I came across an idea a while back called Morning Pages. The idea is aimed at creative writers and is rather prescriptive. You have to write three pages of free form prose first thing every morning. I liked the idea but for me it wasn't free form enough. So I have adapted it. I try and do it fairly early in the morning but I already have other things I want to do first. So I might leave it to lunchtime. I also don't have a set time allocated to it or a set amount I need to write. So I have taken the free form but and really run with it. In light of this I call them my Jazz Notes. Basically, once a day I just sit down with a reporters pad and pencil and jam.
So having given myself free reign, what do I come up with? Basically whatever is in my head comes out. It might be some notes on what I am working and particularly on how well I am doing it. It might be an observation about what is going on in my life, or more rarely in national or international life. Future historians will find them to be slim pickings for insight into what is going on in the world.
But what I like about them and the thing that keeps me doing them even when I have plenty of other stuff to do that seems on the face of it to be more important is that every now and again they crystalise into an idea that might otherwise have slipped by me. These often turn into blog posts, more on that later, or sometimes into Twitter posts. But I also get ideas for business things such as new revenue sources or better ways of getting things done. (My main blogging activity is part of my promotion for my consultancy business, so some of those blog ideas are commercial too.) And a reasonable number are just about living life a bit better.
So all in all what looks at first sight like a bit of self indulgent jotting is in fact something that has for the last six months been a major contribution to my life.
It would be a bit remise not to give you an example of how it works after bigging up the benefits, so here is an example from this morning. I started off writing about how doing a written plan is a good way of focusing your brain on what you need to do and therefore getting your subconscious working on the best way of achieving it. This ended up as a paragraph in a book on time management I am writing. (See http://personaldevlopmentforsensiblepeople.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/is-writing-book-on-time-management-good.html) But it also got me thinking about whether writing my Jazz Notes was a similar thing.
In fact I concluded that it wasn't so much that as a no pressure way to rehearse ideas. I have already noticed that I find it impossible to rehearse with the camera running. When I have a script for a youtube video I like to give it a run through or maybe two before I actually record it. I tried a couple of times to do this with the cameral running in case the rehearsal was good enough to use. But what I found was that even though I have complete control over the camera, the very fact that I am recording puts some pressure on me.
It's the same in other areas. Replying to emails is hard because I imagine the person at the other end reading it. Writing blog posts is the same, even though on this blog for example the probability of it ever being read by anyone is pretty remote. So that is quite a handy observation that might help me overcome the kind of mental blocks I sometimes get with particular projects and clients.
So I think the act of writing something that nobody else is ever going to read is liberating and allows ideas to come out that would otherwise be too frightened to show their faces.
The only shame is I don't actually like listening to jazz.
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