5 tips to help embed displayed thinking

There’s a great scene in the Aaron Sorkin movie, Steve Jobs, where Michael Fassbender, as Jobs, is speaking to Joh Sculley (Jeff Daniels), trying to convince him to move from Pepsi to Apple. “The most inefficient animals on the planet are humans,” say Jobs, “But a human with a bicycle becomes the most efficient animal…the right computer will be a bicycle for the mind.”

It’s true. Not only does a human on a bicycle beat out a condor for efficiencies, but computers have allowed us to become better and faster and more efficient in nearly every task that we set our mind to.

Word makes writing more efficient. Excel makes maths more efficient. PowerPoint makes presentations more efficient. And that’s just Office. Sticking with presentations there’s also Prezzi, Keynote, and Slides to choose from. And what about Photoshop for photographers; SketchUp for architects; Catia for engineers. There’s any number of software programs and apps that has made any number of professions more efficient.

However, they all have something in common. They have two drawbacks: 1) you have to play by their rules; 2) you can create and edit and perfect all at the same time. Both of which don’t hinder the efficiency of your work; but do have a big impact on your creativity. Let’s look at each in turn.

You have to play by their rules. To use any software, you are bound by the limitations they impose. The biggest of which is the size of your screen. As soon as your work goes off the screen you have to re-size or move the view to continue your work. And each individual program imposes further limitations – for example on Word you can only look at one page at a time; in PowerPoint one slide. And of course, the method of input is fixed – keyboard and mouse. Then within each program you have to remember how to insert text or change colour or manipulate information. The point is, these things are quite alien, and a lot of the time are not always designed with the user in mind. I’m not saying these programs aren’t good, but they have to be learned, and remembered. And in the act of remembering how to use them you can lose out on remembering your creative thought.

You can create and edit and perfect all at the same time. This sounds great. But it’s seductively bad. Humans aren’t good at multitasking. We’re much, much better at monotasking; doing one thing at a time, and doing it well. But the programs we use invite us to multitask – to create, edit and perfect our work. How many times have you been writing in Word, happily putting your thoughts down, when you see the little red squiggle come under your text indicating a typo. And suddenly you stop. You go back. And you fix the word. Now you’re editing. You’ve stopped creating and started fixing your creation. This pulls us out of creative mode and into editing.

These interruptions – be it to ask a colleague what the keyboard shortcut is again, or to quickly go back and fix that typo – can have a serious impact on our creativity. A 2014 experiment by psychologist Erik Altmann showed that even very short interruptions, as brief as 2 seconds, can significantly hamper cognitive performance. Computer programs, then, are good for crafting and developing the idea, but not necessarily for creating the idea in the first place.

So, if the computer is a bicycle for the mind because of its impact on efficiency, maybe we have to look else where for help with our creativity. This is where displayed thinking comes in. Displayed thinking – the act of writing, alone or as a group, on a medium that can be immediately displayed (think post-it notes, whiteboards; scrap paper) – is the key to effective creativity.

Displayed thinking is to creativity what word processing is to words.

We live in a digital age, computers are ubiquitous and everywhere. And as members of that digital age, computers are a necessity for everyone in their personal and work life. The challenge then is finding ways of introducing displayed thinking into a digital dynamic that has been reinforced for generations.

Below are five tips to help embed displayed thinking in your life, ordered from cheapest to most expensive:

1)     Keep and carry scrap paper: If you’re anything like me, you have lots of scrap already-printed-on paper. Rather than throw it in the recycling keep it by your desk. Having it nearby means it’s easy to turn to when you’re by your computer, and scrap paper is much easier to quickly write on that a notebook. Take a few sheets with you to meetings; keep it on you all the time. You never know when it will come in handy to write down an idea; share a concept or just doodle to start your thinking. For that matter, always carry a ballpoint pen (pencils smudge; fountain pens dry out; cheap pens die).

2)     Download simple drawing apps or invest in a stylus: There’s a number of free apps which you can quickly download to your phone or tablet, which will turn your phone into a digital pad of paper. (Importantly, I don’t mean a complicated Word style program, but literally a digital piece of paper). I’ve got Draw!, a free app on Google Play, it turns your finger into a pen. Brilliant for any spur-of-the-moment ideas and thinking. Alternatively invest in a phone, tablet or laptop that comes with a stylus. I’ve got a Microsoft Surface and the built in pen functionality is again brilliant for drawing and sharing thoughts. And if you’re really stuck, put a blank PowerPoint slide into presentation mode and press CTRL + P, and it’ll turn the slide into a blank piece of paper to write on. Just remember to say yes to ‘keep annotations’ when you escape presenter mode. 

3)     Put up a white board or buy some flipcharts: Flipcharts and whiteboards are a staple of the office environment. A common curse for each, though, is that they aren’t very mobile. Until recently. 3M sells flipchart sized post-it notes, meaning you can peel off a sheet and stick it anywhere. Similarly, there’s a number of self-adhesive whiteboards now available. Meaning you carry your creative canvas – be it whiteboard or flipchart – where ever you go. On the flipside of this, rather than carry your canvas, why not make everywhere a canvas. Think Paint, turns any surface it’s painted onto into a whiteboard, an alternative is idea paint.

4)     Use a smart pen: A drawback of displayed thinking is having to take the handwritten thoughts and then input them into a program to edit and perfect them. If only there was a way to speed that up … well now there is: a number of traditional stationers are coming out with a range of ways to make the analogue digital. I’ve got a Moleskine smartpen, which has a camera built into the nip to record your notes and send it directly to an app, which you can turn into a Office document. There’s a few different versions of this same technology, such as a smart highlighter, which scans the text you’ve written. 

5)     Invest in a smart board: Building on the idea of taking the traditional digital, you can now upgrade your common office projector to a smart board. This allows your wall to be both a projector screen and whiteboard at the same time, and to instantly digitise your handwritten notes on the board. A great way of sharing ideas and having them digitised for all to see.

I’m sure there are other ideas out there as well. But these are the five that I have found the most successful, and have quickly and seamlessly found myself slipping into my daily routine. Hopefully you do too.