Create a Summer Adventure List & Start the Summer Off Right

Memorial Day weekend arrives, marking the unofficial beginning of summer.  It’s time to bring out the grill, and also time to break out the markers and a piece of paper on which to compose your Summer Adventure List. 

A great tool for keeping all your summer ideas, plans and projects front and center, a Summer Adventure List is a great way to start the season off right.  It ensures that the summer doesn’t fly by without making time for those “This summer I want to . . .” activities that can fall by the wayside once the summer is off and running.  A Summer Adventure List also means that you'll have on-hand ideas for a summer full of activities that embody good creative thinking habits: adventure, exploration and play.   

My extremely organized friend, fellow paper lover and list-maker, Danielle, gave me the idea to create a summer list several years ago when I was lamenting that the summer goes by too fast.  She mentioned that she made a list of summer time activities that she wanted to get in by the end of the season and paper-clipped it to her kitchen calendar.  Since then, I have seen the idea appear in a few places, including this month’s Better Homes and Gardens magazine where they call it a “Sand Pail List” (a clever seasonal twist on the traditional Bucket List.)

My Summer Adventure List is not exclusive to only big-deal adventures.  Rather it contains a wealth of activities and projects that I want to approach with the mentality of an adventurer—from research on a writing project to visiting local historic sites.  Adventuring, as I have written about for the Summer Challenges, is a key ingredient to creative thinking, and as a frame of mind, it allows us to remain open and curious as we observe the journey.  It can make a boring task or obligation feel fresh and new, or it can take something that feels overwhelming and foreign and make it feel approachable.

My Summer Adventure List is sometimes a traditional list and sometimes it is a mind map.  I use a list format to capture an overview of the activities I want to do, go to, or need to plan for.  I use a mind map when I also want to include summer reading and creative projects.  I often create both, keeping the list on the refrigerator as an everyday reminder and my mind map in my sketchbook, where I can cross reference it as I work.

I encourage you to take an half hour this weekend, alone or with your family, to create a Summer Adventure list.  From taking an evening walk to get ice cream to planning a day trip, any adventure, big or small, that you want to do this summer should go on the list.  Have fun creating it and make sure to leave room on your list and schedule for additional ideas for adventures that will come to you over the next several weeks of warm weather.  

Do you have a tradition of keeping a Summer Adventure List?  If so, what are some of your favorite activities to list?  For those creating their Summer Adventure List, what are some of your activities listed that you are looking forward to?

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered. – G. K. Chesterton       

                        

Nostalgia: "Before You Were Here" Vintage Postcards and Capturing the Spirit of a Place

The Sea Island Casino, vintage postcard roughly 1940/50s

History fascinates me as much as paper nostalgia, especially vintage postcards, which is one of the reasons I started The Paper Compass.  When someone speaks about history, I am all ears.  When I travel, I often read up on the location, my curiosity driven by questions such as how did this place come to be? What did the people who shaped it see and think and do?  This is why, very naturally, and gradually over the course of the last two decades, I have unsurprisingly found myself a collector of vintage postcards.

My first vintage postcard set the trend.  I found it in a thrift store in Lake Worth, Florida my senior year in high school.  It was a view of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, looking towards the Boston Public Garden from Kenmore Square, with a statue rising out of a fountain as the foreground focal point.  I bought it with the romantic notion of finding the scene featured once I arrived at Boston University, and I pasted it to my new dorm room filing cabinet.  As synchronicity would have it, “the end” of the Commonwealth mall, part of The Emerald Necklace, was about two blocks away from my dorm.  I recognized the statue one evening after leaving my friend’s apartment in The Braemore.  It was smaller than I thought it would be, the fountain was dry, and the grandeur of the view was marred by the overpass to Storrow Drive.  But I had found it!  I was captivated by the fact that this view of the city was still there 70+ years later.  So began the trend of collecting vintage postcards of places that I wanted to visit, dreamed about (the original Coney Island), or had been.

My recent travels (the inspiration for my last post) took me to back to Georgia’s Golden Isles, where I consistently visited my grandparents, once a year, for the first 25 years of my life.  My memories of time spent on Sea Island, at the hotel, The Cloister, located there, and also on St. Simons run vivid and deep.  They are some of my most favorite memories with my family and of my childhood.  And because time always marches on, so many of the locations, are truly that now—just memories. 

