state of generation, not one of judgment, because you don't have the
time," he says. Another benefit, he adds, is that, "once everyone sees
the various drawings up on the wall, the room starts to build [ideas] on
top of each other, and that momentum leads to creative solutions."
3. The big pink eraser
Revisions are an essential part of any creative process,
whether you're brainstorming a business plan or devising a new product.
"Your first idea likely won't be your best. In fact, brilliant work
often results from much tweaking, redoing, and going back to the drawing
board," notes David Margolis, author of The Billion-Dollar Creative: Inspiring Insights for Unleashing Your Creativity and Achieving Higher Levels of Success.
4. The book strap
Before electric devices could hold a thousand books,
students and prolific readers often had to carry around several books by
hand. If you were born in the 1970s or earlier, you might even remember
buying book straps every September, so you could more easily transport
your load from class to class.
So why might the old-school book strap be useful to a founder? Mainly because there's ample evidence you'll retain more of what you read if you read it in a paperback form, as opposed to on a Kindle or comparable device.
"This very gradual unfolding of paper as you progress
through a story is some kind of sensory offload, supporting the visual
sense of progress when you're reading," researcher Anne Mangen tells The Guardian.
"Perhaps this somehow aids the reader, providing more fixity and
solidity to the reader's sense of unfolding and progress of the text,
and hence the story."
5. The paper calendar
Productivity expert Joelle K. Jay teaches executives to become more efficient by "modeling" their time:
sitting down and sketching how you'd like your ideal week or month to
look. Turning the model calendar into scheduling reality is always a
challenge. But if you begin by drawing it out, you'll have a clearer
idea of your priorities.
6. Post-it Notes
Mark McGuinness, a poet, creative coach, and author, uses a
stack of 3" x 3" Post-it Notes to break his to-do list into manageable
chunks. The top Post-it in the stack contains his list for
today. "Because my day is a limited size, I figure it makes sense to
limit the size of my to-do list," he explains on 99u.com. "If I can't fit the day’s tasks on the Post-it, I'm not likely to fit them into the day."
7. Desk trays
Do cluttered workspaces inhibit or foster creativity? You can argue it both ways.
But if you want to avoid clutter, one useful template is entrepreneur
Neil Patel's two-tray system for handling incoming paper.
Here's how it works: One tray is for new (unread, unopened)
documents. The other is for documents you've looked at and need to take
action on. The "old" tray serves as a visual to-do list. "This is a very
simple approach," he writes, "but it works wonders for eliminating paper clutter from a desk, freeing you to be more productive."
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