Riding The Wave of Inspiration

I’ve been wanting to write this article for a long time, but I haven’t been… well… inspired.

“You can’t just sit around and wait for inspiration to strike.”

I’ve learned that, yes, you can. And it’s the most effective productivity hack I’ve ever learned.

Uninspired vs Inspired Work

Nowadays, I’m trying to publish at least one article per month.

Easy peasy.

But last month, as the month was progressing, I had no idea what to write about.

To finally block some time to write an article, I went to a writing meetup. The premise: I sit in a room with ten others in silence, all working on our own writing projects for 3 hours. For the last thirty minutes, we discuss what we’ve worked on.

I find myself always starting many writing projects, but never finishing them. I have dozens of unfinished articles. My goal for the writing meetup was to pick up one of the unfinished articles, and finish it.

When the meetup started, I found myself clicking through my list of unfinished articles. I’d make a couple edits, but then feel unable to finish the article, so I’d open the next one. Eventually I settled on an article and finished it. But as I was re-reading it, it just wasn’t that good.

*Ding!*

The alarm went off. The three hours were over. And I had nothing useful to show for it.

I went home feeling sad.

Then, the next day, a Monday, I had a work day. Work days are busy for me: there’s no time for anything else. I had a big pile of code to review.

But whilst reviewing, I noticed that I found it difficult to judge how much time to invest in each code review. There seemed to be diminishing returns to the time I spent looking into the code.

Interesting!

I’ve learned myself that when a wave of inspiration comes, I have to catch it. Because as quickly as it comes, it also goes away. So I immediately switched from my code reviewing task to writing. And in just three hours, I churned out a beautiful article about the game of code review.

Capture Ideas Directly

Relieved, I cross out the final task for the day from my todo-list. My head feels full. To relax, I head outside into the park.

That’s when it happens.

While I sit unsuspectingly under the tree, my brain is churning through the abundance of information I’ve absorbed today. And then it comes. An idea, a revelation, or just any random thought jumps into my mind.

I grab my phone, tap “Note”, and start writing.

The subconscious part of our brain is always solving some problems, and usually it comes with the solutions during moments of downtime. For myself, I made a cloud app such that I can capture those ideas on any of my devices, at any point in time. In total, I’ve captured almost 500 notes over the two years I’ve used it. And it’s amazing.

Creative professionals need such a medium for capturing on-the-spot ideas.

Letting good ideas go to waste is a shame, because once they’re gone, they may never come back.

Conclusion

Inspiration is a funny thing. It’s a hugely powerful tool to make great results happen. But it has some funny characteristics:

• Sometimes I have it, sometimes I don’t have it. I learned that I can hardly force inspiration.
• Inspiration is relevant for creative tasks. For less creative tasks, not so much.
• Inspiration strikes at the most random of moments. It happens more often if we have the mental space for inspiration to strike.
• Ignore inspiration too often, and it will no longer strike.

Having a flexible lifestyle, both professionally and personally, allows more room to capture the power of inspiration.

I think there’s a genius in each and every person.

But only those who understand the power of the subconscious are able to use that genius.

Tap into that energy more often, and you soon find yourself capable of thoughts way beyond your ordinary thinking.

Einstein unlocked.

Good luck!