The courtyard of The Cloister roughly 1930/40s--you can
still see the wilderness of the island off in the far distance

Built in the 1920s by famous Florida architect Addison Mizner, The Cloister, a casino, a pool and a resort, soon became the summer haunt of Atlantians, and some of Hollywood’s and Washington’s rich and famous.  The hotel (and island community) survived The Great Depression by printing their own money.  After WWII the hotel continued to expand, and by the time my childhood memories of Sea Island and The Cloister began it had grown into a thriving resort and cottage community.  So highly was it regarded, along with the beauty of the island, that The Cloister hosted the 30th G8 summit there in 2004.  After that, the hotel decided to expand, to upgrade and improve.  The original Mizner hotel was torn down, a new hotel built with more modern amenities and better views.  Next, the original Beach Club was torn down, a new pool area built (minus diving boards—too much of a liability).  And, last but not least, a gate house was built so that only those with special access can get on the island.  Everything that was once there is completely razed.  Everything is new.  Modernized.  In what feels like having a waking dream, everything there is inspired by the same rooms, hallways, pool decks, and dining areas that came before it—so that it seems familiar, smells the same—but doesn’t feel right. 

The new hotel and beach club are truly beautiful.  Like something out of Architectural Digest.  In some cases I will agree that it is “improved.”  My memories, though, are of a place that was much more fun, full of traditions but also casual.  Inviting.  Which is why the two vintage postcards featured here are some of my collection favorites.  They are of the Cloister before I ever knew it, but they feel familiar because the old hotel always had the glamour that is present in vintage postcards.  Even without a message they seem to say, Wish You Were Here—celebrating the golden age of an era when handwriting and postcards were as common as fingerbowls on the dinner table.

 

It is not easy to capture the spirit of a place.  Especially, its place in time.  But I find that if you look in the right places—such as a dusty box in the corner of an antique shop—you just may be able to find the vintage postcard that does. 

For fun: a 1980s postcard of the Beach Club
that looks like it came right out of my childhood memories

A postcard of architectural renderings of the "new" Cloister hotel

                        

Letters, Part I: Taking Advantage of Our Everyday Familiarity with the Written Word

“Dear Brenna—Wondering what Gran’pop & I could have for dinner the other eve, came up with a real easy, old recipe & tho’t I’d send along to you so you could surprise the family sometime & fix it for them. It is a “keeper.” Thus the enclosed [5-Can Casserole*]. Let me hear how they all rave about it.” –Beginning of a letter from Barbara McCormick “Gigi” to me, dated Aug. 14, 1992

Shortly after my last post, I received word that my grandmother, whose health had been failing, had passed away. I found out by email, and remember sitting at my desk, suddenly and deeply sad, despite knowing that it was forthcoming. As I sat there, I remember thinking that I would miss Gigi (as we called her) and then suddenly, very distinctly, her death became tangible in the knowledge that our correspondence had come to an end.

My grandmother’s letters arrived every six weeks or so, and were satisfyingly plain and non-romantic in the way of letter writing; they were often on full sheets of stationery folded into business-sized envelopes. As she was once a secretary, they were often typed, but sometimes held her legible cursive that slanted swiftly across the page. They were filled with unrequested advice, questions, and short descriptions of her activities in the communities in which she lived, first in New Jersey and then New Mexico. They also often included clippings of articles or recipes that had made her think of me. More than a few of them began with brisk lamentations on not having heard from either me, or sometimes my siblings, within a satisfying amount of time. Somehow, even knowing the contents may contain a rebuke for a late reply, I was always glad to see one sticking through the mail slot.

Letter writing has always been important to me, and luckily to some of my friends, so I know both the satisfaction of sending a letter as well as the joy of spotting a hand-addressed envelope among the day’s mail. Yet, it wasn’t until Gigi’s passing that I truly grasped, on a personal level, the impact of her letters. “Letters are memorable. They make a lasting impression.” It is something that I had preached many times as a manager at Crane & Co., Paper Makers—but, now it was something I understood. More than just a way of staying connected with me and my siblings, Gigi’s letters were a way of remaining a part of our lives from the other side of the country. And suddenly, with the realization that there were no more letters forthcoming, her absence in my life was deeply felt, and her saved letters, with their everyday communication, became more precious to me.

