Tools for Thought

Yesterday, looking at a bank building, I saw a sign whose top surface was covered four-inch wires jutting upwards, acting as a bed of nails for any birds that would have otherwise landed. I’ve always disliked this “solution” to the bird problem, since it aesthetically detracts from the sign and has probably injured more than [...]

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Distraction. Multitasking. Attention Deficit Disorder. Information overload. These are the watchwords of the internet age. And yes, they’re very real problems. It’s so easy to become distracted, so easy for irrelevant information to trickle into our environments without vigilant gatekeeping, that it’s tempting to take blocking out all input to an extreme, turning workspaces into [...]

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The human mind is brilliant, but also brilliantly inefficient. We often get our best ideas where we can’t implement them. The classic example is in the shower, but it happens everywhere, anytime. You’re shopping in the produce section of the supermarket, and all of a sudden, you realize you need to add an important topic [...]

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Few things in a writer’s life are worse that staring at a screen groping for words for what seems like an eternity. Some writers can compose as fast as they can type, but most mortals’ writing process is more of a struggle. There may or may not be a way to escape the struggle entirely, [...]

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Whether you’re a writer, artist, scientist, or just a sentient human being, almost nothing helps stimulate the thinking and creative process more than good notebook — provided it’s actually used. In a recent post, Time, Attention and Creative Work, Merlin Mann issued the following warning about notebooks for erstwhile creatives: A notebook is basically the [...]

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The word “po” is a term coined by Edward de Bono in the sixties as a grammatical shorthand for a number of alternative thinking operations. The word has no magic powers in itself, but once you’re accustomed to using the operations it’s meant to invoke, their usage is less cumbersome, just as converting mathematical word [...]

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(Play Video) Most people who think they lack ideas might very well have the opposite problem. They may have so many ideas that they obscure each other. It’s not a problem of having ideas, but of seeing them. Once they’re visible, it becomes easier to see their relationships to each other, prioritize them if necessary, [...]

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Many decisions we make during the day are easy. What do I want for dinner? Should I get gas now or later? What’s the best route to get to my destination? Easy decisions typically involve a very finite number of variables, low enough to manage them in our heads. The moment we have to compare, [...]

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The APC thinking operation was coined in the 1980s by Edward de Bono as a compressed way to proactively search for and generate alternatives. The acronym, which stands for Alternatives, Possibilities, Choices, was designed as a handle for common usage — as in “Do an APC on reducing utility costs.” Each word in the acronym [...]

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The title says it all. LifeDev has graciously posted my guest article here. It deals with explicitly looking for the presuppositions that frame how we view a problem or project. It also contains a few examples for you to run through as a lateral thinking training exercise.

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