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Naomi’s Playlist: POINT

by | Oct 5, 2016 | Tools & Apps

My playlist is an eclectic collection of tools that help me approach my work as play. My hope is that they’ll do the same for you.

focus

Object: Making practical creative decisions.

What Didn’t Work: Trying to jump from a general discussion about ideas to an immediate choice.

My Aha! Moment: I’ve been exploring some new creative thinking tools after taking a course called “Creative Thinker’s Toolkit” that’s offered on Great Courses Plus. One of those tools is called POINT, a step-by-step tool to help thinkers develop novel ideas into something workable.

Most have had the experience of reaching for ideas during a brainstorming session, only to later toss out the “wild” ideas as unusable. When we don’t know how to make an idea work, and it doesn’t fit our normal patterns, we reject it. What would happen if we asked ourselves: How might this idea work?

One of my students was starting a new novel. She was at that moment we often reach when solving a creative puzzle. We have a few ideas and we know the next step is a decision. Sometimes we instinctively know which choice is right. Many times, though, if we’re honest with ourselves, we feel less than clear.

Fortunately, at that moment, I remembered the POINT tool. “Don’t choose!” I said, and then asked if she’d like to try a new approach. She was game, so we went through a structured evaluation of her ideas using POINT. By the time she made her choice, she had clarity and confidence and a plan to take forward.

POINT works for making decisions about writing projects, but also for making any decision that has more than one possible solution. Here’s how it can work.

How POINT works:

  • P stands for “positives.” What makes this idea appealing?
  • O stands for “opportunities.” What options will this idea make possible?
  • I stands for “issues.” What challenges might this idea bring?
  • NT stands for “new thinking.” What new ideas arise as you consider this idea in more depth?

Player’s Notes:

  • POINT offers a method for considering a more unusual idea. When you feel yourself resisting an option because of the unknowns, try focusing on one POINT question at a time. You don’t have to see the end result to consider the possibility.
  • Once you’ve evaluated each option, take time to look over the full list before making a final decision. New options you hadn’t considered may arise. Might two of your options combine? Might your ideas lead to a new option that has yet to come up?

Take it to the Next Level:

  • Not every problem requires creative problem solving, but if we approached more problems with this kind of thinking, we may find more novel solutions. Take a moment to brainstorm the general challenges, small and large, you face in your life. What problem may benefit from brainstorming and POINT thinking?

Would you like a shortcut for structuring your POINT thinking? I’ve created a template, which you can download here

I am not sure to whom to give primary credit for the POINT tool, but I discovered it while taking the Creative Thinker’s Toolkit course on The Great Courses Plus, delivered by Professor Gerard Puccio. Thank you to Professor Puccio and The Great Courses Plus for sharing this fantastic tool, and for providing an overall well-developed course. I highly recommend the course for anyone who is interested in developing his or her creative thinking skills.

 

Playlist: Featuring Timely App

by | Jun 19, 2015 | Tools & Apps

WHERE DOES THEObject: Understanding how my time is spent, to gain a big picture view (and if needed, adjust) my work-habits.
What Didn’t Work: Trying to put things on the calendar and stick to strict pre-determined time slots. Hopping from one project to another in response to whatever pinged at the moment. Simply hoping I was getting to all of my projects. Only vaguely being able to answer the question: so how long did it take to… (fill in the blank)?
My Aha! Moment: I was listening to Amy Porterfield’s podcast (Episode 47). In this interesting interview about mindset she interviewed Todd Herman. Todd suggested keeping a chart of $10 work, $100 work, and $1000 work for a week. The challenge was to notice each task you did and record it into one of those columns. I loved the idea of the activity, but wasn’t yet in the place where I could afford to outsource anything. Outsourcing is the ultimate goal of the activity— acknowledging that when you’re the content-maker, creating your content is your greatest contribution, and that perhaps you oughtn’t to be coding HTML so your website works.
I remember thinking, “But I don’t even know which projects I’m spending my time on, let alone the amount of money I’d someday be able to pay someone to do the tasks!” For me, the first problem to tackle was “which project does this task fit into?” I needed to better understand where my hours were going before I could determine where any time-leaks might be. Maybe I was spending 20 hours a week on a project, but on all of the wrong parts of the project. Or maybe I was ignoring certain projects for too long, only returning to them after they had turned into raging problem-fires. I needed a way to track my time.
Enter the Timely app, a very nice-to-look-at visual time-tracking tool.
How I Play:
  • I’ve connected the Timely app with my main calendar, so the app knows what I’m supposed to spend my time on.
  • I can create a new task with just a couple easy clicks on my phone or desktop, and start a timer or enter time spent manually.
  • I use big categories, such as “admin” or “planning,” and sometimes add a few notes. The main thing for me is to see what I’m doing in broad strokes.
Player’s Notes:
  • If my day gets busy and I forget to record some time spent, I record estimates at the end of the day, when I still remember.
  • Timely has saved me so much time going back and trying to remember, particularly with invoices. Often, scheduling and hourly billing shifts due to various factors, so having a day-by-day record what actually happened is very helpful.
 
Take it to the Next Level:
  • Review how your time was spent every couple weeks with the Timely reports. Are there trends that point to problems? If so, how can you turn that problem into a question, for which you can then seek a solution?