👀🌲This is why I hate productivity systems that help you "capture ideas".
Ideas are great but fuck ideas.
westwind@mcmoots I think there's some value in "capturing ideas" to get them out of your head and focus on current priorities, _as long as you evaluate and prioritize them later._ If I didn't write down my ideas or systems issues I notice, I'd either forget them completely or I'd be dropping everything to change priorities "right-the-eff-now" waaaay too often.
@westwind ... I don't think you and I have experienced the same type of compulsive idea generation paralysis.
@westwind Here's my working theory: Capturing ideas helps if (1) ideas are a scarce resource, and/or (2) your brain gets attached to ideas & won't let them go w/o some level of action.
(1) has never been true for me, except in limited contexts like boring work projects, where I do end up writing stuff down more. For (2), I've found cultivating detachment about my ideas more helpful than interrupting myself to write them down. ADHD means even minor interruptions like that can have high costs.
Midcentury Modern Cockatrice@mcmoots @westwind
I keep running lists of ideas in public, and encourage people to take them and run with them.
It doesn't help with actually getting things done, but it makes people think I'm smarter than I really am (because look at all these wild ideas I came up with) and sometimes makes them feel gratitude for me ("Enki gave me/inspired this great idea I used; he's a cool guy").
It works out well for me because I'd rather be influential than productive.
@enkiv2 @mcmoots
I ride waves of motivation to Do Things depending on my level of depression; my list is for me to take up when I have spoons to spare.
Either that or it's boring work stuff like you described, @mcmoots, where I realize something needs to get handled but I don't have the bandwidth for it, so I make a note and put it out there for my team to look at (or more likely, for me to deal with later myself).
@westwind @mcmoots
My ideas basically never overlap with what I'm paid to do (and I'm in a work situation where productivity isn't particularly rewarded). I very occasionally will get the urge to actually implement something off my idea list, but it's much more common for someone else to do it.
(I sometimes post more than 30 ideas in a day, & some of these lists have been going for upwards of 10 years. The number of ideas implemented by anybody is in the double digits.)
@enkiv2 @westwind Yeah, I mean, given that I'm too lazy to ever work on my volcano lair concept, that's as close as I can reasonably expect to get to having an army of minions.
I'm just so used to thinking of my ideas as essentially valueless without the accompanying labor of figuring out whether they are actually good, developing, etc., it has never occurred to me other people might want to read a list.
@mcmoots @westwind
An interesting idea (as opposed to a good, productive, or economically valuable idea) presents an alternate way of looking at something.
Expanding the mental model might result in later good/productive/valuable ideas that wouldn't otherwise be possible, or might not.
The expansion of the model might not even be *helped* by actually implementing the idea -- a thought experiment could be enough.
@westwind @mcmoots
For a while, I was pitching alternate rulesets for mastodon instances (inspired by oulipo.social). That was a good way to investigate social spaces, how we value communication on them, and issues of persistent identity on them. The ideas were all bad ones (i.e., nobody would want to use them) but they were bad in interestingly different ways, and articulating why they're bad is interesting.
For a while, I was pitching alternate rulesets for mastodon instances (inspired by oulipo.social). That was a good way to investigate social spaces, how we value communication on them, and issues of persistent identity on them. The ideas were all bad ones (i.e., nobody would want to use them) but they were bad in interestingly different ways, and articulating why they're bad is interesting.
@enkiv2 @westwind Oh sure, bad ideas are *fun*, that's why the meme is so relatable.
But how much of that fun (or whatever other srs intellectual value) will transfer to someone coming in from outside the idea's original context? Like, getting drawn into a conversation about gimmick instance ideas is a different & better thing than just looking at a list of what someone else came up with as possibilities.
My story ideas get just stuck in a list (and labeled as 'writing prompts'). My other ideas (mostly technical) get simulposted on mastodon & twitter and get added to a list. Sometimes they create discussion.
Their function, to me, is the same, & has nothing to do with actual implementation.
gabby kar