Brainstorming Follow-Up: The Realization

Too many things.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that this is the conclusion I came to during last night's brainstorming session: I'm doing too much.

It's not that I'm overworked. Lord knows I waste enough time in a day to make the dead rise in anger. It's that I'm unfocused. I have too many "must-do"s on my plate, and more "want to do"s waiting to be added. I have a billion things I SHOULD be doing, but I have no real understanding of which ones are vital.

So I'm scaling back.

The amount of time I work per week won't change, but the number of things I'm doing alone needs to decrease, so I can get them done well. Then, as I master the art of focus and dedication, I can get faster at what I do and add more tasks to the list. I can also find reliable collaborators who can help shoulder some of the responsibilities (and influence the direction) of our joint ventures. But if I try to tackle the 800 items on the various texts and stickies littering my desktop all by myself without an order of operations, I'll spin in circles until I collapse.

Which ones are the important ones? I'll let you know as I figure them out.

In the meantime, I have entire episode to film for Monday...

Brainstorming Night

Tonight, a few of the behind-the-scenes folks from STBD will be meeting for our first weekly brainstorming meeting of 2007. (A couple of them are in-front-of-the-camera folks, too, because we STBDers like to pull double duty).

Waaay back in 2004 (I think -- it's been awhile), I started meeting with a few friends to brainstorm our various creative ideas. I had STBD. They had classwork, or creative writing, or web comics, or Flash projects, or whatever was on tap that week. The value, we found, was that everyone was able to see everyone else's projects from a different point of view, and sometimes those POVs could find creative solutions we ourselves couldn't see alone because we were too close to the situation.

These meetings aren't always weekly, though we try to do it that way. More often, it's when we can all squeeze free for a few hours. Even a quick cup of coffee, in person, can help steer a few of us in the right direction.

Tonight's main topic, from my vantage point: building out STBD.

I have dozens of ideas, many of which have been incubating for years without the necessary resources (time, money, people, know-how) to pull them off. So I'm looking for feedback on how I can put as many of these ideas in motion as possible. Hopefully my collaborators can provide constructive suggestions and we can push this boulder forward, pebble by pebble, until it picks up its own momentum.

But brainstorming night shouldn't be limited solely to us.

Do you have an idea that you can't quite wrap your head around? Why not gather up a few friends -- or even acquaintances -- and grab a cup of coffee? Pitch your ideas and see what kinds of feedback they offer. Not only will someone undoubtedly have a perspective that you wouldn't have thought of, but they'll almost definitely have a conundrum of their own that you may have some insight on.

Brainstorming: it's not just for white paper anymore.