Every Once In A While

Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click i... See more

Creative work is hard. And we constantly beat ourselves up for not producing high quantities of high-quality stuff. It’s easy to forget that we’re trying to make this work at a time when we’re oversaturated with connections, and constant, flashing demands. Boring old boundaries have never been more vital. Going into the cave will feel a little cold... See more

The legendary designer Paula Scher said, “I still [a little over 5 decades into her career] make things that are pretty awful. It’s part of the process. You have periods of tremendous productivity and other periods where you’re fallow. The fallow periods are really important because that’s where you’re figuring something it out. You have to work th... See more

an opportunity for breaks: to pause and reflect, reconfigure.

We might have periods of furious output; to get there, we require periods of faithful input. With input, there’s a restoration of fertile, vibrant thinking. You might need a monthlong fallow after a big project. Or maybe it’s two weeks. You might even do it in a minor way — a half-day mini-sabbatical, say, to achieve what the Harvard psychologist S

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