Tag: CreativeSurplus

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Think of a world without any email

This came up in a workshop yesterday so I am sharing it today. There will be a time in the future for a longer set of posts on how engineers and other humans can cope with email, but now is not the time.

So instead, I recommend reading ‘A World Without Email’, by Cal Newport*. I have even considered making reading this book as a prerequisite for entering into new collaborations.

There is some irony in writing about a world without email on a blog post that is summarised in a weekly email digest. But ultimately it comes down to intentional communication design.

Hopefully, if you signed up to this list, you did so with the intention of hearing from me (and you can change your settings here). But the problem with email and other forms of instant communication is how easy it is to fall into unintentional communication.

Dealing with unintentional communication, and the sense of overwhelm it can cause us, feels important because if we are overwhelmed, we have haven’t got space to think. If we can’t think, we don’t have the capacity to imagine a thriving future. And if we can’t imagine it, it makes it much harder to build it.

*Newport, C. (2021) A world without email: reimagining work in an age of communication overload. London: Penguin Business.

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Can I have your attention?

The default answer ought to be no.

Because your attention is one of your most precious resources.

Attention is how we experience life.

It’s what we attend to, moment by moment, in our waking hours.

It is the focal point of our thinking.

I was recently in a workshop led by Holly Stoppit, where she shared a metaphor I’ve been turning over since:

Attention is like a little bird.

It flits around, always looking, always alert.

If we want to look after our attention, we need to give it a safe place to land.

The trouble is, there’s fierce competition to trap our little bird of attention.

And when there’s money to be made by landing it, no wonder we are surrounded by very attractive perches that call out ‘land here’.

Of course, there are places where we want our attention to land:

on a loved one 

on a problem we’re chewing over,

on an idea we’ve had

or simply on something right in front of us that we’ve never noticed before.

Our attention is precious.

People don’t always ask before they take it.

But it is always yours to give.

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Horizon One Highway

In the Three Horizons model, Horizon One is the world that surrounds us — the one that grabs our attention, dominates our habits, and shapes our worldview.

Because it fills our field of vision, Horizon One obscures our view of possible alternative futures. 

Earlier this week I wrote about cognitive ease — the brain’s tendency to favour familiar options over ones that require more thinking effort. It’s the easy option of taking the familiar path, rather than the harder work of beating a new one. 

Horizons One is the beaten path. It’s the default route; the easy path.

But if we want to move towards a thriving future — one in which our work as designers and builders actually creates life and strengthens our communities and ecosystems — we need to beat a different path. And we need to do it every day. 

That takes effort and resourcing. 

We need time to reflect. We need time to rest. We need space to notice is what is missing and to dream about what is possible. 

And we need the nourishment of living things and the nourishment of community. 

Resourcing ourselves can help us resist the daily pull of the familiar. And we can keep searching for paths towards more thriving futures, even when walking down the Horizon One Highway looks like the much easier route.