Often, I feel that letter writing is romanticized. While I appreciate this (as I think the notion of letters is romantic), I think that it is important to respect that the role and function of letters has changed in our everyday modern lives. More importantly though, I feel that the impact of receiving a letter has not. The rare treat of a real letter, now makes it something unique and memorable to be savored. Letters connect you to people, allowing you to be present in their lives without disruption, without the disturbance of the phone ringing or being another email showing up among many. They allow the reader to investigate them on their own time and allow the author to tell the story, uninterrupted, in their own way.

Originally, letters served as the only means of communication across distances. Technology has taken over many of the functions of letters--sharing news, making social plans, setting up appointments, serving as references, or staying in touch--making them more instantaneous and/or automatic through email, phone, social media or text. There is an instant gratification and functionality to technology that has made our communication better and more efficient (thank goodness.) Yet it has given us something else unexpected that I think we should take better advantage of: an everyday familiarity with the written word.

The act of writing a letter can seem intimidating. When you consider it though, we write letters everyday—in emails, in text messages—the means of communication just needs to be altered (along with a little patience for the postal system). If you are looking for your words to have impact, to connect with your reader in a way deeper than email, or just to subtly strengthen a relationship, I encourage you to put aside the keyboard and pick up a pen and some paper.

I would like to say that this is something that I have always known, but now I feel that I can say that it is truly something my grandmother taught me.

A Little Extra
• Inspired to send a letter that will have immediate impact but don’t know where to start? Consider sending a letter of support or appreciation to a member of the armed forces: www.amillionthanks.org, www.letterstosoliders.org or www.anysolider.com.
• Have someone to say Thank You to? Forgo the email, and send them a handwritten thank you instead. It is an action that always guarantees goodwill and more things to say thank you for in the future.
• *Here is the recipe for 5-Can Casserole that was in my grandmother’s letter. (She suggests in the letter serving it with French bread and sliced tomatoes and fruit for dessert):
(Oven 350)
Mix altogether and heat for 30 mins uncovered:
1 small can evaporated milk
1 can chicken noodle soup
1 can mushroom soup
1 can tuna
1 can Chinese noodles

Note on back of card: “Campbell’s chicken noodle & mushroom soups are like 10.25oz each. Tuna can is around 6.25-6.5 oz. Chinese noodles are in Chinese food section & I don’t know oz. but size of can is slightly larger than soups."

Immersion

It is late November. Wild hurricanes of leaves dance down the streets creating a song that is crisp and lonely. When I stand on the back porch and look towards the woods, the trees are bare branched and I can see the nests of squirrels and birds silhouetted in the light of the sunset, which comes earlier and earlier every evening.

With its earthy color palate of browns, golds, and grays, and promise of colder weather to come, November is unapologetically about turning inwards. Trees shake off their showy autumn mane of leaves and the sap returns to the core. Animals and people gather food, share, nest and sleep longer (or desire too). The weather turns chilly and we spend more time inside, with coffee or tea, with books, or working like elves with a desire to wrap up the year.

Amidst all this, or because of it, I find November a perfect month for remembering the importance of returning to our internal selves. Whether it is a walk outside in the brisk air (often scented with wood smoke here in New England), a moment to ourselves, special time with family, or indulging in a few hours to explore an interest, a personal passion or favorite hobby, it is all about taking time to turn inward towards the core of who we are. Or, in other words, taking time to immerse ourselves.

Immersion is important because it allows us to recharge. Similar to incubation, the second stage of the creative process, immersion allows us to enter a space where we can experience flow, a sense of being connected, or allow our usual mental chatter or activities a vacation. This important and mysterious phase of the creative process usually takes place away from the active attempts of solving the problem—away from the “work.” It is where the subconscious is able to mull things over without the censors of the conscious mind. (How many ideas have you had before falling asleep? Or even in the shower when you are still waking up?)

