Background Processing
Reading Jeff Veen’s entry about how he designs, I thought I’d talk about something Kathryn and I sometimes discuss. Allow me to open with an anecdote.
It’s Friday afternoon and the weekly OK/Cancel strip is done but there’s no accompanying article. I believe the week this happened was, coincidentally, about dating a user experience professional. Kathryn was in the study, and I came in, sat next to her, opened a text editor and immediately, without pause, started typing furiously.
“How do you do that?” she asked me. Kathryn is a very careful drafter of the things she writes (which may explain the differences in our blog frequency) and spends time crafter the perfect way to say something so my approach was rather alien to her.
The truth is, I didn’t just start writing then. I had been writing the article in my head for a couple of days already. It was at least 80% done in my head, I simply had to translate it to somethign other people can see.
My approach to everything is the same way. As a structured procrastinator, I tend to prefer multiple simultaneous projects. That way, I can start in on something until I’m deep enough to intelligently analyse the task, then I can start on something else.
All the while, in the background, I’m processing these other tasks and trying to solve them.
My work is the same. If I work on a project continually, I hit a wall at some point where I am no longer able to innovate. I can still do the job but the quality is much higher if I work on other things in between.
Of course, the true secret, which most have discovered, is that the best ideas come from The Toilet.
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