The Archipelago of Ideas technique is a contemporary reinvention of the age-old practice of outlining—laying out the points you want to include up front, so that when it comes time to execute all you have to do is string them together. The note you see above is exactly what I will want in front of me when I sit down in convergence mode to finish th

James Clear, author of the bestseller Atomic Habits, outlines a clear process for being creative and connecting ideas: 1) gather material, 2) intensely work over the material in your mind, 3) step away from the problem, 4) allow the idea to come back to you naturally, and 5) test your idea in the real world and adjust it based on feedback.

At this point, I want a clear picture of what I have in my master document and what I still might need to add. To get this picture, I take a pad and pen and comb through my onscreen work. For each chunk of prose I read, I sum it up on the pad in a sentence.