Magical things happen when we allow ourselves to become immersed in an interest, a simple activity or a moment. Ideas and memories rise to the surface like bubbles in champagne—little trails of thought, connected and disconnected—are uncorked and released. Some linger, and new ideas form and sometimes become tangible solutions or new endeavors.

During the next few weeks on The Paper Compass we will go back to our roots, immersing ourselves in our core creative medium: paper. We will explore some of the ways to cultivate immersion and ideas through journaling, common place books, and letters. These are just some of the ways to gather ideas, consciously and unconsciously, and create a playground (or a launch pad) for ways to work through them or develop them.

I hope that you will join us! In the meantime, I encourage you to take some time to immerse yourself in something special this holiday.

Best wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving.

What the Water Taught Me or Refreshing Your Relationship with Your Sketchbook, Part I

Postcard No. 3

Remembering Night Swimming

Mixed Media, Collage

Several weeks ago, right on the heels of the amazing Ghost Hunter’s weekend, my boyfriend and I arrived home to find our basement flooded with nine inches of water.

Driving home in the cloud soaked twilight, the neighborhood was an eerie scene, with the rain streaming down and fountains of water bubbling up from the manhole covers and storm drains. My intuition said it didn’t bode well for our seepage-prone basement and I was, sadly, correct.

We lost a few things, some that can be replaced and some that can’t, but thankfully important items, like my sketchbook that my mom kept from when I was little, made it through perfectly dry. My large, unwieldy art portfolio was in the basement and while some of the contents were quickly subscribed to the trash bin, other items, like my sketchbooks from college, I couldn’t give up on and I dragged them upstairs and set about a campaign to dry them.

For weeks, my sketchbooks were spread out on the radiators around the house or, on nice days, propped up in the windows of the back porch, the breeze fluttering the thick damp pages.

Not being one to sentimentally return to mull through things, it was an interesting lesson for me to see how my use of a sketchbook has changed. In college, my sketchbook was filled with images, sketches, design ideas for silk scarves and pillows. I used my sketchbook as a place to try out ideas and play before putting paint to paper, or dye to silk. Sometimes, there were also just big, emotionally-driven, playful drawings or the drafts of poems that later were published.

The sketchbooks, as they steamed and curled on the radiators, lived and breathed with images and the play of ideas. They clearly showed a colorful phase in my artistic journey.

In contrast, I realized that my current sketchbooks are filled with more notes than ideas. That business meetings and To Dos dominate the pages and the occasional “this-meeting-should-have-ended-20-minutes-ago” doodle decorates the edges. There are also notes on books I am reading, or activities and ideas for things that I want to improve in my Creative Thinking class. So while it is important material, it is very distant from the colorful playfulness of the pages of the previous decade.

I like the liberty of having a sketchbook for work, but it made me realize that I need a sketchbook to play in again—and that I need to take the time to play; to return to more visual exploration and expression.

The other thing that I saw in my open and drying sketchbooks was that they held the blue prints of many projects that had made their way from idea to tangible object. Which was an interesting observation—creating a master sketch seemed to make something happen. That or I was just closer to a finished project at the time that I was testing it on paper.

The damage of the basement flooding served as a catalyst for not only looking at my artistic process but specifically my use of sketchbooks and the role they play in cultivating ideas. The resulting search for a new sketch book and its insights are topics for my next post… Until then, I invite you to think about your artistic journey and how you can refresh your relationship with your sketchbook in the activity below.

Sketchbook Meditation

This activity is designed to help you take a look at your own work and see if you there are some new directions or explorations that may stimulate new ideas or work flow habits.

Take out your current sketch book (hopefully it is always nearby!) or, even better, if you keep sketchbooks, take out a selection at random and line them up. Flip randomly through the pages and observe what you see about how you work. Some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you use a lot of words or do you use more images?
• Is there a focus, or do you cover a wide variety of ideas and topics?
• What mediums do you use (paint, ink, pencil, mixed)?
• Is the information organized or random?
• Do you go back and review pages or information?
• How many of the ideas in the sketchbook made it into bigger, tangible pieces?
• How many of the ideas are “blue prints” and how many are exploratory or from playing?

