Maintaining a study plan will help you cultivate the kinds of stimuli you allow into your life and ensure that you are putting the most important pieces in place first. Our minds are excellent at receiving new information, forging new patterns out of it, and then assimilating those patterns. But the more random the information you absorb, the more effort is required to process it and utilize it in your creative work. Variety is certainly helpful in forcing you to look outside your normal handful of solutions to the creative problems you face, but it can also lead you down irrelevant rabbit trails or cause you to feel overwhelmed. If you are more purposeful in how you structure the stimuli you experience, however, you can gently nudge your mind in a direction where creative insights are more likely to occur.
The practice of deliberate study plays an important role in the development of your capacity to think and to process new information. When you assemble a study plan, you cultivate a queue of stimuli designed to grow your creative capacity. Your ability to synthesize new ideas is largely influenced by your depth and breadth of knowledge in diverse domains of expertise. As you study you develop networks of understanding that connect various bits of data in your daily life into meaningful patterns. The more you strengthen these networks of understanding through study, the larger they grow. Similarly, as you diversify your areas of study, you are able to make connections between various domains of knowledge. The net benefit of this greater understanding of the world is that you are capable of generating more novel and appropriate creative insights. You can more easily derive metaphors and see the similarities or connecting points between problems you’re facing. As this understanding grows stronger, your platform for creative expression grows proportionately.
Structuring Your Study Plan
Structure your study plan in quarterly increments. This will give you enough of a horizon to ensure that you are getting ahead of your work without planning so far ahead that it becomes impossible to know which stimuli will provide the most appropriate foundation for your upcoming work. There are three criteria you want to apply when determining what should make the cut for your study plan:
Where are you lacking information that you will need over the next three months?
What will help you engage with your work more effectively? Are there any gaps of experience or knowledge that could become blind spots and prevent you from doing your best work?
Again, with time on your side, you can be more purposeful about closing those knowledge gaps, and you can be more selective about how you do it. Maybe you need to read a book, peruse some old magazine articles, or line up a few conversations with experts in order to gain the insights you need. The main thing is that you are being purposeful in moving your mind in a specific direction. This “I need information for work” category should take up about a quarter of your study time.
What are you curious about right now?
Your study plan is not just a method for getting more done at work; it’s also a method for growing yourself intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Take note of where your curiosity leads you in various areas of your life and give yourself permission to explore those curiosities. So often the overwhelming flood of information we’re required to process on a daily basis squeezes out any time we might have for pursuing personal interests. By structuring these areas of curiosity into your study plan, you ensure that you’re allotting time and attention for cultivating your passions and growing your capacity to explore the deeper questions you have about the world around you.
What would be good for you?
This part of your study plan is the equivalent of eating your mental vegetables. Some items need to be a part of your study plan because they stretch your mind, cause you to grow in new ways, or help expand your worldview. When considering this category, think about areas where you may be deficient in some way, where you have an educational blind spot, where you need to gain more information that could be useful down the road. This category should make up the final quarter of your study plan.
Remember that this study plan is not intended to be the sum total of all the stimuli you absorb in your life. It’s simply meant to provide a supporting infrastructure for your thought life and to ensure that there is some purpose and intentionality behind the kinds of stimuli that inform your creative process. The study plan, and your study time, will help you maintain stability and rhythm. Anything else you choose to absorb is fine as long as you’re building in the most critical stuff first. You can feel less guilty about mindlessly surfing the web or watching reality TV if you know that you have time and energy set aside to explore more purposeful, insight-yielding stimuli.
Once you have determined the items that will be a part of your study plan, you may want to keep a Stimulus Queue. This is a place where you keep a list of items you plan to read, experience, or study. The most effective practice is to establish regular times for study in your schedule, then to work through your queue in sequential order during those times. Again, this will ensure that you are getting to the things that matter and are not simply drifting to whatever happens to capture your attention at any given moment.
* Source: The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry