The Air Traffic Control Problem
This was originally published in my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update to your inbox here.
Many years ago, in my late teens, a friend leant me a cassette which contained an after dinner speech by David Gunson. It talked about how air traffic control worked at the time which you wouldn’t think would be a laugh out loud topic but there was no YouTube back in the early 80s 😉
There’s a concept explained in it that has always stuck with because it can be applied to a bunch of situations which I refer to as “the air traffic control problem”. At an airport, ground control’s objective is to fire aircraft into the sky as quickly as possible. Left, middle, right, left, middle, right, all day long without a care for what happens once they’ve taken off. The catching of those aircraft, processing and passing on of them, that’s for someone else to figure out and it has often struck me as a useful analogy for creative project ideas.
Creativity is a way of operating. Get into the right headspace and around every corner we see inspiration for a podcast, a newsletter, a painting, a YouTube video, whatever your creative practice of choice. Your brain is ground control firing things out all day long, but your conscious brain needs to capture these things somehow, process them and work out what, if anything, comes next. This can be overwhelming, and was briefly how I felt at the start of the year.
I get messages from listeners filled with great ideas and guests to speak to. I think about videos, essays, podcast episodes, all of them good ideas and leads and I am working hard to log them and figure out a way to get back to them over time.
David Pierce and Casey Newton on The Vergecast
As luck would have it, last week on The Vergecast, David Pierce spoke to Casey Newton about his systems for managing ideas and the morning pages ritual came up along with a new concept to me of the Blip. This reminded me of things I’ve done in the past that helped with managing these threads.
In the past, and inconsistently lately, I have ended my day by making a list of things I need to do. This can be as simple as a note in my notes app or a page in a notebook with the next day as the title and a list of a few things to get done below it. This simple act gets stuff out of my head and reminds me where to pick up next time I’m back at my desk. Phones are good for this as they light up in the dark if you have an epiphany as you fall asleep, but a notebook is great too because I do think there’s something to be said for writing longhand.
A reminders app isn’t as helpful as you might think, because I find that the endlessness of the list can distract you from what’s in front of you. There’s usually something in there I’d rather be doing, even if it’s trivial, because it’s either easy or for someone else in the family. I can trick myself into feeling good because I helped someone else, but fall into this trap and if you don’t get back to your task later then you end up feeling grumpy and resentful because you didn’t get to your stuff. So, a single page or follow Julia’s advice and write 3 pages in the morning. Whatever you do, have a page, something you can refer back to and see how you get on.
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What I’m adding to this, because I’m a maker of things, is some place to put the blips. For now this is pages in a notebook, but I’m realising that the limitation of that is the need to go back to the right book which might be on a shelf at home or that you just will never go back. Way back when, around 2008, I had a boss who when we logged feature ideas in TRAC would say “if it’s important it’ll come up again”. I think he was mostly right, but I might need to engineer a way to revisit my library of blips in the future. Do you have any magic ideas or tools you’re using? My instinct is to go full project manager on myself and book in recurring time to look at this stuff, a bit like the Million Dollar Homepage guy used to do, but that does seem a rather corporate solution and I’ve tried to leave that world behind.
Watch this
This week as I was drafting the newsletter, Van Neistat posted a video online about solving a problem for someone. They have the perfect setup for a pen but they hate the refills for it and so they use a different one, but modify it. Van uses solving this problem as a way to also explore the concept of art as communication tool and the act of making. It’s a great watch and well worth your time.