After going through the questions above, think about what you may want to introduce that is different in your current sketch book. Maybe you realized that you want to play more or use more visuals. Maybe you want to better balance blue prints vs. playfulness. Maybe you want to use paint, rather than your standard pencil.

Pick one item/element from your observations and introduce it to your sketch book in the next week. See what happens and how you feel about your relationship with your sketchbook and documenting your ideas. Hopefully it will be a little bit of a “refresh.”

Want to get an idea of how others are using their sketchbooks? Check out http://sketchbooks.org/

“Star-Stuck”: Stop Censoring and Begin Championing your Curiosity (inspired by my weekend talking to ghosts and ghost hunters)

It is not every weekend that I get to go ghost hunting, nor is it every weekend that I get to meet and hang out with the people that I watch on TV on a weekly basis. So you can imagine my delight (if not outright glee) when my boyfriend surprised me with a TAPS(The Atlantic Paranormal Society) ghost hunting weekend at The Spalding Inn in New Hampshire lead by Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Brit Griffith whom you may know from the Syfy hit show Ghost Hunters.

It is no secret that Ghost Hunters is one of my favorite shows. Watching Jason, Grant and the team calmly explore extremely creepy places, debunk hauntings as rattling pipes, etc. and enthusiastically document unexplained incidents, is a weekly ritual. It appeals to my Nancy Drew-side with its mix of adventure, practicality, and the uplifting knowledge that there are mysteries out there to be explored.

So when I found myself standing next to Jason Hawes in the lobby on the first night of the weekend, you can understand that a.) it felt unbelievably surreal and b.) that I experienced my first case of (subtly) being “star-struck.” More importantly, for the purposes of this creative thinking blog, I would like to call it “star-stuck,” meaning that I suddenly had an incredible opportunity to have a memorable conversation and receive the answers to about 10,000 of my ghost hunting questions (or at least say something interesting to a very normal and cool person) but I found that my internal dialogue was being censored by my preconceptions. I didn’t want to say something that every other fan had most likely said. I didn’t want to pester him with a question that he had most likely answered a zillion times. I opened my mouth and the only thing I managed to say during this fantastic opportunity was “I really enjoy the show.” Lame.

With the entire weekend still stretching before me, I resolved that a moment like that would not happen again, not with the TAPS team or with any other person that I found interesting and had the opportunity to meet in my lifetime. For me, the ironic part was that since I teach, and also present to clients at work, I know what it is like to answer questions, and frankly, they are my favorite part of any presentation. Questions are great because they give you a place to start an interesting conversation. So, with that knowledge, I bolstered my courage. I also made a list of all of the things I had ever wondered during the show and identified my key questions: have they ever encountered any people living in the abandoned buildings? Were there any situations where they had felt afraid? Do they do anything special to master or control their fear when being in an unfamiliar (and sometimes sinister) place?

Not only did I get to ask my questions to Jay and Grant at the Q&A session on Saturday, but also afterwards when we were hanging out in the lobby and the pub. During the investigation time, I even volunteered to ask questions to the ghost of Mr. Spalding who haunts the inn—and (through the K2 meter)—he answered back. Now that, is a memorable conversation.

I took many great things away from this experience, but one of the inspiration points for me was tapping into my curiosity and taking advantage of those rare chances you have to ask questions. One of the ways that I am continuing to cultivate this is by keeping a question list in my sketchbook. It is a great source of new discovery points, especially as I try and let my imagine run wild. This means I ask questions such as “What would I have asked Jim Henson if I met him?” or “What was Edison’s inspiration for the lightbulb?” In making it somewhat limitless—out of the boundaries of time and space reality—I discover a lot of cool things that I want to explore.

Within the more practical boundaries of reality, this is also a very helpful activity for when you are going to lectures, discussion panels, or networking events. I recommend identifying someone that you hope to speak to at the event and then list five questions that you would like to ask them. Then make sure to ask when you have the chance!

