Often when I am sitting in a
meeting, a lecture, or presentation, my mind wanders. Early on in my career I
found this annoying but over time I realized that this was my way of processing
the information that I was hearing but also building connections to things I
have read, seen, and heard elsewhere.
One of the things that I miss
about in-person lectures, books talks, and conference presentations, is the
stimulation that these provide. Not only do I hear new, and hopefully
interesting things, but my mind kicks in and starts building new ideas and new
ways of thinking about my work. Interestingly with Zoom, my mind wanders but it
doesn’t kick into this mode of thinking, creating, and imagining. Perhaps this
is why I find large Zoom meetings and presentations so deadly.
We have all heard that we must be
disciplined and concentrate on the tasks at hand. This is what work expects of
us and it is what we’ve come to expect of ourselves. For most of us, I presume,
our minds wander from the pressing problem at work, or at home, to something
else. We daydream. This is not a bad thing.
American theologian, Will Willimon,
agrees, noting that “daydreaming can be the mind’s incubator. When we’re
hyperfocused, the possibility of the mind reaching into its reservoir and
making an “Aha!” diminishes. In daydreaming there’s no controlling censor to
whisper, “That’s ridiculous” or “Completely impractical.”
The library profession is
sometimes accused of being staid, unadventurous. While we know that isn’t really true, we
sometimes do get into our own way of doing things and don’t daydream or imagine
enough. Some of that lack of imagining
comes from being overworked, pressed for time; daydreaming is seen as the enemy
of the necessary. We also worry that our “crazy idea” won’t be appreciated or
welcomed.
Google is well known, as a
company, for allowing their employees some “play time”. Typically up to 20% of
their time can be spent on imagining or creating something new; something that
is not necessarily part of their work assignment. This has served Google well.
However the new work from home might end up being particularly challenging, as
some early large scale studies have shown that while employees enjoy working
from home, it greatly decreased their creativity.
Sources of creativity often come
from reading or seeing something new. The author Neil Gaiman talks about the
role that fiction plays learning to imagine and create. He notes that when
people have visited Google, Apple, and Microsoft to try and understand how they
learned to be creative, they found that almost without fail the most creative
individuals had read science fiction as children. Fiction allows you to imagine
a different world. Fiction can breed discontent. “Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify
and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.”
The
other factor that I have found that has inhibited thinking creatively and
imagining a different future is the culture of scarcity. Decreased staffing levels and budgets always
bring the specter of scarcity and indeed these can be challenging. They can
however, if we allow ourselves, provide a moment to daydream, or imagine a
different future, a different way to do things, a different way forward.
The next time your mind wanders,
don’t be so quick to chastise yourself. Let those creative juices flow. You might not
end up with a new work of art, or a new poem, or the next prize winning novel
but you might have a renewed appreciation for your work, or a new idea of how
to make work better or more interesting.
