Creativity Atrophy

Creativity has been on my mind recently. I realized that for the past 5 years I’ve been doing jobs that are not exactly a creativity work out. That's not to say there is no mental challenge, but the solutions tend to be the same. Its one of the banes of the IT/Networking field, problems tend to have known solutions, unless things are very broken.

Now normally this would not present a problem, but I’ve noticed its impacting my ability to program and come up with new ideas and creative solutions to problems. This is where the rub comes in. I really don't want to be in IT and Networking for the rest of my life. I’m trying to change and improve!

To combat creative atrophy I’ve been trying a pretty obvious technique I heard about on the Back to Work podcast. Essentially it can be summed up as “Just Do Something.” I know, groundbreaking right? Sometimes the most obvious advice is the best. I’ve been trying to do a few things to not only improve my creativity but to also improve other skills I’ve always felt lacked. I’ve been trying to fill up a sheet of paper each day with sketches and drawings. I’ve also been trying to write at least once a day. Now a majority of the drawing and writing will probably never see the light of day, but that's OK to me. I’m already starting to notice some improvements.

Now a few things are going to be a bit more public. I’m going to start writing more blog posts. The Learning to Program series has been good, but I want to go further. In the past, I've been rather quite about personal thoughts on Romb.us. In part because I figure most people are not interested in what I have to say. And to a point, I’m probably right. But it’s also a bit of a disservice to me, I cant improve if I don't try. So expect more “Whats on my mind” style posting.

Also I’ve also been kicking around the idea of rebuilding Romb.us and building my own blog engine. Another bolt of inspiration came this week in the from this blog post: ”A plea for baked weblogs” discussed on the Build and Analyze podcast. I’ll go into more details later this week. Its safe to say I'm going to attempt some of the ideas presented, if only for practice.

More L2P Friday! I’m taking a bit of a break before the final push into the CS193P classes.