Curiosity Building Exercise:
In his book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Gelb, recommends creating a list of 100 questions to help stimulate your curiosity. I find that creating any list of 100 things can be daunting (although I recommend the challenge of it—it leads to some good questions.) I like cultivating the habit of curiosity through questions in sets of five. I recommend focusing on people or subjects that you have an interest in learning more about. A good starting place, for instance, is to take one of those crazy college entrance-like questions such as “If you could have dinner with someone from any point in history, who would it be and why?” Then make a list of five or more people that you find fascinating—then imagine you get to actually have dinner with them: what would you ask? List five questions for each person. See where it takes you. Happy discovery time.

Creating Time Awareness OR The Ultimate Love/Hate Relationship: Time & Creativity

In college, I had a French teacher who, when teaching us to tell time in French (it was a remedial level class, languages not being my strength), would meander off into enthusiastic philosophic musings about time and his unique perspective that the round face of the clock was a pie constantly being devoured.

While the French language has not stayed with me, the vivid image of the disappearing hour-pie has. In fact, I can’t think of time—the artificial, man-made version of it, that we use to measure things such as arriving promptly, being up late, the duration of a task (or amount procrastination)—without thinking of a pie chart. Mainly because, by its very own definition and act of measurement, time is limited resource no matter how we “slice it.” We all have the same amount of, and personal struggles with, time especially when it comes to bringing ideas into action. How we spend our time is, on a very simple level, based on our own choosing and an act of creation/creativity in itself. Our relationship with time can be a powerful force for, or against, creativity and ideas.

The ultimate love/hate relationship is time and creativity. While ideas need time to incubate, they also need a certain amount of pressure to force them into being. This is why we live in a world of schedules, weekends, vacations and deadlines. One of the most important things that you can do to bring ideas into action is to create an equal balance in your schedule of time for doing/creating/producing and time for daydreaming/ playing/relaxing. While it is somewhat natural to consider things like vacations and intense work areas in the course of a year, I find it to be very helpful and refreshing in a small-scale way on a weekly basis. (Also, when you use mind-mapping as a planning tool, it is often a good chance to visually make sure that you have equal goal time and down time.)

The first step to creating that balance though, is creating awareness of how you use your time. There are a numerous ways to do this but being the paper person that I am, I find that even more than lists and digital calendars, graph paper keeps me honest. My strategy, in a very large horizontal graph paper notebook, is to map out the entire week. I block out all the things that I have scheduled, pencil in all the things that may change, add the time that it will take to travel places (this is a very important thing) and then, as the week goes, I block out the things I have actually spent my time doing. This effective technique allowed me to see that parts of my work day were spent in unproductive flurries of 15 minute chunks of multitasking, which were adding to my feeling of never getting anything finished, and that I sometimes easily lost a couple hours in the evening to the television. It helped me decide that I can close my email for an hour, and that I probably don’t need to watch the eleven o’clock news, giving me more time to accomplish the ideas and tasks that I had on my creative project list.

While beginning this task is easy, maintaining it, being honest and not passing judgment on how you spend your time is challenging. On the other hand, once you begin the exercise, just the act of mapping out the week by hand brings attention to areas that you have to work on projects, or to identify areas that you may have over-scheduled. (Note: It is important to fill in the tasks as you go, rather than wait for the end of the day.)

In the case that your schedule is (at least for the time being) no-way-around-it intense, I recommend the following to at least give you the impression that you have some creative thinking time:

• Write, sketch, or read for pleasure in the 15 minutes before bed/falling asleep
• Walk when you can, whether it is on your lunch or to run a local errand
• Take 15 minutes at the beginning and end of the day to do something of your choosing that is purely enjoyable
• Take 5 minutes during the day to stare out the window, meditate, do nothing, or listen to a favorite relaxing song. I like Chopin’s Nocturne No. 5 in F Sharp that has an ending I could listen to forever. (Five minutes! You may even find several five minutes time blocks in your day.)
• Use a timer. This is one of my favorite ways to balance the desire to clean and organize my work space and home with the promise to myself to play or work on creative projects (that don’t feel like work).

By keeping track of your hours on paper, I at least hope that this little task helps you with the big topic of time and creativity. Bringing awareness to your daily devouring of every 24 hours, will hopefully help you see opportunities and find creative ways to take back your time in order to create new ideas and bring them into being.

