Your Software Is Killing Your Creativity 1

It is difficult to be creative and be perfect at the same time, and I believe the two are fairly mutually exclusive. A surefire way to derail a train of thought would be to have the train try and ride two tracks at the same time.  Most will find the human mind works this way as well. Read along as I describe how some of the convenience features of software could be inhibiting the creativity of its users. 

Here are some examples of incompatible concepts, off the top of my head:

• Creativity vs. Perfection
• Listing vs. Sorting
• Cleaning vs. Organizing
• Brainstorming vs. Evaluating viability
• Writing vs. Spell Checking

Oh yes. This is Pure Evil:

On-The-Fly Spell Check is a distraction. Even now as I write, I am told that spell check is, in fact, two words. Silly me. Or maybe the software is silly. I happen to think on-the-fly spell check (again, two words, thank you spell checker) is a huge distraction and it does interrupt my train of thought. I think we do pay a price for being interrupted by software that demands up-to-the-second correctness. When I see that red squiggle appear under my text, letting me know I’ve spelled something incorrectly, I become obsessed with fixing it. Switching my brain into “fixing” mode takes me out of “creating” mode. It takes a lot of practice to ignore the red text and press on, so that one pure thought can genuinely be shared. It slows me down.

If you want to write more, you should write in a simpler software program, such as a basic notepad, without the in-line spell check. No grammar checking is needed. Move for final draft to your robust spell-checker as a final step. Like many things in life, it is faster to do every step quickly than it is to try to do every step at the same time. I feel this way about cooking. Cooking is full of examples of where working quickly, making a mess, and cleaning it up, is faster than trying to work slowly and deliberately by trying not to make a mess. Establish some parameters ahead of time. Work quickly, but with an agreement with yourself that you will wipe the counter down after you chop the vegetables.

I have another example of software doing things in the wrong order. Mindjet Maps for iPad is a great example of  “mind map” creation software with, in my opinion, one serious flaw at the moment. Unlike the PC version, you cannot simply list items and then rearrange them into categories or branches later. On the iPad, in order to put an idea down you first have to decide where it goes. This breaks the flow of thought and, for me, makes the program unusable. In this case, the workflow of the software is opposite of the normal act of brainstorming; The current implementation is precisely contrary to the point of what a mind map is supposed to represent.

Let me give you an example, and you can play along from home.

1. Write down a list of groceries you need to get from the grocery store, or that you routinely get from the grocery store. 5-10 items will do.
2. Are the items in the order that you would grab them as you walk through the grocery store aisles?

In this example, my items are never in aisle order. What if, in the middle of writing down grocery items into the aforementioned Mindjet Maps for iPad, that it occurs to me that I need to go to the hardware store too? Well, I’d better find the category for hardware before I can write it down. Wait. Is there already a hardware category? Maybe I need to make one. OK. Made. What was I going to write under hardware? What was I just doing a moment before? Oh yeah, groceries. Did I already write down orange juice? Oh, that’s right; I needed a juicer. Where’s that hardware category again?

We’ve all been there. We, as humans, have days like this.  All it takes is a few days of poor sleep.

In summary,  the brain loves to brainstorm, and it loves to organize what it comes up with, and it loves to perfect things, but it fails to do these concepts at the same. Software designers would do well to be wise to this.