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Saturday July 12, 2014 2:26pm 95 Spring Street 2nd Floor New York City

Dear Friend,

I’ve been learning a lot lately, small and large things, and I want to make a habit out of sharing those bits and pieces regularly. For one, you’ll get nice little tokens of insight and practical tips. Also, I get to exercise my writing more, which is a goal for me this year. So, it’s a win-win for both of us.

Here are a few things I’ve learned in the past 4 days:

Index cards are awesome for jotting down ideas and concepts without the need to categorize them (yet)

This is my biggest and most exciting find of the week. Index cards. Like the ones you can buy in bulk at Staples.

They’re amazing to jot down ideas and thoughts quickly and put them away. I find that my mind is filled and sometimes overflows from having too many thoughts and ideas float around.

It feels so good to write a single concept (usually a sentence or two plus a few little icons that visualize what I’m trying to say) on one card and then put it on the stack of other ideas.

I’m only starting to use them but I can already tell how they will transform my creative work by allowing for representing non-linear ideas and thoughts and then, later, let me re-arrange them to form a story-line.

If you can, buy a stack of cards today, get a sharpie and write down the 10 things that are on your mind right now.

You’ll be surprised how liberating it is to have them each individually on a card instead of in a list on a normal piece of paper.

Brainwork, like physical activity, needs warming up

I was just reading this in a book on advertising and it prompted me to think about it. Yes, I agree, it makes a lot of sense to ease into a new task or topic and provide my brain with the right type of information and context. This doesn’t have to be a lot of time but just taking a moment, reviewing notes, scribbling a few thoughts, “stretch” the mind feels right. A cold brain isn’t flexible enough to come up with creative ideas and new concepts. Feeding the brain in the beginning (and feeding your body with healthy foods!) is a very good idea.

Having said this, I’ve started reading or watching something inspirational as one of my first things in the morning. Yesterday I watched Baz Luhrmann’s “Wear Sunscreen”–The mother of inspirational videos. Other times I read a few paragraphs of an inspiring person such as Walt Disney or Brian Eno.

I highly recommend warming your mind up at the beginning of the day and at the start of a new task.

When working on a time-boxed activity, it helps to see how much time REMAINS

I just realized this when my current activity (“Write an inspirational blog post”) kicked in on TimeStacks. Just yesterday I added small flashing alert for the TimeStacks browser-tab that shows you what you should be focussing on. I noticed how I would go back to the page to see how much time really was left and that prompted me to put in that time as part of the tab.

Now, it’s much easier to keep the pressure on! For example, for writing this piece my tab tells me I have 24 minutes left.

Which also tells me that I want to move onto the next learning.

But basically, if you are time-boxing an activity and you want to keep the creative pressure on, you want to have a countdown timer on that puppy.

Improving my diet has vastly increased my sense of smell

Very simple and very powerful stuff. I’ve been changing my diet to exclude (mostly) sugar and carbs for most of the week. It’s been going well (my favorite new finding on what to eat follows below) and yesterday I noticed an intensely increased sensitivity to smell.

While walking through Williamsburg with Val, I was able to smell…

• How one bar that smelled fresh and clean while another one that smelled straight-up like a sewer
• The wafts of food from restaurants down to their ingredients and their spices

I assumed it was because I had a solid appetite but even after we had eaten the smells continued to be bold and distinct.

Maybe it’s just New York in the summer, maybe it was because I hadn’t eaten dinner yet but I strongly believe it’s my newly found diet that allowed me to smell things on a level I haven’t before.

It definitely felt like a superpower.

I don’t get hungry all day if I have a goji berry, sunflower, flax and hemp seed shake in the morning

It’s the weirdest thing. I’ve started making different kinds of shakes in the morning since we’ve gotten a mixer and began to add 3 spoon full of this store-bought berry/seed mixture.

First I just did it for the taste and the fiber but several days in a row, this shake filled me up far into dinner.

Usually I get really hungry for lunch but again and again, I felt satisfied and energized until later in the day.

…

Well, that’s a few of my learnings this week. They’re a little all over the place but you get the idea I think.

Now, I’m curious: What have you learned this week?

Sincerely,

Alexis

Tuesday July 1, 4:33pm, New York City

Dear Friend,

I hope you’re doing great.

Yesterday I conducted a little experiment and had to think of you and I think you’ll appreciate this.

You see, I know you’re working a hard job every day and sometimes things get stressful. I think I’ve found something for you that’ll help you get your mind off of work for a few minutes every once in a while.

You know how they say to leave a problem by itself when you can’t figure out a solution? That works really well for me and probably for you, too.

Relaxation Means Creative Problem-Solving

A lot of the creative problem-solving happens when we’re not actively thinking about the issue but kind of let it work in the background.

For example. I’ve been building this piece of software over the past 3 weeks. Very intense stuff. I’d been staring at my screen for hours and days and weeks on end. By yesterday afternoon my brain was fried. I needed to do something completely different just to clear out my “Brain Random Access Memory (RAM).”

What I did helped me take a mental step back from the project and rethink a bunch of core assumptions I had about “how things should work.”

I got in the office this morning and refactored 5 parts of the application. It’s now much easier to use, easier to extend and much easier to maintain.

YOU’LL THINK I’M NUTS

Now, maybe you’ll think I’m nuts when I tell you what I did all evening but MAN, it was so relaxing and so different to programming that I want to do it AGAIN tonight. Just to give myself time to think through some of those pesky algorithms.

Okay, now I gotta tell you what I’ve been doing…

In two words…

Giant. Bubbles.

Yup, you read that correctly.

Giant bubbles.

As in: Making giant, huge-ass, humungous, wobbling soap bubbles. Larger-than-life-sized, bubbly, squiggly, soapy bubbles floating through the air.

And I made them. And it was glorious. For hours.

You see, last week I started experimenting with a few different ‘recipes’ for making a soap solution that would allow me to make those big buggers.

The first experiment failed. The internet said to use dish washing detergent and GLYCERIN but let me tell you that doesn’t work.

I finally wound up finding a recipe that called for a very hard-to-find powder that turns the soap/water mix into sort of a slimy soap sludge. It gets really thick.

But, as it turns out, that secret ingredient turned into bubbles 3 feet, 5 feet, 10 FEET LONG and more! As you can tell, I’m really excited about this.

So. Much. Fun.

It was. So. Much. Fun.

And that’s why I had to think of you.

I know you love fun. (Also, it’s summer!)

And I think you need to take your mind off your day-to-day thoughts. To get the creative juices flowing again. To kick back, mentally, and let things happen by themselves.

Using a special solution (it really works), two sticks and a piece of string as your wand, you’ll make mega-sized bubbles in MINUTES and you’ll relax your mind and just enjoy the moment.

Can’t Wait

I can’t wait to show ya. And I can’t wait to hear what new ideas this will spark in you.

Which is why I would like to invite you to come over to my place where I’ve got a gallon of solution, a wand and a super sweet rooftop waiting for us to make bubbles.

Email me if this Saturday works for ya and we’ll make this happen.

With best wishes and talk soon,

Alexis

 

PS: I’ve found a few factors that make the biggest, best bubbles:

• A little wind is very good because you basically don’t have to do anything but hold up the wand.
• Too much wind will break your bubbles almost immediately.
• Dry air will make it hard but usually New York is nice and humid during the summer.
• It’s better to make the bubbles in shade because direct sunlight will make them pop quickly.

PPS: Oh, and yes, the mixture I’ve figured out is fool-proof otherwise. Let me know if you’d like the recipe.

PPPS: Obviously, this post isn’t about bubbles but the act of mentally shelving a hard problem for a while and instead doing something completely different.