Recommendations & Further Reading
My intention of writing this post was further inspired after reading posts on two of my favorite blogs in the past week that, I felt, spoke to this desire for time in balance when nurturing new ideas. The first is Pam Slim’s winter musings on her blog Escape from Cubicle Nation and the other was Havi Brook’s post about a fragile new idea on her blog The Fluent Self. Barbara Sher’s book Wishcraft also contains, in my opinion, the best practical advice for time management when working towards achieving a dream. It is optimistic with a touch of kick-in-the-pants. For building a better relationship with time, I recommend Waverly Fitzgerald's book Slow Time or visiting her blog Living in Season. Last but not least, for those of you who like ready-made and despise graph paper, Paper Source has a great perpetual calendar planner that is not unlike my current time tracking system, but much more fun and colorful.

Four Blank Books for All Seasons

I am a firm believer in all things cyclical. Like the seasons, my desk and work area have a tendency to mimic the progression of nature’s wild abandon through the seasons. Come spring, new projects are usually in the works. By summer, the file folders are full. And by the end of autumn, papers have piled up like so many stacks of leaves, along with notes, ideas, sketches on scraps of paper, articles and images to be housed and projects started only to become TBR (To Be Resumed) after the holidays.

So winter finds me in a desperate frame of mind for a clean slate, a neat desk and all things tucked away like the severity of a frozen landscape. My tendencies for organizing and mission towards a personal inventory (another thing ingrained in me from my eight years of retail) are slightly held in check by the amount of time I have to dig into them, but even if I have to work small (like drawers and file folders) the sense of well-being is immense. (I will confess to mind mapping the areas I am going to organize in the winter, which does prevent this from becoming a daunting and unrealistic task as I am too “creatively minded” to be a neatnik.)

Like the possibilities of the blank page, a fresh work area is like a launch pad for projects—especially ideas in progress. Part of my customized system of organizing includes four very important blank books where I store all the ideas, images and scrap-paper notes of inspired brilliance (which sometimes make no sense several months later and go in the recycling bin). It is a system I have had going for a few years, and it comes in very handy. Especially since, once the blank books are filled, I put them in the bookcase and can reference them later, when hunting for inspiration.

Here are the four all-important books: one is an image-based sketch and idea book, where I keep everything from drawings, to images that intrigue me to gift ideas and recipes (I cannot tell you how handy this is during the holidays). The next is a notebook for everyday plans, ideas, and raw thoughts. There is also my journal (in which I also put photos and mementoes) and the last is a notebook I reserve for any and all things that have to do with writing stories. The last notebook, by the end of the year, usually has become fat and lazy with plot twists and character sketches that get stuffed into it when I have to sacrifice my time for writing creatively. (If you are not a writer, I would still recommend this for any pursuit, whether it be painting, decorating, cooking, or even business ideas.)

If I was to recommend any of the above books as a must-have or a “start with this,” I would go for the imaged-based sketch book. You will never need to keep magazine around for longer than a month. Plus, over-time, it becomes a lush visual journey that tells its own interesting story and/or is usually good for some idea inspired lateral thinking and random connections.

For me though, just getting the desk clean and all the ideas sorted into their respective notebooks (with all the glue stick and tape that involves) gives me a sense of tying up loose ends. For the unfinished projects, or ideas that still make sense, it gives me an important overview of what projects I have to return to working on—usually when I have no excuses and more time (which sounds like a good topic for next time.)

Further Inspiration
I highly recommend having some sort of blank book in which to store images or things that make your mind light up. If you would like to use this as a creativity tool rather than an idea system, I suggest using it as Sarah Ban Breathnach does in her year-long meditation book, Simple Abundance. As part of the self discovery process, she calls it an Illustrated Discovery Journal and uses it to give insight into things that you may not recognize as points of inspiration, but will reveal themselves throughout themes emerging in the images.

Looking Forward: Using Mind Mapping for Goal & Intention Setting

January is named for the Roman god Janus, who looks both backward and forward. After the whirl-wind of the fall semester and the holidays, January can seem stark with its quiet, weather-driven days. I like to use the weekends in January to catch up with myself and look forward—not making predictions, or resolutions, but set goals. What is it that I want to accomplish this year? What ideas do I want to invest in? I like to take time on a Sunday afternoon at the beginning of the month to mind map not only the year ahead, but also take stock of what I have accomplished in the year that has passed.

