Being a first-class noticer, and cultivating the ability to attend to what others overlook, is crucial to any creative process.

“As you begin to walk home (possibly getting a little lost along the way as you are buzzed and phoneless),” she writes, “tell yourself that you will encounter three clues to the answer to this question in the next ninety minutes. Tell yourself one will be in the form of a person, one will be in the form of trash or something laying on the ground,

“Let’s say we go to a bar, and we see people that are dating,” Ariely suggests. We also notice that the place is noisy, that it’s dark, that it’s crowded, that there’s alcohol: all sound observations. “But now, as a social scientist, I want to think of it like a Newtonian physics problem,” he continues, “and say: ‘What are the forces at work?

How about a Field Guide to Area Dogs, based on your observations? Determine names, physical descriptions, relative friendliness, and barking styles. Or research a Field Guide to Intriguing Personal

“Through conversation,” Krouse Rosenthal writes, “endeavor to find a collection of autobiographical statements that are equally true for each and every member of the group.” Throw out questions: Are we all from America? Do we all like flannel? This might last thirty minutes or go on for hours. “You’ll know when to wrap it up.”

Scheduling creative play • Scheduling personal reflection • Scheduling specific passion-project focus What unites them is a commitment to making the time to attend to what really matters to you—a sort of jujitsu on the culture of scheduling

FRENCH WRITER Georges Perec, best known for his 1978 novel Life, A User’s Manual, coined the term infra-ordinary to describe the opposite of the “extraordinary” events and objects and communications that dominate our mental lives. Perec’s obsession with the infra-ordinary was in part ideological—it

experience everyday life from the perspective, essentially, of an alien. Here's how he described the ideal alien-level mind-set he sought to inhabit: “I’ve never seen the world before.” This, Bellow explained, allowed him to regard everything he encountered as if it were a thrilling discovery, a pure revelation, “a beautiful, marvelous gift.

Did you know that road signs are designed to signal the level of danger drivers need to be aware of by the number of sides they have? And stop signs, having eight sides, signal the second highest? (The round and thus effectively infinite-sided sign used to mark railroad crossings is the highest level.)