I put on some music that lends itself to becoming forgotten and immerse myself in drawing, sketching, and connecting words. I recommend a fresh sketch book/idea book to begin the year, but all you truly need is a fresh sheet of paper (usually the bigger the better, especially if you like to spread out).

When looking ahead, I have two approaches. Sometimes, I focus on the entire year, and more often than not, I focus on the seasons, creating four separate mind maps. Personally, thinking about the year in seasonal quarters is deeply ingrained in me from years of retail, but also makes the year ahead seem less overwhelming. There is a place for everything in moderate detail within each of the seasons.

From the core image, I set out branches that cover the key areas of my life, such as: Friends & Family, Home, Career, Finance, Learning & Travel, Body & Mind, Reading & Writing, and Relaxing. This is a fairly customized list, and I encourage you to do the same for your own exercise.

Mind mapping is a great tool to explore ideas in a non-linear format. It is ¼ list, ¼ notes, ¼ connections and ¼ map. There is no right or wrong way to create a mind map. I often start one and then refine it if it gets really messy. The point of the exercise is to look holistically at the year ahead and set about creating space for you to explore the time and place to either bring to fruition creative ideas that have been percolating (like the short story that you have outlined but never officially begun) or schedule time to learn a new language or finally take that French cooking class at the culinary institute. It is also great for planning ahead for birthdays and holidays.

Once you’ve begun experimenting, you can adjust your mind maps to be as big-picture or as micro-detailed as you would like. Often, when I have multiple projects going on, I create a monthly mind map to document the key points that I would like to take action on that month.

Ultimately, mind mapping the year ahead creates intention. I’ve found that things I noted in my mind maps, even if I was unclear how it was going to happen, do come about—in some way, shape or form. Sometimes things happen in a way that I had not envisioned, and when I go back and look at my mind map, it never ceases to amaze me what ideas (and wishes) have come to fruition.

Happy New Year & Happy Mind Mapping!

Resources: I was introduced to the concept of Mind Mapping as used for setting goals in Michael Gelb’s marvelous mind-expanding book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. I then learned more about using mind mapping as a tool for monthly planning , or even a daily performance evaluationsl, in Tony Buzan’s book Mind Mapping. If you are more of a list maker, or want a quick life-area evaluation tool, I recommend Julia Cameron’s The Artist Way, The Life Pie exercise or Barbara Sher’s yearly planning map in Wishcraft.

Paper Trail

Sometimes it can take a while for an idea to move from conception to being something tangible. The blog that you are now reading was an idea just like that. It has hovered around, like a hummingbird drinking nectar, gathering, darting, but not landing anywhere. Until now.

Sometimes ideas come and go. Other times they decide to stick around. It has been my intention to begin The Paper Compass for over a year. The only challenge was that I didn’t know what it was. It had unlimited possibility and was everything from a small business, to nothing but a name inspired by an image in an altered book that my sister had created. Now, I am letting it off the page and out into the world. It is a working blog that shares both my own experiments in creativity, and connects them to the quintessential role that paper plays in my life. Hopefully it will also inspire you to join me in the journey.

The Paper Compass is about using paper to motivate your creativity, make better connections, and build memorable relationships. It is about taking the magic that happens in your head and using your hand to put it down in ink (or graphite)—imperfections and all.

For me, the point where pen and paper meet is the point of intention. Sometimes ideas hover, and sometimes they don’t. Stock piling them is good for a number of reasons, but for where we begin today, the act of putting them on paper creates a paper trail. Just like a paper trail can lead to solving a mystery, so can documenting your ideas.

I hope that you will enjoy reading my posts and that the ideas will inspire your own creative thinking. My intention is to post in the first and second halves of the month, sharing exercises I am exploring, how I am keeping my mind flexible, and over-coming challenge areas (like putting ideas into action, which, unfortunately, happens sometimes).

Please join me in sharing your own experiences and creative thinking tools in this space, creating a community dedicated to discovering ideas and opportunity everywhere.